While YMMV, always, you’ll probably be blown away by what the DS can do.
I had a few troubles toward the beginning, and a few doubts (only a few!) as it was breaking in, but at around the 500 hour mark, I sat Susan down for a test. We listened to a few tracks on the DS, then swapped the PWDII back in.
No contest, really.
We did do a critical evaluation of both, noting what was good or different about each on each track. As you know, while the PWDII is certainly a fine, fine DAC, the DS just does everything better, cleaner, with far more detail. It’s just so much more… interesting.
The morning after that test, the PWDII went back home to Boulder with zero regrets on our part.
Thanks for that Rob. I guess my biggest fear is . . . too much detail. I have a lot of really bad recordings to mediocre ones, I don’t listen to audiophile stuff only, I have thousands of discs. Sometimes with Redbook a whole lot of detail is a lot of crud coming out. I prefer musical to detailed as a starting point. I think the dteail from the DS is likely going to be musical. I’m looking forward to its arrival.
I truly don’t think you’re going to find “too much detail” in the DS. I was concerned about that as well, as I have a fast Class D amp and Magnepan 3.7s, no preamp, no tubes, and a pretty crappy room. I’ve long been aware of brightness, glare, and a tip toward the high end of things. I thought, the last thing I need is more “detail.”
Only recently, I began treating the room with absorbers & diffusers (official-like, not just stuffed animals ), which helped quite a bit. And now I’m looking into the notion that the Maggies are not phase-coherent, which can lead to that hotness and brightness that cause fatigue. There are ways to mitigate that, and the weekend is coming up.
Now that the room is calmed down a bit, I can safely say that the “detail” is amazingly clear, and not brash at all. It’s not that you’ll be swamped in details; it’s more that you’ll be listening to a very clear recording, and you’ll notice things you’ve never noticed before.
That said, a crappy recording will stand out like a ruby in a goat’s butt. I don’t think there’s any good way around that. Maybe keep a less-capable DAC around and feed that through for those times.
That’s reassuring Rob. Actually, I’ve been able to make do quite well with the Mk II and the flexibility of my amplifier so I’m reasonably sure I’ll be able to enjoy even the rougher recordings with the DS with your explanation of the detail. The Decware Torii Mk III has treble controls outside the signal path that are really useful, and also bass controls that can alter the tightness and character of the bass response sent to the speakers. Plus there are input, voltage regulation, voltage rectification and output tubes to roll, as well as two bias signatures for the output tubes to switch between, and two different ohm settings for the speaker output. Between all these I have a lot of flexibility to tailor the sound and over the years I’ve gotten some spectacular sound from judicious use of these features. Also the PPP and the powerbases (every component is on one) have really done a lot to mitigate glare and hash and grain.
Won’t be long and I’ll be futzing with everything again for the DS!
lonson said
Thanks for that Rob. I guess my biggest fear is . . . too much detail.
Im finding the DS makes the best of the bad. I have some awful recordings and they sound much better than thay did with the PWDII. The fuller, more realistic tones make them more listenable rather than less. If you liked something with the PWD I reckon you'll like it more with the DS.
But if you’re hung up on audiophile qualities (rather than being a music-phile) the DS does expose more engineering and production faults. I used to “listen through” the issues with vinyl to hear the music (rumble, surface noise, wrong RIAA). Now we have to ignore compression and other recording issues that are exposed on some digital recordings.
That’s good news. I don’t get hung up on audiophile characteristics. I’m in it for the music and want what gets me closest to that well-spring. I bet I’ll be happy with the DS.
I’ve owned a descent number of high end CD players and they all disappointed. The PWD MKII, after more than two years, still doesn’t disappoint. Listening to Buck Owens, Act Naturally, and it’s great. Big, open sound. Just can’t believe the DS will be better. But I’m betting 3K it will be!! Life is too short so I’m going for it.
I’ve shared that journey of unsatisfying machines til the PWD arrived. And you’re right, life is too short, and you also never know when your wife or GF will suddenly no longer be cooperative and demand a new kitchen, etc.
Talking about detail… with DS I heard slime in Nat King Coles mouth in a start of an sentence. You know the thing that you don’t notice that you have slime in your mouth and you start to speak and your voice kind of cracks (I don’t know what would be the right term).
For some that is a bad thing but it tells a lot of how revealing DS is!
As one recording ended and the last note faded out, I heard the ‘air’ in the recording studio. People breathing, subtle electric hum, whatever was there.
On another, I heard the artist – a guitarist – very subtly tapping a foot during the intro. Never heard that before.
That said, a crappy recording will stand out like a ruby in a goat’s butt. I don’t think there’s any good way around that. Maybe keep a less-capable DAC around and feed that through for those times.
Rob
A ruby in a goat’s butt? Just the thought of looking at that is wild!
I noticed that when I use Foobar2000 with the DS (bitperfect OK), my IE browser (IE11) slows down to -literally- a crawl. If I change the output to another device, it speeds up again. When I try JRiver (also bitperfect OK) there are no issues, and when I try Google Chrome instead of IE there are also no issues. It seems to be only the combination Foobar2000/DS/IE.
I wonder if anyone had the same experience and if so if there’s a fix (besides using chrome or JRiver from now on)?
What output drivers are you using? (ASIO, WASAPI, DirectSound?)
I use foobar2000 with ASIO to the sacd asio proxy to the DS on Windows 7 64bit with IE 11 and I don’t see any crawling. Perhaps we can see if we have some different settings in foobar2000 somewhere.
I have seen a crawl with IE11 and the Adobe Shockwave Flash ActiveX Control and IE 11. If it’s enabled there appear to be timeouts when I visit any site that has Flash (which includes most ads these days). I disable it except when I really want it and things are much better. I don’t know if other people have this problem or not.
[ You edited your response while I was typing mine - I’ll look over your pictures now while you look at my guesses ]
Is it a crawl in that it paints really slow, or that the mouse moves really slow, or that there are a lot of long hangs? (Not that I know what each of these might imply, I’m just trying to get a feel for what might be wrong.)
These are some of my foobar2000 options that I’m guessing might be relevant:
“Use 64-bit ASIO drivers” checked (Well if you have a 64 bit machine and OS)
“Run with high process priority” checked
If you aren’t using foo unpack you might try uninstalling it. With big zip files or rar files it can waste a lot of time when scan your library for updates.
The “crawl” is that when going to a new page, e.g. the PSAudio page, only the top bar shows up (Products, Community etc). It then takes about 30-40 seconds before the rest of the page shows up, and then another 10-20 seconds before I’m able to scroll the page up/down. The mouse can be moved as usual throughout.
If I close foobar any time during those first 30-40 secs the page shows up instantly.
At first I thought that it might be related with foobar trying to get the tags onlne, so I deleted the tagging server name.
Also, in the “networking” tag I saw “Use internet Explorer Settings”, just to make sure I changed that to no proxy but that didn’t help either.
I changed all the settings to the values you suggested, but so far there’s no change.
foo_unpack is greyed out, and with a right click the “remove” link is also greyed out, so it seems it can’t be uninstalled. What if I delete the foo_unpack.dll file from the Program Files/foobar/companents folder? Would that do the trick or would it kill foobar?
If foo_unpack is greyed out it’s part of the base foobar2000 installation. The clean way to get rid of foo_unpack is to reinstall foobar2000 and unselect unpack. But you may be able to rename foo_unpack.dll to foo_unpack.dll.disable when foobar2000 isn’t running.
I don’t think that it will help, but if you don’t need foo_unpack it couldn’t hurt to remove it. You foobar2000 installation is much cleaner than mine so I’m running out of ideas.
), which helped quite a bit. And now I’m looking into the notion that the Maggies are not phase-coherent, which can lead to that hotness and brightness that cause fatigue. There are ways to mitigate that, and the weekend is coming up.
Thanks. I never made that correlation before. If you have Adobe Flash you might try IE’s “manage add-ons” (