jgenner;518768 Wrote: > "difference is in the ear of the beholder" > > Actually, it is not. As I already mentioned, we were not able to hear a > real difference. In particular, not the incredible effects some people > are raving about in reviews and forums. > > Of course, I know that a room can make a big difference, and probably > the biggest one. (We moved from a modern building in Germany to a flat > in an old house with 4.50 m high ceilings in Brussels. The former room > was deep, the current one is broad. It was a pain to get rid of bass > refections.) > > More over, my equipment was assembled with my listening preferences in > mind. As I am not living on guaranteed bonuses, I tried to get good > quality for the money I spent - about 10000 overall. And no, I don't > want to start experimenting. On the contrary, I want to stop and focus > on listening again. > > However, as I find the SB 3 not only very convenient but perfectly > acceptable from a sound perspective (my Creek Destiny CDP risks to start > collecting dust), I was thinking about ways to improve it or replace it > by playing the music directly from my mini PC to an external DAC. So > far, I am not convinced it is worth the extra investment. > > I am quite capable of realizing differences between the cartridges of > my turntable even nothing else is changed. I believe to hear a > difference between flac and mp3 rips of the same CD. As regards the > DAC's: not really. At least not after calibrating same to the same > volume. > > Thus, I ask my question again: Is there really a difference we hear > that could not be achieved by turning the volume knob? Doesn't the > quality of the recording have a much bigger impact? > > Jörg
You are quite right the recording matters most, modern pop and rock is very overcompressed and harsh sounding, sounds the same on everything or even better on bad equipment, other recordings may reveal/have more subtleties mainly acoustic naturally sounding recordings. You must have a reference in reality to judge if something sound correct a natural voice is better than a midi sound and also acoustical instruments you might have heard or played irl. Sadly the majority of source material is sounding quite mundane, not putting much stress on your hifi, you don't need a 10 liter bucket to hold 1 liter of water, you don't need 18" subwoofers etc when modern recordings have turned the interplay between drum and base to a generic "whump whump whump" that you hear in most hit songs. Then their is your acoustics and in third place your hifi. Todays sources are most of them very very good, I remember the old days with turntables and cassete decks and also old CD players before the EE's got a grip on how to design them, they where more different in the beginning. Complete failure in playback for a source these days is often cheap on-board chips in laptops or those very bad cheap DVD players. I do find subtle differences in DAC's CD players and processors but not that divine experience reported in hifi rags . Only you can judge if the $$ is well spent . I've have a not so cheap digital pre amp/home cinema processor for its overall performance with all my sources and discs and it's abilities as a preamp and movie decoding. The $$ spend must be judged in the context of the rest of the system. But you have done something that not many audiophiles care to do when comparing, calibrating the volume level :) Don't dive to deep into the exotic dac department, some loonies are adamant to make their product sound really *different* Non oversampling w/o filters tubes ? i/v stages made of resistors & paper oil caps and countless other "cargo cult" engineering tricks. These products may have a radically different sound indeed, but they not actually reproducing the incoming signal anymore. The endless switch components all time thing that some of us gets into begins when none of the involved components are close to neutrally reproducing, all your mix and matching only turns out wrong in a different way all the time. Example if a power amp only sounds good with a certain preamp that would indicate to me that both or one of the amps is a flawed design. -- Mnyb -------------------------------------------------------------------- Main hifi: SB3 (soon to replaced by a Touch :) It is on preorder) Bedroom/Office: Boom Kitchen: Receiver (soon to be replaced by my SB3 and the SBR to be stuffed in a box in the attic ) I use a Controller various ir-remotes and a Eee-PC with squeezeplay to control this ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mnyb's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4143 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=75447
_______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
