Jump to content

lovejoy

  • Posts

    9
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Country

    country-ZZ

Retained

  • Member Title
    Newbie
  1. Thank you very much for your excellent work. I spent a day comparing players on my 2007 Macbook Pro into my Arcam rDac over USB yesterday. Audirvana won by a clear margin and I was up until 3am this morning enjoying tunes, not something I've done in a long time. It blows iTunes out of the water for sound quality (which I guess is obvious), and sounds more natural and 'analogue' than Ayrewave which I didn't think handled sibilants very well and tended towards being a bit to sharp, although extremely good in most other areas. Dare I say it, but I even prefer it to Pure Music (a tendency to pull music apart and present it to you as separately recorded instruments rather than a performance if that makes any sense) and Amarra (which I didn't think really did much in my system). The problem I get is that after around 20 minutes or so of listening, it starts to glitch, firstly at the start of a track and as it gets worse does so throughout a track, so restarting the program is required. This seems to be exasperated if I'm flicking through tracks and it doesn't like me loading any other software while it's playing. This isn't going to stop me using it though as I think it's fantastic.
  2. Great news, thanks for the heads up. Managed to get the new drivers to install after initially downloading the wrong ones for my system. All up and running now: I am on a Macbook Pro (2007/8 model) running snow leopard. The clicks are still present with the new drivers :-(. I have found that using Soundflower on my system with the buffer set at the lowest value (64) that clicks are reduced to negligable levels and the louder clicks are eradicated altogether. I'm quite happy to stick with this solution until things are fixed, anyone else with clicking problems may want to try this too.
  3. Hi John, To my ears, the biggest difference came from getting rid of the standard wall-wart power supply and replacing it with a linear 12V supply. I guess this is the easiest mod to perform as it doesn't involve taking the lid off the DAC. I use a "TeddyReg" connected to a transformer outputting 18V. The TeddyReg then supplies the DAC with nice clean 12V. http://www.teddypardo.com/ A further improvement to this can be had by removing the reservoir capacitor inside the case, but only if you're not likely to go back to the switch mode supply. The second biggest improvement came from swapping out the PCM1716 DAC chip for a Wolfson8716. They are pin for pin compatible and apart from soldering an SMD chip (which is not for the fainthearted) there are only a couple of wire mods to perform. The third big change then comes from bypassing the op-amps in the output stage and having nothing but DC blocking caps between the DAC chip's output and the phono sockets. I think this one is more system dependent though. You could alternatively swap the op-amps for higher quality components. There is a company called Tirna Electronics that will perform this upgrade for you, amongst others.
  4. Hi John, The ground loop hum is concerning. I've never experienced this myself and it shouldn't really happen seeing as the Beresford in stock form uses a switch mode power supply. It would be worth dropping an E-mail to Stan Beresford. He's always incredibly helpful and if anyone has an answer it will be him. If you're not handy with a soldering iron then I'd recommend against trying to perform any mods yourself. Some of the jobs are quite fiddly and I've almost ruined my own DAC a couple of times trying various things. I'm not sure about the quality of the cd5001 as a transport. All of the CD players at that level I've ever played with the digital output from I would rate "competent", but generally outclassed by even the lowest specced PC with a digital output. There are a handful of tweaks you can perform on the cd5001 to improve it considerably. A quick Google has turned up a few pages of info over on diyaudio, but again these jobs are best left to people who know their way around a circuit board. Rich
  5. Hi John, I've used the 7510 on the end of a number of pieces of kit ranging from cheap DVD-players, to good CD players, to computers and it's a great piece of kit, and is hugely tweakable. I have experienced the same problems as you and my first question is - How are you connecting the Marantz to the 7510? When I started out, I was using an old IXOS optical cable I'd had lying around for some time and I found the sound just as you describe - metallic, harsh and thin, not in the least musically enjoyable. All this was transformed with the aid of one of Stan Beresford's own optical cables. It cost me about half the price of the IXOS but the improvement was incredible - the difference between an enjoyable and a fatiguing sound. There's also a coax digital availble. If you still find things aren't what you think they should be then it could be that the transport in the Marantz isn't really allowing the 7510 to give of its best. If you have a PC/Mac with an optical output then it's really worth doing the comparison. The Beresford is capable of some quite amazing sounds - as an example I took mine and my Macbook Pro to a friend's house this weekend to compare with his Naim CDS2. Now I know my 7510 has been 'breathed on' a fair bit (linear power supply, Wolfson DAC chip, op-amps bypassed with audio caps) but the whole thing still cost about 1/10th of what the Naim initially cost and the difference between the two was scarily small.
  6. I should have probably qualified that sentence with 'quite sensitive to SOME'. I noticed a worsening of the problem when I connected my USB hub and also my external hard drive (also with it's own SMPS), and yet I can now run the hiface from the Macbook whilst powering the Macbook with it's own SMPS.
  7. Hi Guys, I have been trialling a HiFace all week on the end of my modded Beresford DAC and like a few of you on here I have also been experiencing quite disconcerting clicks and pops every few seconds - I'm running a Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard and playing through iTunes. I set about some troubleshooting: Killed all unnecessary processes Tried running the Macbook from the battery Different audio midi settings renicing iTunes and coreaudio for higher priority ...and many other things. None of which made any difference. I wheeled in my Mac Mini earlier on to see if that exhibited the same problems, and sure enough, it was exactly the same, so I came to the conclusion that either the HiFace was faulty, or there's something going on with the DAC itself. Then it occurred to me. My Beresford is running from my own home built linear power supply. It used to be fed by digital coax cable from a PC running Foobar but when I changed to a Mac running iTunes via optical cable I found that I needed to raise the voltage from 12V to around 12.5 as it all sounded rather flat in comparison to when it was being fed by the PC. This fixed the problem. So it occurred to me - What if I reduce the voltage back to 12V into the Beresford with the HiFace in place. BINGO! This has fixed the problem. Well, I've managed an hour of click free music so far anyway. I have to say that I don't think I could go back to the optical connection on the Mac now, such are the improvements that the HiFace has brought. I intend spending the evening listening to it and will make another post if the clicking returns, but I believe this has done the trick. Another note about power supplies. The HiFace seems quite sensitive to Switch Mode power supplies. I tried running it from a powered USB hub with an SMPS and the clicking was 10 times worse. Rich
  8. Yes, inconsistent results. Tell me about it ;-). I've been getting that from iTunes for a long time and had no idea what it was. I put it down to my home baked power supply which I've been tweaking around with, but never really sorted the problem out. It never really occurred to me that it could have been down to the priority iTunes was being given. I'll run it more over the course of the weekend and report back on its consitency. Thanks for the tip on finding the PID of coreaudio, I'll give that a go too.
  9. Hello, I had to join this forum after reading this and trying it out for myself. I am running a Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard through a very heavily modified Beresford TC-7510 via optical connection, into Musical Fidelity A3.2 Pre-power combo and Shahinian Arc speakers. I've run a test with a few of my choice test tracks. The only problem I've had is that COREAUDIO does not show up in my activity monitor, so I've only renice'd the PID for iTunes, but I can certainly tell a difference for the better. Less fatiguing, it's taken an edge off the sound, most noticeable in the fact that strong 'S' vocals are less sibilant. There also seems to be more fine detail coming through and I've noticed decay in instruments that I've never noticed before. It's as if you can suddenly look deeper into the recording. I'm mightily impressed.
×
×
  • Create New...