sq225917

I don't post an awful lot on CA, but I've been around a fair while. I do think it's a shame when people can't all post together without falling out. I'm all for robust discussion and dissection of claims but there's no need to get personal about and certainly never any need to retaliate in kind. Hopefully the guy who was doing the coding will continue to do so. I for one am dismissive of the claims made for the software, if it ain't blind ABX it ain't worth a damn. But with that in mind I'm about to build a new pc and I will test the software later this week to make sure that it is indeed bit perfect. if it is, and if it does sound different to this sceptics ears then maybe just maybe he has hit upon a way of improving the noise transmitted with the data to the dac. I have a friend with a Wavecrest 2077 and a decent spectrum analyzer so we'll find out if he has.

I use the 2.5 foot usb that came with my printer. My DAC doesn't have the 5v line connected so nothing flows down it. It's an async DAC and I've not been aware of lost bits, so I guess it must work. Have any of you with special USB ever bothered to blind test, or measure the output from the dac to compare to different USb cables on the input?

too much spare time?

I've tried Audiorecorder pro with my Nexus7 and Ibasso D10 and it does work, sounds pretty good. It's just a shame it is hopelessly unsuited to being a media player, too few file formats too many restrictions, file locations etc. Given that a little app like Bitperfect has sold 11,000+ copies via the Itunes store you would think there would be a viable market for a suitable Android player with USB-out functionality.

Joplin, 32/384 A-to-D convertor and phonostage. I’m an early adopter, there I’ve said it, got it off my chest, admitted my fault. I’m also a magpie, I love shiny. So the new Joplin 32/384 A/D convertor and phonostage from M2tech is right up my street. Truth be told I also have a lot of time for the brand; they broke the mould with the Hiface USb/Spdf convertor, which I owned and then continued to do great things as they expanded into the dac market with the 32-384 Async USB Young dac, which I also owned. I have to admit I was pulled from the fold by the offer of a Weiss 202 at around half msrp- who’s going to turn that down? It’s fair to say I like what M2Tech do, I like the house sound, the product design and the functionality. Best of all though I think they have so far offered pretty damn good sound per pound- and that’s what really counts. Not my actual details. The Joplin arrived last week in the usual ‘packed by Keith’ brown paper wrapper. An unassuming lightweight box, hiding an even less impressive cardboard box inside. Fair enough though, I’m not big on paying for packaging and all I want is a well packed item that will survive the inevitable fall from the back of the delivery van to the road- this packaging will suffice. Inside you get a small SMPS, USB cable and remote control, there is also the familiar silver extruded casework used for the Young but this time housing a little bit more. Set up is simple. I was born in the age before video recorders so I’m hard wired not to read user manuals and to just go at it. Power in back, arm-leads into the input and spdif cable out into my dac and off we go. Houston we have illumination. We don’t have any sound though, ok so I do need to familiarize myself with some of the controls, well the volume control at least- hey, we have music. That was utterly painless. I then spend the next twenty minutes fiddling with every setting imaginable. I set level, I set output format, word length and sample rate. I set dither, fiddled with high and low pass settings, chose various vinyl EQ options, mess about with MPX ( I don’t have a reel to reel, but what the hell). In short there is a setting for just about everything you could possibly think of with one exception, there is no adjustment available for cartridge loading. For me that’s not an issue my Benz LP is happy running in 47k but it may be an issue for others, though I suspect the MM brigade with shelf after shelf filled with pre 54 jazz recordings and 78’s is where the Joplin is primarily setting its sights and they will be perfectly served by the 47k input impedance for their MM carts. For those collectors of jazz and early issues then the Joplin includes pretty much every major EQ. RIAA, AES, Capitol, Columbia (Microgroove), HMV, Decca FFRR, MGM, Angel (EMI), Audiophile (Acoustic Sounds reissues), NAB, Oiseau-Lyre, Pacific Jazz, Philips, RCA (1, 2 & Orthophonic), Brunswick, Columbia 1925, Columbia 1938 and Columbia England (CO25, CO38 and COLE), Victor 1938-47 and Victor 1947-52 (VIC3 and VIC4), Decca 78 and MGM 78. If it’s not on there you probably don’t need it. I have no 78’s and only a handful of early HMV and one pre 54 Columbia. Playing back with the RIAA curve I’m limited to in my phonostage has always left me wondering what was missing from these records. The ability to select the correct curves has brought these records back into focus and freed the music that was pressed into them for the first time in many, many years. For me the EQ curves are a nice addition, if I had a reel to reel I’m sure I’d be very interested in the tape playback curves and filters that are built into the Joplin but the truth is I don’t, I’m looking to simplify my vinyl playback and improve upon my current phonostage. I have a pretty expensive dac, the Weiss 202, it’s well regarded and to my ears sounds very good. I’m sure better exists but it would be out of my price range. I like the idea of convergence, as long as there’s no trade off of quality for functionality and interoperability. So a phonostage that integrates a high quality A/D that works with my current dac would be welcomed into my set-up. I’m genuinely not bothered about the bells and whistles and tech for tech sake, it has to sound good. Actually at the price it has to sound better, not just in one area but top to bottom, right across the board. The Joplin sounded a little thin fresh out of the box, so I left it plugged in for a couple of hours playing a locked loop dj record that I have. Whether I quickly became acclimatized to its sound or if the unit did genuinely burn in a little I can’t really say. But I did like it much more after coming back to it than I did straight out of the box. I’ve had quite a few phonostages through my music room in the past twelve months, discarding both a Naim Superline and Linn Uphorik in favour of a simpler and cheaper, modified Naim Prefix. It’s not perfect but I’ve not found anything I like more overall for sensible money yet. Back to back and box fresh there are areas where I prefer the Joplin and where I prefer my Prefix. The Joplin does better bass. It has more depth, greater slam and less overhang. It’s better nuanced with every kick and thwack having more shape and more natural tone. It’s not a small difference, it’s a fundamental difference and if the bottom end is where it happens for you then the Joplin excels here. It memory serves me right it sounds better in the bass than either the Superline or Uphorik did, it really is first class. Across the mids I think there’s little to separate them you could prefer either on a particular day. I think the Joplin may trade a little sweetness in the mids, but repays you with greater soundstage definition and placement. It’s only in the treble where I prefer the Prefix and not by any great margin. Reading that back it sounds very cut and dried, and it isn’t. I think there’s more ‘flow’ to how my phonostage presents the music. I’ll refrain from serving up analog vs digital analogies but that’s what I’m hinting at, at least with the supplied SMPS. The Joplin stayed in over the weekend and I played a fair bit more music for myself and for friends, several of whom were struck by the Joplin’s forthright way and firm grip down below. It was only on Monday that I started wondering what a decent linear PSU might bring to the party. I have several power suppliers lying round that would work, including a brace of LiFePo 18650’s which I plugged in and used. Instant improvement, less grain in the mids and a greater sense of cohesion. I’m not sure if this is the result of better power to the Joplin or not having the SMPS plugged into my 6-way block. Whatever it is, it’s worthwhile and needn’t be an expensive upgrade. There are so many features and functions to the Joplin it seemed remiss not to try them out. So here’s what I found. I can’t hear any difference between AES and Spdif. On Spdif and AES it sounds better using the supplied sync rather than the internal clock in my dac. I don’t have a USB dac present to test the USB output with though I did make some rips to my laptop. I already have the Young drivers installed so didn’t bother download them specifically for the Joplin. You may wish to check out later drivers if they exist. You set the input sample rate and word length on a Mac via the Audio-midi window from then on it’s a simple case of opening your preferred recording app, Audacity in my case, and hitting the record button. I spent a fair bit of time recording at 16 and 24 bit, 44, 48, 88, 96, 172 and 192khz. I can’t tell them apart, they all sound excellent. If there is any difference between the signal going from Joplin (AES)to Weiss to power amp and speakers vs, a recorded rip played back through laptop (Firewire) to Weiss and onwards as before then I can’t hear it. Whenever I’ve used A/D before there has always been an exaggeration of surface noise, tape hiss and clicks and pops from the vinyl. There’s always been a telltale I could focus on. The record/playback loop with the Joplin and my DAC as best as I can tell is utterly transparent making the Joplin not just a great phonostage but a great archival tool as well. It should be obvious by now that I’m quite taken with the Joplin, it performs solid service as a phonostage and almost has every bit of flexibility you could ever wish for- in fact apart from cartridge loading options it does have everything. A quick look inside surprised me with the component density, I wasn’t expecting it to be so densely packed and it’s nice to see even though it’s mostly smt inside that a significant proportion of the parts appear to have been chosen for sonic grounds- you would choose to use the barrel resistors they use if ‘pick and place’ was your overriding concern. Likewise in the signal path all the caps are Wima film and in the digital section all the inputs and outputs are galvanically isolated and correctly terminated. For your money you get a nice case, an adequate psu, remote control, a high gain low noise pre-amp, top notch A/D, a Hiface evo, and the ability to use the Joplin as phonostage, Archival quality A/D and standards convertor between different digital formats. It would be unfair to call it a jack of all trades, with all that implies, as it does seem to be the master at extracting the best your records have to offer. Simon

The 202 hasn't changed, the USB card is plug in module that replaces the spdif out socketry. You can upgrade any 202, they are all the same.

If you can hear a difference and the bits are identical when checksummed then it can only mean that for some reason your pc is polluting what it sends to the dac when playing back flac. Which would mean either your pc is broken, or your chosen software is. On a Squeezebox flac is typically decoded on the SB not in the host pc, so there is a legitimate technically reason why wav and flac might sound different via a SB. You can of course turn this option off and force decompression in the host pc instead.

I'd be with the school of thought that says a good dac should be impervious to noise on the input within certain limits of confirmation. My Young didn't care what USb cable it was connected with, an Rdac I had on loan was incredibly sensitive to usb cable (so much so I'd consider the design of the dac way below acceptable limits). Similarly my Firewire equipped Weiss 202 cares not what cable it is connected with. I would consider that a well built dac. Any good dac should be relatively able to reject signal noise, RF, etc coming into it via the signal input cables. they were after all designed and checked by being used in a real test environment weren't they? ;-)

You would struggle to improve upon the USB implementation on the m2tech Young dac with an offboard unit. I'd assume the same would hold for any well designed usb dac that buffers the input.

Surely it's the embedded code that really counts, not the chip which is just executing instructions?

Sage words from Barrows, nearly everything counts. I own two Sabre dacs, Weiss 202 and Audiolab mdac, they sound quite different.

Outrageous pricing. Barry that's all fine for new recordings, but we are talking about re-issues of old recordings here, the cost to sell is zero, the cost to redigitize is next to zero. I'm all for paying 2l.no the going rate for guaranteed quality, but HDtracks charging top dollar for another Rolling Stones re-release is just laughable.

I look forward the day anyone produces a better dac than the Weiss for less money, or at least less money than I picked mine up for. ;-)

And yet for all those prosaic components it's the best measuring dac that Stereophile has ever had on its test bench. Which just goes to show it is not the parts that count but how you use them. I feel sure that if the transformer were radiating and negatively affecting sound quality that they would be shielded, the output stage and dac section is shielded no doubt for just this reason. There's a difference between sufficient and excess, many dacs include a whole lot more things that we might think make a difference, yet they don't measure as well as the Weiss 202. A cursory glance at a pcb layout can only tell you if it is majorly flawed, it tells you nothing about the countless careful hours of design, measurement and generations of revisions and improvement that have gone into the product delivered to the customer. Assuming that one understands the circuit better than the design merely from visual inspection is most humorous. I look forward to the OP coming up with a full upgrades pack for the Weiss 202 based on his insight.

I used to own the AMR 77 integrated amp, from the first range. That was liberally sprinkled with Mundorf tin foil/polyprop caps. Given that the 777 series is much less expensive I doubt they are rebadging Mundorf supreme silver/gold caps for their own use in their less expensive range. The tin foil caps start at around 5 euro the silver gold supreme 40 euros for the same cap. These will be the same tin foil/film caps as in the 77 series.