Evolution of the Species?

Well I have had a weekend to take on board the new sound.

In Conclusion here is where I am at.

Saturday a 200 gig harddrive arrived as did an Arcam Black Box 3. Impatiently I nipped into town and got a one metre toslink cable whilst I wait for a 10 metre one to arrive from Germany.



As a result of constant disk changing I have succeeded in getting down from this to this:



With any luck they will all be on by the weekend. At this stage I can kick itunes Catalog into action to get all the tracks listed with covers in HTML format.

Sound Quality
This set up sounds supurb nice a clean sound, and significantly more sound stage and stereo imaging than the CDi. However I think its lost a bit of something, something dosn't sit quite right. I think this may be down to the fact that I have owned in one guise or another a naim front end for 8 years or more.

There is a significant cavet to all this. Any level of compression degrades the sound significantly. I think Paul is mabye not listening through the best front end and I mean this with no disrespect but it does sound significantly worse. I have tried the following:

AIFF full quality
AIFF 32 MHZ
AIFF 28 MHZ
WAV Full Quality
WAV 32 MHZ
WAV 28 MHZ
AAC 128
AAC 256
AAC 340

The only ones that worked were the uncompressed ones. WAV and AIFF at each level of compression exhibitied two main problems. A hardining of the treble and 'blooming' of the bass. The bass issue is particulary bad and has meant that at the most I could only reduce the quality to 32, this still brings the average tune in at 50megs.

This is not an issue as far as I can see from a storage perspective, I am over half way through but still have 128 gigs to play with. However it will lead to issues in the future, bearing in mind itunes only looks into one folder and no where else...

As I write this my lead has just arrived:



Man this is a great lead, really solid and 15 quid for 10 metres. Lovely, I'll let you know how it sounds.

 

Well, fair enough Gary as I said in another thread its not for you.

But FYI, I would consider my hearing "fairly good", and I would honestly, hand on heart consider that my headphones are as revealing as £1,500 speakers. Perhaps the sound card is the bottleneck, but even that I feel has a nice sound, and to be honest, I have tried and failed to tell them apart with Foobar's ABX feature.

But anyway, whatever the reasons, you have your experience and I have mine, so I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.

Edit: However, I'd like to suggest you find a Mac equivalent to ABX software which you can use, particularly to compare the higher bitrate formats with uncompressed, to see if you really can, reliably, tell the difference.

Also a point about the headphones. Some of you probably choked on your drink when I said they compare to £1,500 speakers. Perhaps I should qualify that statement. I think the level of detail and overall quality of sound produced by them is to the level which I said (and after all, they were originally about £500 FWIW), but I sometimes *suspect* that headphones may not quite reliably reveal as much information as speakers when it comes to soundstaging and atmosphere, and, potentially make them more forgiving than speakers in some respects. This is, however, speculation on my part.

Edit Part 2: I hope you have a good backup plan

 

Gary,

glad to hear it's coming together, I do feel the Arcam will be a stopgap measure in your case - it's presentation is quite smooth and maybe lacks a bit of drive compared to Naim kit.

But longterm, I'm sure your plan is spot on. I've finally got mine up and running, with the M Audio, it is neccessary to tweak the settings in the Audio Core Interface on the Mac to get an SPDIF output. Now I have that I am pleased with the results. As a transport, the Mac offers a slight loss of air up top compared with the Denon, but offers more solidity (possibly down to the different cables but very slight)

What the Denon didn't allow me to do (which I am currently), is to enjoy hours of shuffled tracks from my collection of Female singer/songwriters Great stuff!

 

Merlin.

One thing is for certain, I lisentyed soley to CD this weekend, and ear splitting levels. Mabye its because the top is rolled off, but I certainly can go louder this way, and of course because its all there in front of me (well up to L anyway) its very easy to listen to stuff you might otherwise ignore.

Excellent.

The cable is now in place so the arcam resides over in the HIFI, looks and feels cheap compared to the naim stuff

Sounds preciesly the same as the other way round where I had a tonne of cheap maplins lead with multiple connections in it.

 

Hi Garyi

Great to hear that this is coming along so well.

Just as a thought, I would think the main limiting factors soundwise, apart from the compression issues, would be the amount of noise the computer would inject into the transport/signal from it's power supply, isolation of the drive in terms of mechanical and acoustic feedback, jitter/timing errors between transport and DAC, and the DAC itself.

I get the impression its a superb solution for easy access to a library of CD's, but on a soundbasis one is effectively designing ones own CD player so to speak with the many variables involved.

Mind you, if I had a G5 I'd be doing similar things, but I'd still probably have kept my Naim CD player, but then I like keeping things, so that's just me...

We wait with baited breath, over at Naim HQ for a review..:MILD:

Warmest Regards

John...

 

Or perhaps you can go to ear splitting volumes with the new front end because perhaps the CDI was sick??

I might get a long stereo phono lead (just for tests you understand!) and run a feed from my PC to my bedroom system's Minidisc deck; I'm expecting a total music-free zone myself...

BTW Gary - nice Genesis "The way we walk" CD - couldn't make out any of the others...

Until I HAVE to move to this kind of system, I won't; I chop and change tracks all the time - having to get off my arse to do it keeps me fit!

 

I think we can to a certain extent discount that John. With a quality Dac, it would be fair to say the Mac totally destroyed the Naim CD player, which did sound broken to me in comparison.

Playback from hard drive is a very viable option IMO, I am surprised at the quality of playback from a Powerbook. It easily matches, and in some respects betters mid price dedicated spinners.

 

It is worth remembering that most popular music is recorded onto a MAC; the sound quality is not in question. The main problem I think is that most people only hear a MAC or PC through the soundcard that it comes with or upgrades to a cheapish pro-consumer soundcard or use the optical out with a DAC. I'm convinced that if more people could get to hear a MAC or PC with a high grade USB/firewire soundcard (read DAC) then they might be strongly pursuaded to consider ditching their CDPs. There is a huge difference in bypassing the internal soundcard by using USB or firewire.

PS Peter Gabriel's last album was recorded on a MAC using Logic software, yes no tape!

dominic

 

Hi Dominic

Not sure what you're saying here. Why would a USB/Firewire card be better than slotting an aditional/replacement card of decent quality into the MOtherboard?

 

I think that you may have misread what I wrote. Of course you can use a high grade internal soundcard but they will normally come with off board converters. I'm emphasising using the standard internal soundcard through optical out and a cheap ungrade live soundblaster.