Several people asked me to report on this, so here goes. I went over to PhilNYC's today along with a friend and auditioned a transporter, as well as a number of other sources and DACs. Most of the listening was done through Phil's main system, the details of which you can find on this forum or on the web with some searching. Suffice to say it costs about as much as a Mercedes, and should certainly be very revealing. I might also mention that it sounds really great :-). His dedicated listening room is large and thoroughly acoustically treated. Phil was a gracious and very good-natured host, and we listened to quite a few combinations of DACs and sources. I'd strongly recommend anyone in the NYC area to drop him a line and check out his gear.
I'm not going to comment on everything we heard or tried, just the part that's probably of most interest to this forum - the differences between the TP and my stock SB3 as transports feeding Phil's Dodson DAC, and between the SB3 and TP analogue outs. (We also tried to compare DAC to analogue out, but had trouble getting the volumes matched.) I couldn't hear any difference, either between the TP and SB3 as transports or as analogue sources, despite trying very hard - several times I thought I did hear something, only to lose it quickly. My friend (who's a second generation audionut!) was also unable to hear any difference. Phil thought he could detect a slight difference in soudstage width, so he tried guessing which was TP and which was SB3. On the first try (comparing them as transports) he made one guess, but what he thought was the TP, with the wider soundstage, turned out to be the SB3. We then hooked up the analogue outs, where you might think there'd be a bigger difference - and again (on one guess) the one Phil thought was the TP was the SB. On the final attempt Phil again thought one had a slightly larger soundstage, and - based on his previous attempts - guessed it was the SB... but it turned out to be the TP. Levels were perfectly matched as far as we could tell, although we didn't check with a meter. Phil only made three guesses in total, after listening hard to a bunch of A/B switches - we weren't there to do a real blind test. I just wanted to find out if I could hear a difference. In fairness to Phil, he had switched the analogue interconnects (which weren't the same) between the second and third trials, and the one he thought had the wider soundstage switched as well. So possibly it was the cables making the difference - but any combination of guesses he could have made would have correlated either with the cables or with the TP/SB3, so I'm not sure that means much. In any case, it was very clear to everyone that the differences, if any, between these sources were either non-existent or extremely subtle. In contrast, my system at home sounds quite different (and not as good), as did Phil's secondary system (which has slightly lower grade speakers). To me, this really nails down what I've been pretty sure of for a while - that all digital sources are really very close, if not absolutely identical, while rooms and speakers make enormous differences. For some, the peace of mind knowing you have the best may be worth it, and that's fine with me - but I'll focus my time and money on what seems to me to really matter. I won't be buying a transporter (although I might perhaps buy a reasonably priced DAC that can double as a pre for digital sources). -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=35068 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
