Tomorrow’s my birthday 
And I have some equipment to sell.
Ted Smith said Dang it's nice having a true multichannel system again. The Oppo BDP-103 with the Audiopraise Vanity HD card doing DoP drives 3 DirectStreams well and now I can play my thousands of MC SACDs again. (My old Meitner CDSD transport dying was what really got me in gear to build a DAC
The new DSs need serious brake-in - they are quite covered and have flabby bass out of the box but in just the last hour things have gotten much more open and precise.
I’m just enjoying music I haven’t heard well for years…
OK, there’s a little flangyness if the center and the left/right have similar material. With some discs it shows up as the vocals being artificially recessed, with others the voices are artificially “richer”. I’ll still listen to MC SACDs and DVD-As this way and for most home theater it will work fine, but some won’t find it entirely convincing. When I don’t have other more important things to work on I’ll see if I can come up with something to clean it up (I have some ideas, but the current software wasn’t designed to stay sample accurate with other DSs.) I can’t recommend three DSs as an ideal MC system till I do some software work. No ETA with my current priorities/commitments.
Ted Smith said Tomorrow's my birthdayAnd I have some equipment to sell.
Happy birthday Ted!!!
A big +1!
And many happy returns Ted.
Thanks Guy
I’m enjoying a bag of bagels while I listen to Machine Head in surround and work
-Ted
supersax said I will receive my Oppo 103D on Saturday, and my Vanity 103HD w/DoP ships today. I can't wait to try them with my DS!!!!!I did receive the Vanity, and after initializing the Oppo, last night I successfully installed the Vanity card and was able to play a CD, a DVD-Audio and an SACD! I did find out a quirk about the Oppo ... I had enabled HDCD because I thought I could take advantage of it for the few HDCDs I own. But I found that on a recording I knew very well, the channels were reversed (this also was the same through the Oppo digital coax output). This morning I disabled the HDCD option, and the channels were properly restored. Also, when HDCD was enabled, the DS was showing that all my red book CD's were playing at 44.1K and 24 bits.
But most importantly: Ted, may you have a most wonderful birthday, you truly deserve it, and may you be granted many years of good health!!!
Best wishes,
Dave
Ted Smith saidTed, I'm first in line for any "fix" you come up with for this problem. As you're aware, I'm running MCH into 3 x DS, albeit from Lynx Card in server, and DSD converted to PCM. I personally have no other reference for MCH playback so I can's say I detect any problems myself, but I take your word for it.Ted Smith said Dang it's nice having a true multichannel system again. The Oppo BDP-103 with the Audiopraise Vanity HD card doing DoP drives 3 DirectStreams well and now I can play my thousands of MC SACDs again. (My old Meitner CDSD transport dying was what really got me in gear to build a DACOK, there's a little flangyness if the center and the left/right have similar material. With some discs it shows up as the vocals being artificially recessed, with others the voices are artificially "richer". I'll still listen to MC SACDs and DVD-As this way and for most home theater it will work fine, but some won't find it entirely convincing. When I don't have other more important things to work on I'll see if I can come up with something to clean it up (I have some ideas, but the current software wasn't designed to stay sample accurate with other DSs.) I can't recommend three DSs as an ideal MC system till I do some software work. No ETA with my current priorities/commitments.The new DSs need serious brake-in - they are quite covered and have flabby bass out of the box but in just the last hour things have gotten much more open and precise.
I’m just enjoying music I haven’t heard well for years…
Seems like a tough nut to crack though. You need to physically connect the stack of dacs and make one the masterclock. This is what Mytek and Playback designs are doing, but the DS was never designed to do this. I have full confidence in your ingenuity though…
Ted Smith said Thanks GuyI’m enjoying a bag of bagels while I listen to Machine Head in surround and work
-Ted
Killer album. Do you have “Tommy” in MCH?
Somewhere in my stacks of SACDs 
Like Machine Head it’s just so much better in MC. They used the original stereo mix of Machine Head for the stereo layer to not get static for messing it up, but the original elements were used for the multichannel layer and they are so much more open and alive than the stereo mix. Thanks for bringing up Tommy, I think I know within about a cubic foot where it is
Tommy is a phenomenal MCH mix. I believe Pete Townshend went back into the studio to remix the original multitracks masters. For Quadrophenia in MCH you have to get the 2013 reunion live concert in London in BR. If you’re into the genre, Another Stoney Evening by Crosby & Nash in DVD-A is another great MCH album. Of course, the supply of good rock albums in MCH is depressingly limited.
edorr said Seems like a tough nut to crack though. You need to physically connect the stack of dacs and make one the masterclock. This is what Mytek and Playback designs are doing, but the DS was never designed to do this. I have full confidence in your ingenuity though...Tho technically it may not be perfect I can easily get the phase difference down a lot with no changes in hardware. If I drop it by two orders of magnitude it will probably be enough to not be audible - but we'll only know by listening. I've remembered that the DS's automatically sync their FIFOs whenever there's a discontinuity on the inputs, e.g. changing sample rates or a transport spinning up so at least I probably won't have to force people to play a synchronizing track (e.g. the bit perfect test.)
I’m already out of my depth technically here. Just waiting for your solution. So do you have 5.1 speakers now? Without it, your missing channels in a native 5.1 mix played in DoP?
I’ve had a nice multichannel music system for more than a decade, that’s why I missed multichannel music so much while I was working on the DSD DAC project and my MC transport was dead
SimAudio W-10 monoblocks for the front left and right, a W-5 for the rears. Front left and right speakers are JM Lab Nova Utopia BE and rears are Alto Utopia BEs, sub channel goes to a Utopia BE Sub (where’s the BE there?) - that way the tweeters and mids are identical and at the same height all the way round and all (non-sub) speakers are full range without external crossovers to a sub.
My preamp is modified to put 1/2 of the center into the left and right speakers - in my system that turned out to sound better than having a physical center speaker in the system (even with it’s own W-10) and it solves the center tweeter and mids not all at the same height as everything else problem.
All speakers are 10’ from the sweet spot at the ITU locations for SACDs and level matched. The first reflections from the walls are further than 11’ from the direct path so the Haus effect lessens coloration from reflections…
Right now my room is a mess so high frequencies have lots of “natural dispersion”
More details:
System description: http://cgi.audioasylum.com/systems/3367.html
Description of room modifications: http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hirez/messages/224992.html
Some pictures of the mods to the listening room and pictures of my system components: http://gallery.audioasylum.com/cgi/view.mpl?UserImages=7184&invite=1408691761
I see. so you have a 4.1 system, mapping center to mains in the analog domain downstream, allowing you to play 5.1 in native dsd. I would imagine that playing center into the mains but coming from a different dac than the mains themselves and without clock sync is more problematic than having a separate center.
Happy Birthday Ted!
I was hoping to tell you on Facebook - but there are so damn many Ted Smiths…and I have a feeling Facebook probably isn’t your thing. LOL
If one is only interested in 2-channel stereo, is it worth it to go the Oppo/Vanity route to get to the DSD layer on the CD? I don’t really understand how the Vanity board (with 4 RCA connectors) would connect to the DirectStream with a single SPDiF cable.
Thanks!
I think it’s worth it to get to the DSD stereo section of SACDs. Getting a PS3 and ripping your SACDs is the obvious alternative. FWIW I like the sound better with the Vanity HD card - whether there are significant rip errors (which I sort of doubt) or once again there’s just more noise with USB I don’t know for sure. The stereo comes out the front left/front right RCA, so you can hook up the Vanity HD card to play stereo just the way you would if you were using any other RCA digital out. The Oppo also has a setting for what section of an SACD to play by default - stereo DSD, MC DSD or Redbook.
Ted, do you share your preference for playing S/PDIF from the Oppo over playing the rip on a server for regular 44/16 PCM rips, or is it just with DSD?
Also, what server are you playing your DSD rips from? As Paul can attest based on his experience with the Mac mini, not all servers are created equal. I suspect the actual data of the DSD rip and what is on you SACD disc is bit for bit the same, and all difference can be attributed to playback hardware (i.e. server versus Oppo), and moving up the server foodchain will eliminate any performance gap with the Oppo.
I’ve heard many servers/DAC pairs that sound different depending on what’s going on on the server - at least to my ears my laptop and DAC sound the same whether I’m defraging my music drive or not, whether I’m doing simulations or just have foobar2000 running, whether I’m ripping CDs or not. Tho I’d hesitate so say that no-one could hear the difference… When johnjen was over he could hear a clear difference depending on whether my wifi card was powered or not - all I got was a subtle difference in “feelings”.
Anyway to your question: I think Redbook is also has a little more ease on the Oppo/Vanith HD compared to my laptop. I suspect that the Vanity HD card’s clean treatment of the clock helps and also that I have the Oppo right next to the DAC, whereas my laptop goes thru a lot of USB cable and is plugged into circuits on the other phase of the house wiring. I wouldn’t generalize from my setup to another. I was just answering a direct question about what I heard, not trying to suggest what other people may hear.
I’m not convinced that just picking the right server gets you to the best sound. I’m pretty sure that careful grounding thruout your whole system (and outlets), cable layout, your equipment’s susceptibility to noise and other interference, your maximum latencies on your server/computer (along with the style of graphics card), etc. all make a difference that’s bigger than any single choice along the way. I’ve heard plenty of systems that sound fairly good until you, say, start ripping a CD. To my mind if ripping a CD changes the sound of your server there’s something wrong. I took the time a long time ago to make sure that sound didn’t suffer in my system when I put in satellite receivers and/or other very rude equipment.