Meier Audio StageDAC - Page 10

@DarKu

Thanks for your comment. I think the same as you are thinking. As for the money, it should be a great deal to better the sound of Cantate and also expand the flexibility of my system.

Hi, i have the symphony at the moment and am very satisfied (except for the rather loud speaker olume I am getting), of course i still wonder if the stagedac can improve upon the internal symphony dac, i hope jan will incorporate the dual mono design of the stagedac into the symphony in the future.
Greetings, Anouk,

Just received shipping notice from dr Meier, most likely here in next week, yay!

1st listen: I love it when a new component makes a huge difference

Dear all, I will start today listening properly to the new kid on the block. First I will be testing my own hearing with a tone generator to make sure my hearing is good enough (for the record, I had my hearing tested by an occupational nurse last month and I was told I am have a category 1 hearing, the maximun -company policy to go for a fitness check every 2yrs, nothing wrong with me!
Just for the record, it is going to take time to assess this one properly due to the wealth of options and also the limitations of the rest of the hardware.
My methodology will be as follow:

1. My SACD will be connected to the DAC through Coaxial RCA (Van Den Hull D-102 III Hybrid) and by optical (Fisual Cable) in the preliminary tests. If I notice no difference, I will use the optical connection to further limit possible noise. All mains cables will be shielded and connected to the mains though a Tacima filter.

2. The DAC will be connected to the Graham Slee Solo through Crystal Cable Pyccolo using the fixed RCA output of the STAGEDAC.

3. The mode in the DAC will have the crossfeed deactivated in the first round so I can assess just the DAC section. Once I have determined which combination for oversampling and pulse response does agree better with my taste, I will proceed to test the crossfeed section. I will use for comparison the 8 fold oversampling with the first filter because in that position the frequency response is a flat line up to 10 kHz and almost an straight line to 20kHz (very linear with almost no roll off).

4. As I said, it is my feeling that this DAC is so good that the only limitation is the rest of the chain. I will keep the Graham Slee SRG with the PSU1 because I think is one of the very bests headamps and I do not have anything better at the moment (I would like to have a Lehman Black Cube handy but it is not the case at the moment).
Regarding the headphones I will use three different ones for clear reasons:

- Grado GS1000i because it accentuates the high frequency and will show clearly the shortcomings between 8 kHz and 12kHz.
- Denon AH-D7000 because there is probably nothing on Earth that you can put around your ears that gives you deeper and nicer bass. So that one for the low frequencies.
- AKG K601 because it is one of the most neutral and lineal headphones in the market.

I have posted here the comparative graph for the three of them an a couple of pictures of the "testing bench".
Cheers

Looking forward to your impressions Leonardo!

That's great to hear. What was your source prior to the Stagedac?

Thanks for the comments so far guys.
StageDac owners are going to lose some sleep this weekend !

Looking forward to a comparison against the DacMagic at some point...

Cheers!

Could you please do some testing (at least a little bit of testing ) with the Senns as well? It would make me very happy . I'm very tempted to buy this one.

BTW, thanks for testing the dac!

A Sonos Zoneplayer. No idea what the DAC is inside that; it's supposed to be fairly good, but certainly not 'audiophile' standard I'm sure. The only time I've previously had a seperate DAC was when I had a balanced rig:
Zoneplayer -> Apogee minidac -> RSA Apache -> balanced GS1000.
It was very good, although in the end I decided that the difference between balanced and SE was so small (to my ears) to be pointless, and also I missed crossfeed! Anyway, before I changed to a purely SE amp, I did some listening to see how much of a difference the minidac made (using the Apache in SE mode - without the DAC I couldn't do balanced!). I didn't think it was much! A slight increase in clarity, if anything.
So I wasn't expecting much of a sonic improvement from the StageDAC; my main motiviation was actually the nice crossfeed! But, obviously very early impressions, it's making a big difference in my current rig (-> Earmax Silver -> APS RS1i). Hugely increased soundstage in every direction coupled with improved positioning, and increased clarity across the spectrum. Nice.
Jan did say to expect a 200-hour burn-in but I doubt this'll change much. I'm very happy.

Leonardo how do you like it with USB ?

I haven't done much testing with USB yet.
I checked that is funtional and I can say that it does work just fine with very little jitter (I presume that Dr Meier has included a dedicated USB solution that feeds the DAC rather than an integrated solution). My Pc recognized the STAGEDAC with no problems at all.
I may check with the USB later on but I am not going to use it because of the limited implementation that Jan has gone for (sampling rate is limited to 48KHz). I rather use the digital Toslink from my computer so I can stream my Hi definition files at 24Bit/48 or 96KHz from my Soundblaster X-Fi- I joined the B&W Society of Sound just to receive plenty of music at high resolution.

I can indeed. Not a problem at all. The HD650 is a nice working horse!

tempting!!!!!!!!!