I’m still on the fence about MQA. A lot of hip hop that is only on Tidal is MQA. I haven’t figured out how to make my K50 streamer unfold it and not Roon (though, honestly, I love Roon, so I’m hesitant. I do use a SqueezeLite player with the Roon server and UI, that I think sounds better than a Roon player with the Roon server)
I got a better response in the Stealth with a modded Phonitor One which has much less power than the Hugo 2, proving it's not a power quantity thing, but a power quality thing.
Yea. Roon doesn't do mqa unfold too well ever since.
In the Antipodes thread others dislike Roon too. They like SqueezeLite with the SqueezeLite server. But, the UI is so much worse. I have an extremely large collection of music, and I really like how Roon handles it. I’m probably being stubborn though. With my K50, it’s easy to switch everything, so I’ll experiment this weekend
The most accessible thing would be an Android phone doing mconnect tidal. USB c idefender to usb cable to ddc to toslink to HMS if u wanna get your feet wet before pursuing further. But from my recollection, I think the phone's distortion will make 192khz have the edge. I have to dig deep in my chats for that one. Lol. But with a zen stream and my custom psus, MQA is superior to 192khz. More stable, more midbass, less noise (via ringing) even on just a first unfold to the Dave. Then do HF ON + xfeed on the Dave.
Yes. Any reviewer/journalist can fudge a review. They use Roon, says MQA sucks then claim it's bit perfect so their case stands.
I think that @Triode User has compared solo Dave and Holo.
I have owned the Dave for many years. I bought a May to see what all the fuss was about. Compared to the Dave (even with no mscaler) I did not like the May at all. The May couldn’t cope with large scale orchestral works, it had a collapsed sound stage compared to the Dave and the May had nowhere near the Daves ability of not smearing music and allowing all the instruments to be heard no matter how busy the music. By contrast the May easiliy degenerated into a wall of sound with busy music or crescendos. I also found the Dave had the ability to make music where the May was reproducing individual sounds but they never seemed to come together as music. A friend has Metrum and Denafrips DACs and I noticed this as well with his Dacs when he brought them round to try in my system (he sold the DACs after hearing them against DAVE).
Yes and against solo TT2 and solo Qutest which I also preferred compared to the May.
Solo Dave is where the magic is anyway, I'm not sure about PGGB ( I know it's the current flavor of the month), but HQPlayer really doesn't compare to the M-scaler. And believe me, I've bought the M-scaler almost against my will and been trying to get rid of it ever since, but it's just much better than HQplayer. I only do streaming so i don't care about PGGB for now.
Exactly. A full orchestral jazz or classical music can expose the shortcomings of timing and depth in many dacs which lack the sophisticated WTA filtering of chord dacs. Vocal oriented music on nos and R2R dacs can be a bit fuller experience because of lack of ultimate precision. A very clean, transparent and dynamic dac can present even the last ounce of details and because of these extra details these dacs can sound less fuller but that does not mean these dacs are less true to source. So in a way r2r/nos preference is more for a colored sound than accuracy.
I have no idea what it is, but i've heard that on multiple tracks when i had the LCD-5 in for a home demo. The voice is very stable on the Z1R and every headphone i've heard, but with LCD-5 it was just moving across slightly from the left to the right channel. It was extremely annoying . Not to mention other artifacts which i hadn't heard before, but now that i know where they are...i can sort of hear them with the Z1R as well
Okayyy with the LCD 4 and 5...here's the thing, maybe I said it here already or another thread but, those HPs are super sensitive to radio interference. Try turning off all phones and wifi and unhook appliances as much as possible for the test. Oddly a standby induction stove has a strong interference. The lcd4 sounds smoother than a Susvara (with 1 phone on) for me. It's a smoother susvara with midbass. With the 5, you may not get the female vocal dip as much as the 4.
I do have a power conditioner. I also do have my phone, airpods and apple watch like 50 cm from Dave, and my 34 inch monitor..5 cm above Dave, but i haven't reliably heard any differences with it on or off. Either way, still has to fit my use case.
My god man, we've already bought a new apartment partly so I can switch to open backs, I'll end up living in it alone
.I am looking into setting up a separate circuit for Dave in it though.
