dSc DAC and Wilson Speakers

No damage just not as intended to sound.

The song does seem to have louder sounds in the upper midrange that would translate to be fatiguing and bright, so is not the best song for sound quality. Your speakers might also be toed in too much. I would rotate them to have less toe-in, aiming the speakers a few feet behind your listening chair. You could also test listen to a song called “Travelogue” by Sophie Hunger from her album titled 1983, a song that is NOT fatiguing and bright, to know if only certain songs or all songs sound bright.

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Will do. Thx.

One of our forum members had his speakers wired out of phase. I detected it and we started hunting. Everything looked correct so we just swapped the black and red on one speaker. That solved the problem. Turns out the speaker cables were made incorrectly, as in the red and black rubber ends were reversed when the cables were “Hand Made”. They charged him a bunch to correct their own error. And they took a long time to do it. Odd. I would have lived with it and put markers on the cable to denote the problem.

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Edgar from Bacch dSP told me that 15 to 20 percent of the golden ear audiophiles fail one of his first set up checks. An IC or speaker out of polarity.

Some expensive audiophile fuses give a similar sound to out of phase connections perhaps their ICs wrong connection were fooling them in believing a 600 dollar fuse was beyond praise and causing a phase shift that put an imbalanced system back in phase. I was personally perplexed. But my system had passed Edgar’s test.

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My CJ tube preamp inverts polarity. I have to connect the speaker cables red to black and black to red at the amp end.

@RonP i owe you one… after fixing both cable issues, my system is sounding so musical. So nice to my ears.

I’m going to listen all night :slight_smile:

One last question, I have DS volume at 85, I read that Tims advice was to keep it at 99?

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In the end, this “lack of soul” is what made me sell the Vivaldi dac+clock. Could not agree more.

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Mpd-8 s exceptional. I suggest you take a look at nagra dac (tube or hdx). The digital part is designed by Andreas Koch (founder and designer of Playback Designs) at the analog part is, of course, nagra. With tubes!

To me, they are as “soulfull” as it gets.

I just traded mine for a MSB cascade. Hoping I will not regret it.

He was charged for the job of swapping the red and black stickers? Wow. That is appalling

If it still seems fatiguing after a while you might try making the speakers parallel with each other and then slowly start toeing them in. With them parallel the tweeters wont be as bright sounding due to the off axis roll off in output.
It sounds like you are having a lot more fun now!

Many have reported that setting the MKII volume at 100 and leaving the volume adjustments to their preamp yields the best overall sound, but YMMV.

Glad to hear you got the signal cabling all sorted.

Cheers.

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nice

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Sorry for one more digression, I know the original topic and what I’m discussing currently are completely off. Let me know if you want me to start a new topic and not pollute this.

After fixing 2 wrong polarity issues, I still found the bass to be high, I usually kept reducing REL’s hi/low level but yesterday being different, I completely removed both the REL’s and still had the issue…

It seems like the way I have done bi-wiring using the jumper cable in my speaker. Long story short, I use to have the gold plated connector for the binding post but the Iconoclast sales person told their jumper cable is sonically better. It seems I have run the speaker wire to the speakers low from the amp and connected jumper wire from low to high on the speaker :tired_face::person_facepalming:

Now this making the speaker produce aggressive bass. I switched the wiring so that speaker cable goes to high rather than low. Now my dilemma is, if I need the jumper cable or just ditch that and go to binding post connector that came with speaker. Which method do you guys recommend? Or it’s just personal preference?

This was the previous erroneous setup

The jumper cables should sound superior to the gold-plated connectors in any case.

Reading your earlier posts, I wonder if you have tried any vibration isolation footer for both equipment and speakers? I found them effective in smoothing out trebles and tightening the bass in a good system. Power cords make major difference too.

Got it. Thx. I will leave the jumpers on.

I use BAV 10 AWG power cables (made by iconoclast) for all the components.

When you say vibration isolator, you mean the spikes that come with the speakers?

That and tons of similar tweaks for speakers and equipment (especially transport/CD player, and more importantly turntable). But this is a dangerous and deep rabbit hole once you find how these little devices can make a difference. So, forget what I just said and do not check into any of my posts on the subject!

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Footers really do, do a lot to tune the sound, especially on speakers. I use Mega Brass Footers to kill the excess bass vibrating my wooden floor, and it works great. The other thing I did was, I changed the resisters to the midrange crossovers of my speaker to a higher value to make the sound more laid back and not as aggressive. Getting the right cablings and toeing out the speakers also helps. Donald, you are right, this rabbit hole is very deep and can be very expensive, but it’s fun.

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Only a newborn into this hobbie compared to all the seasonpiles here. In the past couple years, with $$$ some well spent, some total waste to the drain, I start to question what defines as a good sound.

Can it be measured by the total amount of green spent? In some systems, only through reading, I guess it can be. But I still question the wisdon of that metric. Even more so recently…

We exeprience the world in 3D(spherichal), 4D if we add time to it. Yet, all we can talk about regarding sound quality, is not even 2D, it’s only a single axis: dark, bright, warm, cold, you name it.

Maybe adding another axis to the x is a good starting points as to how to build a system from scratch, not how much money spend.

Yet I fail to put a lable on the y axis. Maybe that’s where the big $ bussiness already learned and did not inform us what the lable should be?

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