As far as Bacch for Mac it’s addicting! The majority of my listening is with Roon playing thru the B4M. The Grimm MU1, The Ethos, and the Rega RP10 all have superior sound quality over Roon played on the B4M. What all those sources don’t have as of right now is XTC and ORC. The Mac Mini is not bad it’s quite good just not at the level as the previous mentioned gear.
The B4M is incredible. The Adio or Dio would be the machine to get if you expect high end audiophile quality. B4M responds well to all upgrades I’ve tried so far. Upgraded power cable, muon pro, and connection to GC 1.1 along with Ethos Dac.
If you enjoy classical music the best component in Hifi imo is the MBL 101 speakers. If you can’t afford MBL 101 then it’s definitely Bacch!!! The size and scale of the soundstage, instruments placed in space is perfect! The ORC and XTC is so good it makes the short comings with the MacMini and not having better power cables a non issue.
I thought with Bacch I’d miss DSD but I can’t say I’m missing DSD. I can still play DSD it’s converted to PCM by Roon. I look foward to hearing Bacch with CD’s and vinyl.
The DAC is a substantial improvement over the Mk2… We really like it!
Regarding streaming… We called to get help setting it up properly, we guess it’s a good streamer, but almost everything to us pales to compare with using the BACCH DSP system.
Would greatly appreciate your insights on the following:
1. XTC levels you got with the LX521 and Kii3 respectively.
2. With similar goals, but very different methodologies, can you comment further, and in comparison, as to whether the LX521 and Kii3’s are highly optimized for BACCH. Edgar and other users have referenced planar designs, including Sanders electrostatics as preferred.
Was there any additional acoustic treatment or other considerations relevant in either speaker setup? Are power handling, room requirements, low level listening similar or preferable with either?
BACCH processing seems to work extremely well, possibly better with dipole speakers. I have two friends with dipole speakers and it seems obvious. I don’t have dipoles and of course BACCH works fine. It just seems better with them.
Thank you and agreed. What I especially like about BACCH is that the XTC is measurable, and some point of reference for its performance in an otherwise subjectivist hobby, (even with variables like dispersion, user recording references, and room reflection and asymmetry).
I have D&D 8Cs which others have indicated can achieve an XTC of 12 with a symmetrical room and some acoustic treatment. My room is great though.
It is the LX521 (in tandem with BACCH) that interests me especially, as this seems like the closest approximation of a planar dipole, aside from being an impressive speaker in its own right. Essentially, I am curious as to whether it is similar in XTC performance to flat planars like Sanders Sound Model 10E.
A fair question. I am not a BACCH owner, and therefore have no direct insights. From forums, reviews, and a brief conversation with Edgar, I understand that BACCH has a theoretical anechoic XTC of 30dB on one end of the spectrum. 3dB represents an audible, though minimal impression of BACCH. Andrew Quint’s Magico speakers in a minimally treated room with wide dispersion dialed in at 6-11dB. He did not qualify his follow-up with the Janszen Audio A8 narrow direcivity electrostat hybrids. A Sanders Model 10E user appeared to peak at 15-20dB and other narrow directivity speakers like the D&D 8C speakers fall a little below that at around 12dB (at least in one user’s experience and room) - which is where I derived the number from. The data you have kindly shared highlights that this is at best a generalization, with room acoustics, symmetry and perhaps other factors playing a significant role.
As I’m sure you are well aware, this this is all independent of recording quality and spatial manipulation, where artificial soundscapes will sound unnaturally projected, panned, etc., warranting that the XTC is intentionally dialed down.
Certainly, I do not know what “skewness” means but am intrigued. Does Theoretica not explain this feature?
Which speakers were these tests done with? Can you make a correlation with the acoustics of the room - any REW frequency sweeps?
Skewness is a statistical measure of a distribution’s asymmetry, indicating whether the data points are skewed to the left or right, or are symmetrically distributed. There are three types: positive skewness (right-skewed), with a tail extending to the right; negative skewness (left-skewed), with a tail extending to the left; and zero skewness, where the distribution is symmetric, like a normal distribution. Understanding skewness helps in interpreting data and selecting appropriate statistical method
I played around with my speaker positions today then thought I’d better re-calibrate my BACCH-dSP on my Mac mini (Apple M2 Pro, 16GB RAM). It is taking forever to do ‘Processing Measurement’. Set to 96 kHz sampling rate and ORC off this time as I gave up with 192 kHz + ORC during the first run. Maybe 10 minutes so far and no progress. I don’t remember it taking this long before. 59% CPU, 5.39GB memory (green) on Activity Monitor. Anyone else have processing “hanging” for ages?
See my screenshot - I have added a rectangle in yellow around the Audio Setting where the bitrate is selected (96000). The Processing Measurement has been hanging at ~90% for half an hour
According to ChatGPT, it does have a significant effect on the processing required. I thought that might have been the issue when I tried calibrating at 192kHz, so I dropped back to 96kHz but the Processing Measurement is still hanging at 90% - at one hour. Definitely something wrong as that Mac mini is only used for BACCH-dSP and Roon and hasn’t changed since installation. I’ve never seen it take that long. Odd
My first time with it doing this, too. I’ve sent an email to info@theoretica.us but not sure what the support is like. Maybe I’ll message Edgar via WhatsApp if I don’t hear back, but I really don’t know how he can single handedly manage support for BACCH.
