I'll listen to it. I listened to a young jazz singer named Gabrielle Cavassa whose album Diavola was reviewed by Stereophile. I like her a lot. She was kind of discovered by Joshua Redman who plays on a cut or two. Gapless didn't work. The next track became silent. Although there are a few choices on gapless I'll experiment with when I have the energy. Not tonight.
Does anyone have a digital system that is as involving as their analogue front end?
I have a good analogue front end. Not stratuspherically good but good enough for this comparison. VPI Prime Signature 21 turntable, Pass Labs XP-25 pono preamp, Pass Labs XP-30 preamp and Hovland Radia amp. It has a lovely, very involving sound. On the right recording, I just drop everythng and am drawn in to listen.
My streamer, on the other hand, is decent but not spectacular. It is better than my CD player, but it is not jaw-dropping like my analogue front-end. My question is this: does anyone have a high-end, tier-one streamer (dCS Bartok Apex, Lumin X2, or something like them) that can rival a good analogue system?
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@audio-b-dog yep I tested gapless with Stravinsky no bueno with jplay. Hower it worked with Tidal Connect and should work with qobuz connect without a problem the slight silence with jplay when gapless is not enabled isn’t ideal but it’s not the end of the world. You can try qobuz connect. |
My EMM Labs CDSA se is excellent. On the best SACD's the sound is perfect. Unfortunately it was never 'involving' like my analogue rig. A few years ago Ed Meitner did an interview, At about the 20th minute he let something slip. It's in fact the chip manufacturers who are to blame. They refused to build the right kind of chip. Maybe one day that might change. Stop chasing the high. Digital is for listening to music. Analogue is for getting immersed in the music. Two completely different animals. |
It doesn’t matter what the chip manufacturers are doing with their chips, several DAC designers are building DAC’s without them, including Meitner. Do you have a link to this interview? According to an interview from Stereophile from 2019: JVS: Do you work with chips, or . . . ? EM: We make our own DAC from discrete components. We don’t use any chips. Mariusz Pawlicki: (EMM managing engineer) There are various components, including FPGAs [field-programmable gate arrays]. However, we don't use any commercial DAC chip. The very core is not a typical market solution. We have various semiconductors; it's Ed's unique digital architecture. Every piece is unique to EMM. EM: There is something fundamentally wrong with a commercially available DAC chip, no matter who makes it. The life of that chip is very limited, because they're building it to go into mass-produced consumer products rather than high-end components. When you totally rely on a chip that is only available for a limited amount of time, you can never evolve a product over years and years and years. But when you roll your own, you're free to do what you want as time goes on and you want to expand the product further and further. That was my path in this business, and I've done it pretty much without looking at what the rest of the crowd is up to and doing. Another manufacturer that uses an FPGA, one who used to design the digital side of Meitner’s products is Andreas Koch from Playback Designs. Speaking of DCS check out this video comparing DCS Apex to MPD-8, and the owner’s comparisons to his quite nice vinyl setup.
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