More or less laptop size, but thicker and heavier
I am not really sure how much each weigh but when I brought my heavy 17" MBP to listen to the two together today I did some in hand weight comparisons before everything was setup and it felt as if each on its own weighed sligtly more than my 6lbs heavy laptop.
I am really temped to buy a featherlight just released brand new 13" Macbook Air with 16gigabyte of ram and at least 512 SSD this season.
In other words both TT2 and Mscaler together at least 12lbs I think.
Not a doublepack I would carry around on my travels.
And I would absolutely not pack either of them in a suitcase on flights.
But both heavy and expensive as it is, at least the M-scaler is undoubtedly still on my radar.
The Macbook Air I mentioned above is even beefed up with 16Gig ram and 512TB hardrive still quite a lot! cheaper than either of these two audiophile toys.
And that is so even accounting for the fact that with Apple you have to pay way more for the same tech than when buying a pc only because "someone has already taken a bite out of the apple on the back".
Anyway,
I started my listening for about half an hour with my usual large scale symphonic acoustic hi res reference material via two different sets of headphones connected simultanously, Senneiser's HD820 and the new HE1000SE from HIFIMAN and TT2 on its own.
Intial impressions were not overwhelmingly positive with TT2 on its own.
I had honestly expected a much more obvious SQ advantage over both H2 and Qutest also at hand, finding the sound still "a bit digital" and with a whiff of synthetic at first. But with more inner low level detail than both H2 and Qutest. Judging from this first real music session I would not be willing to pay so much more for a TT2 than a H2 or Qutest.
But adding the M-scaler now THAT was something else indeed!!
Even more detail than TT2 on its own, but less synthetic and less digital sounding with ,sorry to repeat it all over again, for those who find me really annoying, but material I know very well how it can and should sound.
With Mscaler added there was no doubt that I was hearing a clearly and very obviously more effortless and realistic sound with both more information delivered and timbrally more accurate.
And of course also opening up the soundstage quite a lot.
I spent about two hours with the TT2/Mscaler combo but when I was ready to connect the Mscaler to Qutest instead of TT2 the shop got really busy and it was impossible to listen to low level symphonic material any longer even via the HD820.
But I will return next week again and hopefully run through the same program again with Qutest connected to a very good headphone amp and the M-scaler.
With TT2/Mscaler I was mainly listening on green level into blue and maxed out with really low level mastered non compressed material into -4 on the scale. But most listening was done between 15-25 on the TT2 scale.
Via HE1000SE I could hear really low level things I know are there, but not as clearly via Qutest and my HEKV2, via Mscaler gentle ppp level brushes sounded closer to how they should sound hitherto only heard via DAVE/BLU2 outside of the sessions.
But the question is whether my humble Qutest will deliver something similar or approaching what I heard, connected to a really good headphone amp?
Maybe I will know next week.
I suppose some of my posts on this thread have been a bit "Sour said the fox".
Mscaler does deliver .
But I am still a very greedy person and don't want to spend more than absolutely needed.
There was also a very puzzling incident. When someone connected something to the same power outlet TT2/Mscaler stopped working completely and had to be restarted again.
I don't know why this happened not did the saleman who plugged in some other unit on the same line.
PS Not even a single second of AC/DC was listened to by me this time around.
Cheers Controversial Christer