8th-note
Responses from 8th-note
| 10-15 year old hi end DACs are still great. I have a late 90's Krell CD 250/2 cd player that I keep in my system. I also have a Jay's CD3 MK III transport and a Berkeley Alpha Reference MQA Series 2 DAC. I realize some people will scoff but that ancient Krell holds its own against the Jay's... | |
| Sound Absorbing Drapes I have a couple suggestions. This sounds like a big project that will involve hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours. I highly recommend that you run Room EQ Wizard to get a baseline of where you are at before adding more treatment. The softwa... | |
| What type of cables make the most difference I'm a geezer audiophile and I have experimented with cables for decades. So far I have never heard a cable that makes a difference. One possible reason for this is that I use a control whenever possible. For example, I have multiple digital compon... | |
| Room treatment So far my new listening room has no dedicated treatment. I have several thousand CDs and around a thousand records and I have arranged them on dowel racks and custom album furniture to provide a large amount of diffusion. I have run REW and the re... | |
| To Equalize or Not to Equalize If you are open to getting a used EQ I can recommend a DBX 10/20 Equalizer. It is a 10 band EQ with memory settings so you can save and recall several different profiles. The unit also has a real time analyzer but you would need to find one where ... | |
| $35000 to $40,000. speakers what would you buy and why? @emergingsoul I have always used one amplifier to drive my speakers. My Thiels and my new Dynaudios only have one set of binding posts so biamping is not practical. My approach has been to focus on one really good amplifer rather than biamping but... | |
| $35000 to $40,000. speakers what would you buy and why? @chuck I just completed a process to upgrade my speakers to end-game status. I was looking in roughly the price range you specify. I visited two stores in Portland Oregon and had a very good experience in both. I'm going to write a more complete p... | |
| Is Sound Stage an artifact of recording? @bruce19 Your example of recording a solo guitar and singer illustrates my point perfectly but not in the way you may have thought. I've recorded hundreds of tracks of singer/guitar and I've tried a range of microphone setups and locations. If you... | |
| Is Sound Stage an artifact of recording? Thanks for this original post. This is a subject that I have thought much about over the years. In fact, I wrote a letter to the editor of Stereophile more than 20 years ago about this same topic. My point was that after going to over a hundred li... | |
| Do You Ever Get Glare/Raspy Sound on High Pitched Female Vocal Lines? Interesting post. I hear something like this too on a variety of music. It's an upper midrange/lower treble harshness that sounds like distortion to me. I have wondered if it is something in my hearing because it can be worse or better depending o... | |
| Looking To Upgrade to a new CD Transport I have a Jay's Audio CD3 MK III and a Teac 701T transport. Here is my take on both. Even though I stream using Qobuz I still mostly play CDs and vinyl. I play at least 10 CDs a week and I got mad when $4000 transport made by a guy named Paul had t... | |
| MQA thoughts @lordmelton Good question. The Berkeley display only shows MQA, not the final bitrate. If I understand correctly, MQA compresses the signal and then restores it to a facsilime of its original bitrate, whatever that was. I never subscribed to Tidal... | |
| MQA thoughts @lordmelton My Berkeley Reference displays the characters for MQA on the display when playing an MQA disc. You have to set the 701T to MQA which does the first upsample to 88 khz and then the Berkeley DAC recognizes the MQA format and decodes it t... | |
| MQA thoughts I have a TEAC 701T and a Berkeley Reference MK II MQA DAC and I have bought 18 MQA CDs (I just counted them) to test the format. Most of them sound pretty much identical to the regular CD. An example is Rapture by Anita Baker. This is a great soun... | |
| Pass Labs Amps - Does the heat bother you? It's not a Pass but I have a Krell KSA 300S that puts out a lot of heat when I'm playing music loud. At idle it's warm but after an album or two at 95 dB it's too hot to touch. At idle the amp uses around 400 watts. I only turn it on when I'm goin... |