Indeed the "is it an amp" question is purely technical and irrelevant to the end user. Even if it isn't, most people will call it an amp for convenience if nothing else. We've probably done that to death here. The interesting technical point is that there is no analog gain stage in the unit.
regalma1;187696 Wrote: > The real question is, does it sound good. The reviews I have seen have > varied. That makes sense as it is likely any class D unit is going to > be very load sensitive, what with the smoothing capacitors and the high > frequency filters on the output. I read a very extensive review of > several high end class D amps in Stereophile. It was pretty apparent > that how they are going to perform is dependent on the reactive element > of the cables and speakers they are connected to. Opinions of the > various reviewers in the article ranged all over the place. The jury's still out in my case. It's very hard to evaluate, and utterly impossible for me to do it blind. Transferring speaker cables etc... I'll plug in the Creek again in a week or two for a long-term impression when I find some time and some patience for an evening of swapping. It's very clear to me that it has more resolution than my Creek amp (4330, plus Epos ES12 speakers). However, I haven't decided what I think about the overall musical experience, particularly the tonal balance. The Creek is definitely warmer, even though I thought of it as pretty neutral before. I have to decide whether I feel like I was mistaken, or the Panny is unnaturally thin. It could be related to difficulty driving the speakers' frequency-varying loads, with its class D-like output stage, but that sort of speculation just unhelpfully feeds back into the perception. I feel the clarity really is showing up the quality of the source. I used some Elliott Smith for comparisons, and now my conclusion is that his production values weren't great. e.g. I thought some sibilants were terrible, and blamed the amp, but then listened to other recordings and there were no problems with sibilants. (Which makes me wonder whether a theoretical ultimate "transparent" system could actually be a liability in the real world of imperfect recordings which you still want to listen to?) Surprisingly for anyone only passingly familiar with their ilk, I listened to The Wedding Present's Seamonsters which, being mostly heavily distorted guitars, doesn't seem like a candidate for critical equipment listening. However, it is and it really shone. The production is superb and there's minimal compression. This can be annoying if you hit a track on shuffle as some have a peak volume of 80% or so, much of it way below that, because the producer -didn't- turn everything up to 11 and left headroom for tracks that should be louder, to be louder. I tried one track for a (blind) test to compare FLAC to mp3 (lame -V1 VBR, avg ~240kbps), and the difference was instantly and clearly apparent. I expected to sit down and patiently compare the two and slowly generate an opinion. In the end I listened to the first 3 notes (minimally distorted guitar) a couple of times each and said, "this one is -definitely- the FLAC", and I was right. The texture and detail was clearly significantly superior, and it was so obvious that I didn't see any point in trying other tracks. Up until now, I mostly listened to mp3s (background listening, portable player etc.), but sat down with a real CD in my Arcam player when I wanted a treat. I'd read on the likes of the HydrogenAudio site that -V1 would probably be transparent, and only quickly compared it on a pretty weak DAC (Stereolink USB DAC into the Creek) before. So I have lots of experiments to do: Try up to 320kbps CBR mp3s and see whether I can distinguish them from FLAC... Try the Creek again after listening to the Panny for a while. Try the same mp3 tests on the Creek and see if it's so clear (ditto on my portable player)... Try out the bi-amping option on the Panny... -- jimmyfergus ------------------------------------------------------------------------ jimmyfergus's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4323 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33112 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
