technobear
Ursine Audiophile
The new toy has arrived 
Only took 5 minutes to get it playing. Loads of settings to tinker with after that. I am having lots of fun here. Love the VU meters
So how does it sound? Much better than I was expecting! It's not as good as the Arcam CD192. The top end is not quite as smooth. The soundstage is not quite as wide or deep. It's not far behind though. Bass is good, tight and deep and powerful. Voices are good. Boogie factor is good. It's involving to listen to. I'm not sure a DAC is going to be necessary.
The Arcam has some other advantages here, namely an Omiga mains cable, a Trichord Powerblock and a Van den Hul D102mkIII interconnect (wish I hadn't sold the spare set now).
I think I'll be looking at obtaining a linear power supply. Then I can use the Trichord Powerblock and the Omiga mains cable. I don't want to plug the supplied switching PSU into the Trichord as this will polute the supply to the amp.
Still, an encouraging start.
Need to rethink the way some of my music is stored though. When I select a genre, SlimServer shows artists. This is good if your looking for an album by an artist but hopeless if your looking for a compilation. The only way to get to a list of compilations is to list all the albums. Not ideal. Creative MediaSource is much better in this respect as you can filter by genre, album and artist simultaneously. The best solution I can think of is to have extra genres like 'Rock Albums', 'Rock Compos', 'Chillout Albums', 'Chillout Compos', etc. That's gonna be a pain to arrange though. Need to think about this.
Only took 5 minutes to get it playing. Loads of settings to tinker with after that. I am having lots of fun here. Love the VU meters
So how does it sound? Much better than I was expecting! It's not as good as the Arcam CD192. The top end is not quite as smooth. The soundstage is not quite as wide or deep. It's not far behind though. Bass is good, tight and deep and powerful. Voices are good. Boogie factor is good. It's involving to listen to. I'm not sure a DAC is going to be necessary.
The Arcam has some other advantages here, namely an Omiga mains cable, a Trichord Powerblock and a Van den Hul D102mkIII interconnect (wish I hadn't sold the spare set now).
I think I'll be looking at obtaining a linear power supply. Then I can use the Trichord Powerblock and the Omiga mains cable. I don't want to plug the supplied switching PSU into the Trichord as this will polute the supply to the amp.
Still, an encouraging start.
Need to rethink the way some of my music is stored though. When I select a genre, SlimServer shows artists. This is good if your looking for an album by an artist but hopeless if your looking for a compilation. The only way to get to a list of compilations is to list all the albums. Not ideal. Creative MediaSource is much better in this respect as you can filter by genre, album and artist simultaneously. The best solution I can think of is to have extra genres like 'Rock Albums', 'Rock Compos', 'Chillout Albums', 'Chillout Compos', etc. That's gonna be a pain to arrange though. Need to think about this.
