[Fuzzy OneThree]

GAH! I live 10 minutes away from Harrington. Sadly, I learned about this too late. I was busy all that day with a wrestling tourney, but that would have been really fun for me to go.

 

[[AK]Zip]

My RS-1's are on their way back to Grado for repair as of today. I hope all goes well and I get them back soon.

-Alex-

 

[Killercrush]

Any impressions on the Muse Model Nine CDP ?!

Can somebody enlighten me on this player, what DAC does it have, what kind of output stage & does it have true balanced outputs or just RCA's ??

 

[swt61]

That's a player that luvdunhill picked up right before the meet, so he hadn't had any real time with it.
I thought it sounded pretty darn nice, but I only got to listen for a short time.

I don't remember the specifics of the connections for that unit, but I imagine Marc will pop in soon to give more detail. He has some cool plans for the unit.

 

[Killercrush]

Sweet, waiting for some incoming infos from him

. If he doesn't, I'll just send him a PM.

All I know is that there's a BB 24/96 dac in it I think.

 

[luvdunhill]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Killercrush /img/forum/go_quote.gif Sweet, waiting for some incoming infos from him . If he doesn't, I'll just send him a PM. All I know is that there's a BB 24/96 dac in it I think.

ya, in fact there are four BB PCM1704 DACs in it with passive filtering then into four INA103 differential amps (fully differential DAC). The backend portion of the circuit using the INA103 is pretty much exactly what Wadia uses in their TOTL gear (I had a short-lived thread in the DIY section about the INA103, with links, pics and what not).

All this proceeded with the usual BB DF1704 upsampling and preprocessing. Before there there is a custom Xilinx CPLD that generates the i2s signal from the native transport data (this uses a local reclocker) and hands this data off to the DF1704 chip.

How does it sound? Quite amazing actually. It's a more warm, less digital sounding source, especially when compared to Al's 840c. In fact, compared to all oversampling DACs and definitely all PCM1704 implementations I've heard. Unfortunately, I've also heard the Muse Polyhymnia which is hands down the best digital source I've heard.

My plans are pretty much to gut the DAC and replace it (everything after the CPLD, die oversampling, die!) the reason I'm using this transport is first the CPLD does a lot of hard stuff, namely interfacing with the CD/DVD drive and generating the Philips-compatible i2s signal. Other advantage over a CD transport is native 24/96 via DVD-V discs, such as the excellent Classical Records re-releases. Thirdly, there are 5 transformers and a dozen or so regulators in this unit, thus the power supply is over-speced and up for the task (puny psus in digital equipment is one of my pet peeves). Finally, there are trade in options (note the similarity and modularity of all the Muse gear) and I think $2400 + trade-in nets you a Polyhymnia, which I think retails for around $6k, depending on options. So that's always an option as well.