For those who are interested, I tried a little A/B comparison myself over the weekend with the transporter. I have a Krell Showcase / Martin Logan system which uses balanced connections throughout, so it is (relatively) easy to swap bits in and out of the chain - well at least the plugs all fit. Impossible to do a blind A/B as the Mrs wasn't willing to play.
In summary, I could tell the difference between the transporter, the SB3 and the Krell DACs, but it was very subtle. I couldn't identify any difference between the digital output of the transporter and the SB3 (wired, not toslink - I dont have a fibre long enough) driving the Krell. Most noticable difference was removing the Krell processor completely and driving the Krell poweramps directly from the transporter. A bit scary with 250W per channel - I had visions of picking bass driver out of my hair. In this configuration, the noise floor was noticably lower - so much so that I thought long and hard about keeping it that way. The Krell processor has an analogue passthrough mode where it shuts down most of the digital innards to minimise noise - using this and the analogue output of the transporter still had noticably more noise than the transporter direct. Guess that is more do do with the analogue stages after the DAC than the DAC itself. So I would rank the DACs in order of my preference - Transporter, Krell, SB3 and I would say the main difference between the Krell and the Transporter was the noise floor. I ended up with my original setup - transporter into Krell processor into Krell poweramp - this was because the Krell has some limited room equalisation capabilities (switched off for the A/B tests), and my room a dreadfull resonance at around 130Hz. So I have the choice of transporter direct into the Krell with its amazingly quiet noise floor (but the room booms) or through the Krell which is doing goodness knows what to the orginal data but does notch out the resonance. -- Andy8421 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andy8421's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16846 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=58311 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
