Crgreen
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
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- 303
Thanks for uploading the link.
Interesting review that tallies with my own experiences during still very limited auditions with headphones and some both ADD and early native 16/44.1 digital recordings of acoustic music.
I have both the Paray on SACD and the Grieg Concerto recording on LP. And yes the Philips LP is a bit soft and woolly and dated and multimic'd in SQ imho.
Nice performance ,although Katia Buniatisvili live at the Proms now up on youtube delivers Grieg's masterpiece more seductively beautiful than ever before to my taste.
The Paray SACD disc on the other hand makes up for its OLD AGE with simpler miking not messing things up as much as Philips did by making sure almost every instrument had its own mic.
But there is no mentioning at all of BLU2 with proper hi res material.
And that is where I still harbour some lingering doubts regarding M-Scaler.
For me to be really tempted by an M-Scaler it has to bring not only 16/44.1 VERY close to the best of current standard hi res.
But also even more importantly sound clearly better with hi res than all other much cheaper DAC upsampling combos/solutions.
And it must improve SQ in ALL of its important aspects of timbre,resolution and transparency not only depth, to make me bite.
For headphone listening I would even stick my neck out and say that in some respects of transparency and soundstage depth some of the low res binaural Proms broadcasts sound clearly more realistic as in the sense of "being there", than most of my,standard stereo, hi res recordings of the same works do via headphones and my Qutest/Benchmark headphone amp combo.
You can't really retrieve information that was never captured in the first place can you?
I'd love to hear from BLU2 owners exactly how much of an improvement BLU2 brings to streaming BBC 3 Proms which has been my main staple for months now with Last Night of the Proms on tonight.
Cheers Christer
I’m not entirely sure what comparisons can properly be made in respect of Prom broadcasts. Yes, the BBC, like most European radio stations, know how to properly mike and mix these concerts, and on my old Leak Troughline tuner with Tim de Pavarinci stereo decoder, they sounded wonderful, even though FM broadcasts are of limited bandwidth and there’s some form of compression applied. I still have some excellent broadcasts which I recorded onto a hard disk recorder and burnt to CD. Now however, you’re presumably listening to digital broadcasts, which I don’t think go higher than 320k, though I know the BBC have experimented with higher rates. Of course, a good recording or broadcast remains such even in a technically poorer digital format, and in my experience the Dave makes everything sound better and the m-scaler has a pretty uniform affect on what it’s processing, MP3 up to hi-res.
In short, I’m not sure if you’re really comparing like with like, and you should try and limit the variables. The real comparison should not be between Red Book, hi-res and Prom broadcasts, but between any source going straight into your DAC and via the m-scaler in the Blu2. I can’t really work out from what you’re saying if that’s what you’ve been doing.