I hadn’t heard he passed away.
rkindel, see here.
I sure enjoyed his MKll review as well as his FR30 in TAS. I guess we will never hear his impressions of Massive. I am looking forward to read impressions of it from a HiFi publisher in the future for whatever thats worth.
Yeah; a bummer.
Don’t know the guy from Adam, but he always struck me as an exceptional human being…
he was often on TV doing his “day job” … was quite interesting…
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Have owned the MK1 with Bridge for several years now. MK2 just arrived (AirLens is on order). I immediately downloaded the Massive update and since AirLens has yet to arrive, I plugged in my iPad Pro via a decent USB cable and OMG…blown away. Detail, width, imaging, punch, analog sounding cymbals, crystal clear vocals. Now I am questioning the need for the AirLens at all. I see lots of USB vs AirLens dialog on this forum so no need to repeat all that. I will demo the AirtLens when it arrives and A/B for my own ears. But wow…this DAC is impressive.
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I own both the Mk2 and the AirLens and I have found that the USB implementation on the Mk2 is way better than on the Mk1, so much so that USB sounds very very close to I2S out of the AirLens using top of the line WireWorld and Synergistic cables on both paths. I am reasonably convinced that I could not tell them apart in a blind test. Be aware that the AirLens really benefits from extended break-in…
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Air Lens arrives tomorrow. Look forward to auditioning it and appreciate your insight on break in. Thanks!
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I have the Ted created BitPerfect test files in flac format. My mkii passes BitPerfect for all the files. I decided to convert the 192/24 stereo file to DSF and run it to see what happens. The BitPerfect flag does not pop up on the mkii like it does for the FLAC versions. Does the BitPerfect test transfer to DSF? It does show up as DSD 64.
Thanks!!
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The BitPerfect test needs to see the exact 24-bit bit pattern that it expects. The point is that it should fail if any processing is done at all (e.g. as simple as a volume change or as complex as a conversion to DSD.)
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@tedsmith, I revisited the BitPerfect files after reading your response to this question and ran into something that got me a bit mixed up here. Reading the readme included in the zip file, it says that the BitPerfect files are actually DSD encoded in DoP, but then the files are labeled as either 24/96 or 24/192, which makes me wonder if these are actually PCM files because I didn’t think that you could actually contain DoP-encoded DSD data within a PCM bitrate as low as 96 kHz.
My related question is, would it not be worthwhile to have BitPerfect tests for DSD in native format, DSD in DoP encoding, and native PCM? I’m not sure how much distinction there is in the processing between the former two within the Mk2, but there certainly could be different things going on within the different streamers and software that we use depending on how we set them up.
I personally do feed all three formats to my Mk2 and feel like there are enough variations in equipment and software options to make something like this useful to me from a piece of mind perspective.
There is nothing DSD related in the bit perfect tests. They are the same bits either marked as 96kPCM or 192k PCM. Basically, if you can pass the 96k or 192k bit perfect tests you can play DoP - i.e. the interconnects, etc. are good and the source software isn’t doing any volume control or other DSP. The biggest problems people usually run into getting the BitPerfect test to pass are related to finding all of the volume controls in their playing software and in the OS and setting them to unity and turning off any “sound enrichening”, either DSP in the playing software or “Spatial Sound” in Windows, etc. As I mentioned above if Native DSD doesn’t cause an error at the source it will very probably play fine if the PCM bit perfect tests pass. It doesn’t really matter if something along the way converts from Native DSD to DoP or vice versa.
I guess the other thing I should explicitly say is that you need to make sure that the display of the sample rate, etc. on the DS matches what you think you are playing - e.g. if you think you are playing DSD then seeing PCM on the DS’s display means that someone is messing with the bits, almost always the one of the (sometimes many) OS volume controls or the playing software’s volume control. Also you should trust the DS’s display of sample rate and bit width over your source’s. Often the source tells you what the source file was marked as, not what it converted it to, whereas the DS counts the samples per second and watches to see if the bottom bits are changing to report the bit width. The DS Mk I also always reported DSD vs. DoP correctly. The DS Mk II UI code doesn’t distinguishing between, say, DoP64 and DSD64. I’ve reported it a few times.
The DS really converts Native DSD to DoP right at the I2S inputs (USB and the Bridge are I2S as far as the FPGA knows.) The rest of the processing chain is just passing DoP thru unmolested until the sigma delta modulator code does the final processing.
As I said, I’ll think about a possible explicit Native DSD bit perfect test but it’s not easy and it probably won’t really help find any problems that the regular PCM BitPerfect tests and watching the display on the DS don’t find.
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@tedsmith, just out of curiosity had you wondered if anywhere in the MkII design the use of glass capacitors would be of any benefit?
I hadn’t considered them much since their value range is lower than I need for any purpose in the DS. (The ones from AVX top out at 2.4nF and the smallest cap I use in the DS is 3.9nF 
) I do like their characteristics otherwise.
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Thanks Ted!
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GREAT review.
The review resonated with my experience. DSD256 and SACD sounded better than the best of PCM recordings in my system too.
Sure makes sense to me. Maybe I will have the opportunity to try it out on my MKll someday.
That’s interesting because SACD is the equivalent of DSD 64. PCM 24/192 should in theory have more information to work with. Does this point to limitations in the PCM to DSD conversion?