Sound signatures of Esoteric vs. EMM Labs - Page 2

Maybe this is because the Modwright Transporter got such a glowing review at 6moons recently. He even compared it favorably to the NWO 3.0 in some cases.

With my EMM stack and the ES-2/HE90 i have been struggling to get rid of glare at the high end of the spectrum. I am currently listening with my RME 9632 as the transport, running aes to the DCC2 SE. Now i did not do blind tests, but IMO, i got the computer transport to sound very close to the CDSD SE using samplitude as the software player. Fooobar doesn't have the same resolution/clarity, but it cuts down on the glare a bit, so i am using it for now. The ES-2 may need to be tweaked for the glare issue, maybe more tube rolling.

With the RME and DCC2 i am using an atomic clock, so this does influence things a lot. Makes it all sound more real. Using the internal DCC2 clock has slightly better soundstage, but tonality suffers.

andy

Quoted for truth. I'm not sure why a firmware upgrade would produce a change in sound, especially when the creator (Sean Adams) states that all firmware revisions should sound the same. My ears tell me that FW40 sounds way better than FW36 so upgrade and see what you think then. TP becomes less analytical and much warmer.

digital volume broken; but who cares

I was showing David the difference in DAC's by running the analog output of the TP into my McIntosh pre through a speaker setup, also running the digital out of the TP using an AES/BEU XLR into the PCM digital input of the DAC6e.
The difference is significant, but the Emm Labs output is louder (into the balanced inputs into the McIntosh) so it's hard to volume match.

Comparing my DV-50 to the Emm Labs is less of a difference than the TP, but the Meitner setup definitely beats out the Esoteric.

How much is Samplitude?

Anyway, which version of Foobar with which output (ASIO version?) are you using?

I use the free demo of samplitude, 24 bit, asio.

Foobar is v.0.9.5 beta 3, asio 1.2.5. I haven't experimented with others yet.

Don't you have to eventually pay for Samplitude?

No, it just has reduced features. Quite inconvenient too, no playlists.

The Esoteric sources tend to not be dual differential, a requirement for true-balanced output. There's a thread on the subject in this forum somewhere, I forgot which thread though. Also there's a DSD/PCM issue with Esoteric that I forgot to mention earlier, you can read more about it here: http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f7/new...d-05-a-260855/

The Esoteric equipment, in my experience anyhow (DV60, UX1, DV50, some other thing; I forget the model No.) maybe has what people call "analytical" sound. I'm not sure since I'm not certain what this term means. Likewise, I'm not sure what to call the DCC2 since it was also highly detailed and I had very little trouble picking out various elements of the music with precision. However, it was still balanced and very pleasant to listen to; moreso than the Esoteric gear I've used.

From a design standpoint, the EMM gear (at least what I've used) is also considerably more interesting, to me at least. EMM uses ovenized discrete d/a converters and discrete output stages, along with what are apparently in-house developed algorithms for sampling and filtering. Several of the Esoteric products are more or less fairly standard converter + op-amp output stages with off-the-shelf filters, receivers etc. and, while they sound good, are not particularly novel or superlative in the broad scheme of things. I'm not sure if the DCC2 was the best thing I've ever heard, but it is certainly one of the best I've heard (thanks to foo_me's very gracious sharing of it at a meet, and very friendly attitude towards letting people have at it).

With respect to the D-05 specifically, for me at least, I'd take the DCC2 over it without much worry. The D-05 uses the AK4397 which, while the "32 BITS!" sounds neat, it just means it'll take a 32 bit word length and not much else. The dynamic performance isn't even up to par with the best of the 24 bit delta sigma ICs out there (AD1955) and you're going to be limited by the performance of the SCF (switched capacitor filter) that's stuck on the output of the chip. If this were me making the decision, I think I'd favour the more novel and, in my opinion anyhow, likely to be higher performance approach of the DCC2. At the very least, I'd say the DCC2 poses a pretty low risk of sounding less than very good to excellent, especially if you like that type of presentation, and it has a higher coolness factor ^_^

I, personally prefer the latter, but I could live on a desert island (with electricity) with either one.
The Esoteric DV-50 costs approx $6K and the Emm Labs CDSD and DAC 6e cost $19k MSRP, but $11K realistically.
The thing that makes my DV-50 seriously valuable is that it also plays my DVD-Audio and DVD-Video, which the Meitner gear doesn't. They have different assignments in my stable.

That combo *is* pretty soft and bland sounding. Try to find Foobar v0.8.3 AND Otachan ASIO version 47a. This is the most resolving AND musical combo I've been able to come up with, which I FAR prefer over any Foobar version after that with any other ASIO version.