An exploration of Chord DAVE, MScaler, Qutest, and Holo May, HQPlayer

[Arnold Schwartz]

I’m always interested that R2R is described as “natural” sounding when the proper words are likely “more comfortable”. In my experience R2R has treble that is slightly more rolled off and lush bass.

If you hear wind or brass instruments in real life certain notes can be ear piercing - that’s natural. R2R is a coloured sound that some people prefer; if they grew up listening to records on crappy headphones or speakers (at the time) then yeah maybe it sounds natural to you.

 

[Christer]

The problem is no one discusses their reference point which is relative to whatever “sound” they grew up listening to; in large part is a function of the technology available at the time.

IMO there IS and can only be ONE and only ONE reference point in HIFI:live acoustic instruments and the human voice!
All else is just VERY subjective!
There are many reviewers here and elsewhere who haven´t even ONCE been to a live acoustic instruments only concert, much less a recording session of classical music. But still make a lot of noise about what is the best dac or other piece of HIFI equipment without any reference points other than their favourite pop or rock album they heard in their youth or among the younger generation their fav EDM track.

Cheers CC

 

[sajunky]

R2R, particularly NOS is all about natural reproduction. Some instruments, not only brass, i.e. the upper range of piano notes can be ear piercing, it is not a fault in reproduction, it is how it sounds. This is because harmonics are not simplified (falsified). Piano notes have three distinguish phases of reverbations, I hear it all on my Audio GD R2R-11. Reverbations of instruments stay longer, by example a gong initial hit is stronger pronounced and it lasts three times longer than on the typical Delta-Sigma DAC. It is a very characteristic instrument, as a base frequency is constantly changing at irregular intervals. Hear a gong in a nature, then you want it to sound the same on your HiFi.

I’m always interested that R2R is described as “natural” sounding when the proper words are likely “more comfortable”. In my experience R2R has treble that is slightly more rolled off and lush bass.

If you hear wind or brass instruments in real life certain notes can be ear piercing - that’s natural. R2R is a coloured sound that some people prefer; if they grew up listening to records on crappy headphones or speakers (at the time) then yeah maybe it sounds natural to you.

Frequency roll-off is due to the sample-and-hold decoding method (most typical). It is not noticed at all with a presence of Nyquist images (a lack of output LP filter). Let reconstruct analogue waveform in our brain and there is no frequency roll-off and no a lush bass. However a presence off HF images can be distorting on our audio chain, it will leak to the audio band when intermodulating. For this reason some designers want to reconstruct analog waveform on the DAC, but when they add LP filters, frequency roll-off comes out. It can be easily compensated on the digital side (before conversion take place), it will look nice on the FFT plot, but I am not fan of such solutions. NOS is only NOS without a presence of digital filters.

It is pity that to get a natural reproduction in a digital age I have to spend a fortune on the DAC and another (equal) part on the high-frequency capable analogue equipment. In my young age, it did cost few bucks and I could enjoy music. Not anymore.

 

[kkugel]

IMO there IS and can only be ONE and only ONE reference point in HIFI:live acoustic instruments and the human voice!
All else is just VERY subjective!
There are many reviewers here and elsewhere who haven´t even ONCE been to a live acoustic instruments only concert, much less a recording session of classical music. But still make a lot of noise about what is the best dac or other piece of HIFI equipment without any reference points other than their favourite pop or rock album they heard in their youth or among the younger generation their fav EDM track.

Cheers CC

IMO Hifi gets better than real life concerts really fast. You can never sit directly next to the conductor, and ideal seating is about 500$ for one classical concert in my country, and you're still not *in* the music like the mics next to the conductor. I've experienced some of the best concert halls in the world and really good planars def can keep up (if the recording is good)

 

[sajunky]

IMO Hifi gets better than real life concerts really fast. You can never sit directly next to the conductor, and ideal seating is about 500$ for one classical concert in my country, and you're still not *in* the music like the mics next to the conductor. I've experienced some of the best concert halls in the world and really good planars def can keep up (if the recording is good)

Pure immagination. But it is good to take a first row.

 

[GoldenSound]

I’m always interested that R2R is described as “natural” sounding when the proper words are likely “more comfortable”. In my experience R2R has treble that is slightly more rolled off and lush bass.

If you hear wind or brass instruments in real life certain notes can be ear piercing - that’s natural. R2R is a coloured sound that some people prefer; if they grew up listening to records on crappy headphones or speakers (at the time) then yeah maybe it sounds natural to you.

'Natural' is definitely a word which is used far too often and too ambiguously.
Some people describe anything warm as 'natural', others anything spacious, others anything that isn't sibilant. It can be a bit tricky as it's rarely used to actually describe something which closely resembles a real instrument/musical element.

Though unfortunately that's also still somewhat problematic with many subjective terms. Even if you asked 20 people to describe what 'slam' is you'd get many different answers I imagine.

 

[GoldenSound]

IMO there IS and can only be ONE and only ONE reference point in HIFI:live acoustic instruments and the human voice!
All else is just VERY subjective!
There are many reviewers here and elsewhere who haven´t even ONCE been to a live acoustic instruments only concert, much less a recording session of classical music. But still make a lot of noise about what is the best dac or other piece of HIFI equipment without any reference points other than their favourite pop or rock album they heard in their youth or among the younger generation their fav EDM track.

Cheers CC

Just in case this is aimed at myself, I grew up playing Piano, Violin, Drums, and was also in a Cathedral choir and an orchestra, so have spent considerable time with live music both playing and listening.

Though honestly a lot of live music as in pop/rock type stuff isn't exactly an ideal experience in reality. A recording will often give you a better version of the actual music than the live experience would, but being there isn't really about the actual quality of sound but the experience and atmosphere.
This isn't the case for orchestral stuff usually though.

 

[kkugel]

'Natural' is definitely a word which is used far too often and too ambiguously.
Some people describe anything warm as 'natural', others anything spacious, others anything that isn't sibilant. It can be a bit tricky as it's rarely used to actually describe something which closely resembles a real instrument/musical element.

Though unfortunately that's also still somewhat problematic with many subjective terms. Even if you asked 20 people to describe what 'slam' is you'd get many different answers I imagine.

To talk about planars again, I get "naturalness" only with those and Estats, and I did quite some experiments with different drivers (especially BAs and Estats) and I actually found for distortion to not matter that much. Driver speed seems to be way more important. I stacked so many BAs that I actually achieved lower distortion than planars, but that did not sound as good as the real deal.
About DACs, I don't have a clue about naturalness there, but for amps a low output impedance might help speed up drivers due to damping.

Naturalness is composed of 3 factors for me:
1. Texture - mainly achieved through driver speed and good HF extension
2. Transparency - Gear that makes itself disappear, clean, noiseless sound, good separation
3. Emotionality - This is a hard one to analyze. For male voices, this is a combination of texture and 200-300Hz boost (for IEMs, flat for over ears), for other things stuff gets more complex, there is also macrodynamics and other stuff I'm not sure about at play here.

 

[lucasratmundo]

Took the plunge and ordered a Holo May KTE! Arriving this week, can't wait!

 

[Triode User]

Took the plunge and ordered a Holo May KTE! Arriving this week, can't wait!

Will be interesting to hear how you get on. I sold my L2 May after 3 weeks.

 

[lucasratmundo]

Will be interesting to hear how you get on. I sold my L2 May after 3 weeks.

You were coming from a Mscaler + Dave system with fancy custom power supply. I’m coming from a Mscaler + TT2 system. Different reference points, we’ll see

 

[lucasratmundo]

Got my Holo May KTE today. Coming from a TT2+Mscaler stack, my first impressions are very positive. There's something special about the instrument separation and realism with the May. I'm literally hearing things that I haven't heard before in my "sound test" playlist. I'll have a lot of fun going through my headphone collection with the May in the next weeks.

I'm still working through some issues with my HQPlayer setup when upsampling to 768Khz. I'm constantly getting "clicking" sounds with many of the filters (sinc-M, sinc-L, poly-sinc-ext2) and shapers (LNS15). Any tips would be welcome here.

 

[Tubewin]

I'll soon be able to purchase either a Holo May KTE or a Chord Dave. Which would you guys recommend? If I went the Chord Dave route it would be awhile before I can get the M Scaler.

 

[DJJEZ]

I'll soon be able to purchase either a Holo May KTE or a Chord Dave. Which would you guys recommend? If I went the Chord Dave route it would be awhile before I can get the M Scaler.

I went the chord dave route first as I had a M-Scaler already and love the chord sound but I plan plan get a holo may KTE to compare

 

[Tubewin]

I went the chord dave route first as I had a M-Scaler already and love the chord sound but I plan plan get a holo may KTE to compare

Are you not completely happy with the Chord Dave + M Scaler?