Is Exemplar the answer?

Tbg, I have made no claims. My APL is fully broken in, The Exemplar has had about 24 hours of break in, certainly not enough to pass any judgement. When I had the exemplar from Ric in my system, comparing to the APL(before the new chip/volume control mod)I had felt the exemplar bested the APL in redbook/and the APL won with SACD, for me in my system. Upon my decision, I paid John to build me the Exemplar with the latest siltech upgrade cause I loved the sound, also I intended to use the exemplar in both my HT/and 2 channel, along with either the APL/or Dan wright.

Upon seeing the 3910, with the higher grade video, and the HDCD capability I have decided that when I break these units in, I will most probably sell one or both and upgrade to the 3910's. I am an audionut, yes I am.

I believe each modder has their own ditinct sonic signature of which there will NEVER be an unequivocable best unit. This is a result of each individual having their own sonic signiture to their own liking. As far as I can tell so far, they are all GREAT. I just dunno where this journey will lead to, do you? I am glad you have found your audio nirvana with the Exemplar, at least you can be set for a while now. Just wait till you here the NEW denons(3910)after they mod them....I know for myself I have the full remaster collection of the Grateful Dead, BUT they only sound GREAT in HDCD, and right now, my denon 2900, nor my sacd 1000 with play SACD/whats a man to do?

I found there to be a small but noticeable improvment overall with the display and video circuitry off. I use this mode for critical listening sessions.

I have been having some problems with my Exemplar 2900. This post is meant in no bad way to John, some of the issues have been caused by my own addition of a SDI output board for outputting video which appears to be causing issues with the standard as well as enhanced ouputs. John has been 100% helpful and has continued to work with me to help solve these issues.

My latest issue (now the valve driven outputs are working fine) is a loud popping/cracking through my speakers, regardless of pre-amp volume.

I wonder if this could be caused by the clipping of my analogue line stage? Its a EAD thetermaster 8800Pro.

I began to wonder about this because of the comment in the six moons review which stated, "The output tubes are Amperex 7062s, which increase RedBook output to 3 volts, 50% higher than the industry standard."

If I run this input into the direct analogue inputs which are passed unprocessed to the ouputs I get this bad popping/cracking sound. If I run the inputs to the EAD re-digitising inputs I get a much less muted, almost clipping pf the peaks type sound.

Has anybody else had any issues with clipping of linestages, especially EAD ones?

Once again, I just want to reiterate than Johns support has been first rate and I wouldnt hesitate to do business with him again.

I just asked EAD about a 3V input to their unit and got the following reply. Any thoughts?

1) The maximum recommended input on the 8-channel Analog Direct input of the TheaterMaster 8800 is 2.0 Vrms, although hard clipping does not occur until 2.6 Vrms. This is normal behavior for standard line-level signals. I would recommend that you build or have someone build you some L-pad attenuators for all analog channels that exceed 2.0 Vrms. For best performance it is good to keep well below the clipping point.

If you wish to construct L-pads, please remember that the input impedance of the various Analog Direct channels is as follows: LF, RF 10K; all other channels 5 K. You can take advantage of this to simplify your L-pads to a single resistor:
For the LF and RF, place 5K in series with the signal.
For the CT, LS, RS, SUB, LB, RB, place 2.5K in series.
Best type of resistor is nichrome, but metal film should be OK too.
These values will attenuate 3 Vrms to 2 Vrms. If your CD player output is higher, you'll need to calculate some higher values.

I noticed that many modded players output higher than the stock player. Why is that?