There’s light already at the moment I installed a Nad M50 streamer with coax. The sound became a lot stronger than with I2S and the bridge.
I’m not surprised when people like the sound better with one input compared to another, but if by “The sound became a lot stronger” you mean a literal change in loudness or a significant change in frequency response, etc. then something is configured differently between the different inputs. If that is the case the bit perfect test can help to tell you if indeed there is something configured differently.
Having inadvertently reconstituted the “perceived bass” discussion, I need to add: In a good listen this morning without worrying about any issues, I heard the DS really starting to blossom.
I think everything that has been said by those in favor of the DS is coming true over here. The bass is clean and articulate, not bloated at all – and perhaps that’s what took a bit of getting used to. It is certainly quite ‘there’, with plenty of oomph coming through. Was the lack of perceived bass caused by my distractions? By further burn-in on the DS? I’m not sure, but I’m certainly satisfied.
Also agree with the ‘flat response’ through the entire range. Now that I’ve listened more carefully, I’m hearing a huge soundstage, tons and tons of detail, great presence, great placement within the soundstage, and all that other cool-but-hard-to-adequately-describe stereo stuff.
Assuming that I don’t have any further USB issues, this unit is definitely a keeper.
I’m still chasing down the cable possibility. The manufacturer doesn’t quite believe it, but if I’m not mistaken on my test grids, every time I use the cable, I can generate the issue on the DS (but curiously not always with the PWDII.) The USB module on my Off Ramp went bad a couple of weeks ago, costing $300 to replace. And I still can hear crackling on USB Port 1, which, not surprisingly, is the one I had been using with that cable. No worries, I have three more to work with.
As I told the maker, I’m “98% sure” it’s the cable, freeing me up to enjoy my new favorite toy.
wijnand said
What can we expect during burning in. Will bass get stronger? At the moment my Sub is set 4DB louder.
I suggest returning the sub setting to where it was as I believe there are two things going on with the bass.
First, the DS presentation of bass is more precise, more nuanced, with more accurate timbre. Thus, there is a sense there is less bass but in reality there is not; it is better, more precise bass. It takes a bit to appreciate this new and improved bass. You should find all the bass is there.
Second, as is well known, I find there is a lack of a certain type of bass presence which I miss. This is not a volume issue. It is possible it is a final artifact of number one above. In any event, it cannot be solved by turning up a sub.
I have set the sub back to it’s original settings. I understand turning up the sub is not the way.
For he lack of bass this seems better on certain inputs or maybe caused by the source. I’m not sure yet which it is.
There’s light already at the moment I installed a Nad M50 streamer with coax. The sound became a lot stronger than with I2S and the bridge.
I’m not surprised when people like the sound better with one input compared to another, but if by “The sound became a lot stronger” you mean a literal change in loudness or a significant change in frequency response, etc. then something is configured differently between the different inputs. If that is the case the bit perfect test can help to tell you if indeed there is something configured differently.
Yes it was a literal change in sound quality. Stronger bass etc.
I compared the inputs with te same online stream from Qobuz. The bridge was the weakest (streamed by a strong PC), I2S better (Streamed by the same PC) and Coax the best streamed by a NAD M50.
I’ve seen this kind of differences with the PWD and this was different from firmware to firmware.
Ted thanks so much for an honest answer. However instill do hear a big difrence between the CPU s. But you are giving me very good intel. I know people with win server say the same as you. Again I a sure you curse me at times for what I say but it is my honest answers or posts.
Reg inputs. When i did get the the CPU I thought sounded best and compared to a real server
the inputs were undecernable
even same song in a ab changing the inputs. Something that any thing there is easy to spot.
Again thanks ted for always having real answeres even if it’s leading me to more questions. In the end I have only my brain to trust
Something I have found out about dacs regarding CPU ,s. Almost every dac I have tried was affected by the cpu used…
Howdy Al
To a first approximation everything is about the electrical noise in the computer. For example a fast seeking disk is fast because it uses a lot of current when it seeks. This spiky current obviously comes from the power supply and those spikes show up everywhere in the PC. The same thing from graphics cards and each of the cores in a CPU. The pattern of code accessed in a CPU makes enough specific noise that in the right circumstances cryptographers can monitor the AC line at your breaker panel or the radiation out of your fan exhausts and figure out what passwords you are using.
To a first approximation the slowest computer with the slowest disks (or SSDs) and the slowest graphics, etc. that can play music reliably has a leg up on a state of the art computer.
Even more benign things like the fans are an issue. These days a lot of them are variable speed and that speed is controlled by pulsing the current to them. I.e. by adding gobs of noise spikes to the system.
In addition, unless you are using TOSLink, you introduce another ground loop by having something else plugged into the wall and also hooked up to your system (thru the DAC). The noise induced in a ground loop is proportional to the area of the loop. Most of us tend to plug our computers into outlets far from the rest of the audio system and hence make that groundloop bigger than most of the other groundloops in the systems.
This noise can affect people’s systems thru the AC power, thru radiation, and thru the cables to their DACs. In the case of the cables to the DACs the noise can cause problems both by conducted noise into the DAC and by causing jitter. That jitter from the PC depends on all sorts of things in the PC, but the PC is an incredibly noisy environment and having anything there that’s trying to talk real time have low jitter is asking a lot.
The DS is less sensitive to jitter than most DACs, but there’s still plenty of other things like the AC power, radiation, and electrical noise direct from the PC to the DAC that can affect the sound of the system.
There are also systems that are more sensitive to garbage on the power lines, or EMI in general than other systems. That’s one reason I have balanced interconnects where ever I can. That can get rid of most of the common mode noise at each of those connections: with the added benefit that things like different USB cables make a heck of a lot less difference.
The more work you take making your system less sensitive to power cords, interconnects, speaker wires and various other tweaks the less you have to spend on all of those tweaks to get a certain quality of sound.
But what really happens is that most people are always looking for ways to get better sound and after they raise the level of their systems beyond anything they ever imagined it could be, they start hearing new things to spark the imagination more.
I’m so happy with my DS at this point (330hours +), all is perfect, terrific, the magic is here. Many thanks Ted!
I’m sorry if I’ve another (may be weird) question the enthusiasm is driving me.
Until now I was surprised that the phase (In/Out) seems to produce almost nothing. With the PWD it was more obvious, especially on some recordings. Now I can’t say there’s a clear difference (I just went to listen London Grammar - Wasting my young years which revealed me a change) but am I alone to think the phase modification is less sonicaly evident?
Duke of Earl said
How are vocals sounding with the DS? An audiophile friend commented that they sounded a tad lean in his system.
I did a demo to a friend yesterday. It is an audiophile like me but the one I "hate" (I say this kindly) because each time he came until yesterday there was always something wrong. He's particularly taking care to the voices, and yesterday it was its first remark: "the voices are really beautiful now" (he didn't heard the PWD I had before ;-)). He remarked too the lot of details and was stunned when I launched the Showcase DSD with Eric Bibb - When the grass...
But on this last point I must admit it is a cheat because even with a not DSD DAC, this recording is terrific.
Duke of Earl said
How are vocals sounding with the DS? An audiophile friend commented that they sounded a tad lean in his system.
I did a demo to a friend yesterday. It is an audiophile like me but the one I “hate” (I say this kindly) because each time he came until yesterday there was always something wrong. He’s particularly taking care to the voices, and yesterday it was its first remark: “the voices are really beautiful now” (he didn’t heard the PWD I had before ;-)). He remarked too the lot of details and was stunned when I launched the Showcase DSD with Eric Bibb - When the grass…
But on this last point I must admit it is a cheat because even with a not DSD DAC, this recording is terrific.
That Eric Bibb track, is it from Opus 3? I have a demo album from them that I really enjoy - great sound! I’ve been tempted to buy something else from them. I see they have this in DSD128. Hmm.
patrick said
Until now I was surprised that the phase (In/Out) seems to produce almost nothing. With the PWD it was more obvious, especially on some recordings. Now I can't say there's a clear difference (I just went to listen London Grammar - Wasting my young years which revealed me a change) but am I alone to think the phase modification is less sonicaly evident?
One thing that can confound a transparent polarity switch are imperfections in the signal path. For example even a very small voltage offset somewhere will cause a polarity switch to be more obvious...
But less obvious is there are a lot of non-transparent ways to implement a polarity switching feature, both in analog and digitally. I think you could make a case that the only analog way that should work transparently is swapping both sets of speaker cables, but even that has some obvious problems: any time you unconnect and reconnect you get a different quality of connection, whether it’s relays or speaker connection lugs.
It’s also not trivial to implement a polarity switch digitally: in PCM there is one more possible negative value than positive value (for 16 bits there are 32768 negative values and 32767 positive values) If the digital material you are listening to hits the maximum negative value you can’t invert polarity (in 16 bits) without doing something special. Further with most DSPs you are working with numbers between -1 and 1. This includes the volume. Tho -1 is exactly representable with the most common encoding, +1 isn’t and hence even trying to go to 100 volume takes a little thought by the implementer. The standard trick is to negate the volume specified by the user and count how many times the signal is inverted to keep track of it’s real sign.
That Eric Bibb track, is it from Opus 3? I have a demo album from them that I really enjoy - great sound! I've been tempted to buy something else from them. I see they have this in DSD128. Hmm.
Yes it is this one in DSD (5,6MHz). The Eric Bibb's song is "Where the green grass grows". Sorry for the typo.
I’m crying…333, 345hours, I no longer know. But IT’S TOO BEAUTIFUL
I apologize for these overflow, but nobody at home to share with me tonight.
How to say, I red from some people there that the DS is particularly cruel with some bad recordings. I was in the burn in period so I said nothing on this except that I shared this point of view. Now, I don’t know what happened. May be there’s some tracks I could not like because of the poor recording quality however there are so other examples of tracks which was hard to listen before and are now listenable (and more than this) that balance is clearly in favor of the DS. Only one example but I would have others. The song from Rover - Lou, I like it but it is not a reference in term of sound quality (level is too high, highs are a bit aggressive to say less) but now the DS restitute something very engaging, the timing of the song is extremely accurate. If you like the song…
Feel free to cut me the connection to the forum if the moderators think I speak too much
Ted the criptobstory was funny. I had a childhood friend who was a genius, a very smart kid. Anyway he got a job with someone and was doing along the lines of that. At the time, many years ago, he had a device that they pointed at a building and it could read what was on the CRT s in the offices.
They were at a later time worried about LCD screens as they did not radiate like a CRT. off topic but true. And again thanks for you replies they are always fruitful in learning.
Email me directly if you’d like and let’s get you hooked up.
Paul,
I assumed that with “email me” you meant a PM, so I sent you a PM with the latest developments. I hope the PM got sent properly, I wasn’t sure if I did it right.
Well guys, I've been up since 5 and have some free time so I decided to finally A-B test the DS DAC vs. the Oppo using my McIntoshes.
I just started and I have one question: why do tubes sound so damned good?
(Edit: Test parameters: CDs, music files, and music DVDs only. No SACDs, of course, no Blu-ray Audio discs.)
Playing the second Previn/LSO recording of Shostakovich's 8th Symphony and, of course, Mahler's Ninth with Karajan and the BPO.
First things first: Oppo to DS DAC via coax cable. Running the Oppo and DS DAC via unbalanced cables to my passive preamp and then to the McIntoshes. I had the Oppo and DS DAC both set to max volume (“100”) on the volume settings. The Oppo has more gain than the DS DAC; I had to reduce its volume by 7% to get them equal in dynamics.
Second: so far, bass seems just a wee bit lacking in the DS. That’s my first impression, but more listening is on tap.
Tubes are a funny thing. For me if they are not tuby they are adding to the experience , but if I do an A /B I then hear the increase in detail of SS and a more solid bass and like it better. It’s a tough call both ways for me. But this is all headphones . Speakers it’s all SS amps and only one dac I own has tubes to play with .
In any event, it cannot be solved by turning up a sub.
