Elk saidI assumed you tried various cutting boards before settling on the Ikea.
These cutting boards are audiophile-recommended elsewhere on this site as well as other forums, and the price is peanuts. The other cutting boards I have are too greasy, so I haven’t tried them.
For other components I used to have mapleshade blocks, but I found the Ikea boards superior.
scotte1 saidThere should be no need to adjust speaker position or any of those other things when upgrading from PWD2 to DS DAC. The physical installation of the DAC will however benefit, as I have found, if you sit it on set of 3 Magico Qpod.Anyway, my question: What steps have DS DAC fans taken to adjust their speaker placement, listening position, room treatment, etc. to address this phenomenon (or other notable changes) to the presentation of familiar music wrought by the addition to DS DAC to your system?
Agreed. I have liked how the DS responded to Nordost BC Kones, myself. Haven’t triend the Qpods.
Solomon saidThe DS chassis should be sitting on the isolation devices, that is, the feet of the DS should not be in contact with anything. Try it this way around instead of the method you're currently using.I found that placing the DS on an Ikea cutting board and placing vibrapods between the cutting board and the shelf, served to add some warmth to the sound of Torreys. Same for DMP.
TarnishedEars saidWell...last night I installed the Torreys software update. The raving about a marked improvement in performance is not an exaggeration!Step 1: Get rid of Pikes Peak.
Step 2: Load Torrys
Step 3: Enjoy your music again.
Even though I am a (well paid up) dues-paying member of this crazy club, I like to think I have been able to maintain a healthy dose of skepticism about all things “Hi-FI” and “Audiophile.” Now, I must apologize to all of my fellow club members of whom I have harboured doubts and cast arched eyebrows at when reading the DS DAC software upgrade descriptions and praises.
I was genuinely surprised at (and of course very pleased with) the level of improvement in my system when I installed the FREE software update.
Quoting Bruce from Post No. 6 above:
THANK YOU TED FOR YOU INSIGHTS AND DILIGENCE.
THANK YOU PAUL FOR YOUR DEDICATION TO THE AUDIOPHILE PURSUIT FOR THE MUSICAL EXPERIENCE, AND YOUR FORESIGHT INTO THE NEXT FRONTIER.
THANK YOU TO THE EXTRAORDINARY TEAM AT PS AUDIO, WITHOUT WHICH NONE OF THIS WOULD COME TO FRUITION.
Scott
There should be no need to adjust speaker position or any of those other things when upgrading from PWD2 to DS DAC.My experience when upgrading from PWD2 to DS DAC is that you need to switch absolute polarity (AKA "phase" on your remote) from what you had on the PWD2, assuming you had that correct. Give that a whirl.
HiSolomon saidThese cutting boards are audiophile-recommended elsewhere on this site as well as other forums, and the price is peanuts. The other cutting boards I have are too greasy, so I haven’t tried them.
For other components I used to have mapleshade blocks, but I found the Ikea boards superior.
I can think of four possible explanations for the change you described.
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You’ve changed the extent to which your equipment is being affected by vibrations coming from the environment.
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You’ve inadvertently made another change to your system whilst making the intended change. For example temporarily unplugging interconnects then reconnecting them may reduce the effect of small degrees of oxidation on the electrical contacts, or the interconnects may now be taking a slightly different route and so have become more or less affected by magnetic fields coming from other equipment or wires or more or less affected by their action as an aerial bringing interference of radio origin into your equipment.
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You imagined it. The placebo effect is a well-established fact in medical and other research and I know of no reason to suppose that it cannot happen when audio equipment is changed.
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You have become insane. (This is not the same as (3). The placebo effect is part of normal human brain function.)
As a reader of your post I have to discount (4) because I don’t know you and because from my perspective any denial by you of insanity will give me no additional information.
(1), (2) and (3) all remain possibilities. It’s notoriously difficult to reliably eliminate (3). In practice probably the best you can do is to invite a disinterested member of your family to occasionally remove or add the measures you took without telling you and without you being able to see what may or may not have been done. (I would find this difficult because my partner would rather spend her time doing other things. This is understandable.) If you notice changes in sound reproduction in a way that is different from chance then you may have discovered something about the value of your equipment support modifications.
(2) is something you can take great care over to minimise. You might need to avoid unplugging and reconnecting things and take great care not to reposition wires but this will be difficult when changing equipment supports.
(1) strikes me as entirely possible for equipment which creates or processes analogue audio signals. I can see that it might also affect the sound of digital audio if vibrations were to affect signal timing. Of course the DS and DS Junior are peculiarly INsensitive to signal timing problems in the form of digital audio jitter but they could still be affected by disturbance of their analogue outputs.
The other thing about (1) is that the effect of changing an equipment support will be very dependant upon how much vibration there is in your environment from which your equipment may be usefully isolated. Your environmental vibration will be dependant on such things as the construction of your room, how your loudspeakers are physically connected to the floor (walls??), the distance from sources of vibration to the equipment you’re trying to improve the sound of and perhaps how bouncy your neighbours children are! It may also depend upon what other measures may already have been taken.
My point is writing all this is to support my view that it is impossible to draw any conclusions from your report of success with your chosen equipment supports. Indeed it is more or less impossible to draw any conclusions from ANY individual report of success with equipment supports.
So what should I do? I look for patterns of reports from reviewers I’ve come to respect. I also want to know something about the mechanism by which a given support is supposed to work and that mechanism needs to make sense.
Enjoy the music!
Peter
All true and particularly well presented.
Vibration control measures, particularly of digital equipment, has always bothered me conceptually. Why should it matter if a bit of wire or a chip is subject to minute vibrations? Additionally, each piece typically contains a transformer, all of which vibrate to a degree, presumably more internal vibration is generated by the particular unit itself than is prevented from entering by vibration control.
Yet, I find a good rack makes a considerable difference v. placing the equipment on the floor or on nondescript stands or furniture. This is true even if listening on headphones where no vibrations are being added by the sound produced by speakers. Odd.
As with many things audio, there are diminishing returns. The differences occasioned by more vibration control - cones, pods, marbles, etc. - add, but to nowhere the degree of the initial placing of equipment on a rack.
I remained bothered by vibration control intellectually, but experientialy find it real.
woot said My experience when upgrading from PWD2 to DS DAC is that you need to switch absolute polarity (AKA "phase" on your remote) from what you had on the PWD2, assuming you had that correct. Give that a whirl.Not sure if you are serious...
Elk said…Vibration control measures, particularly of digital equipment, has always bothered me conceptually. Why should it matter if a bit of wire or a chip is subject to minute vibrations?
I remained bothered by vibration control intellectually, but experientialy find it real.
All the metallic bits and pieces carrying the electrical signal within a device’s gizzards exist in electric and magnetic fields, and when those bits and pieces are mechanically shifted in those electric and magnetic fields by external vibrations then the electrical signal being carried by those bits and pieces is being modified to a microphonic degree. We don’t want adulteration of the electrical signal caused by these vibrations, hence the veracity of vibration control devices, which you and I and others have been found to be experimentally real.
This is the standard explanation, but what external vibrations are there when listening to headphones in a quiet house? In particular, what external vibrations are there which are greater than that generated within the piece of equipment itself?
scotte1 saidwoot said My experience when upgrading from PWD2 to DS DAC is that you need to switch absolute polarity (AKA "phase" on your remote) from what you had on the PWD2, assuming you had that correct. Give that a whirl.Not sure if you are serious…
I was serious.
Absolutely.
The PWD2 and the DS DAC have a different (even/odd) number of gain stages. Whatever you had the PWD2 set to (absolute phase wise) you should REVERSE this setting on your DSD DAC.
Really.
That’s interesting because I pay attention to the phase on recordings and experiment with the phase switch. I find that “IN” was the same between the two DACs.
woot said…The PWD2 and the DS DAC have a different (even/odd) number of gain stages. Whatever you had the PWD2 set to (absolute phase wise) you should REVERSE this setting on your DSD DAC.
Really.
Thanks, “Woot”. I’ll play around with it and see if it makes a difference.
Regards.
woot said The PWD2 and the DS DAC have a different (even/odd) number of gain stages. Whatever you had the PWD2 set to (absolute phase wise) you should REVERSE this setting on your DSD DAC.Just being a smart ass here: but how many gain stages does the DS have? :)
When doing fixed point DSP with the audio represented asymmetrically, say between -1 (inclusive) and +1 (exclusive) there’s no representation for unity, the largest positive sample value is smaller than unity (1) by a single least significant bit. So a common trick was to represent a gain of unity using -1 and keeping track of how many gain stages you had in your processing.
This really mattered when DSP was done on fixed point 16 or 18 bit samples. With floating point or fixed point 24, 32, etc. bit wide samples it matters a whole lot less, if at all.
In the DS there are multiple reasons to have more bits both on the left and the right of each sample so unity (+1) is representable and I don’t need to worry about counting gain stages. (However here’s no path thru the DS that acts any differently with unity (or zero) than any other value, even the volume level 100 is a really weird number that differs between 44.1, 88.2 and 176.4 vs 48, 96 and 192.)
I’ll defer to your experience about any empirical polarity difference between the DS and the PWD.
Ted Smith said Just being a smart ass here: but how many gain stages does the DS have? :)The stage count was an assumption. I did notice that with the DS DAC I needed to switch absolute phase from how I had it set up with the PWD2 for whatever reason.