ecwl
500+ Head-Fier
Thanks for sharing your experience with HMS and giving those musical examples.• For orchestral music (e.g., the lovely Decca/Kondrashin Dvorak 9) the sound became creamier, more natural, more flowing, with less "glare" - more "musical" or "analogue", if you will.
• For vocal music, the differences were much starker. I found that the M Scaler transformed the perceived "depth" of sound, making the voices and instruments almost "holographic": soloists appeared in front of me, rather than arranged in a line from left ear to right ear.
Personally, I find that creamier, natural flow with holographic sound with volume and depth of vocals and instruments to be present in all recordings but certainly in the examples you provided, they are more prominent. Moreover, these improvements are obviously not audible by switching on and off the WTA2 filter on the Hugo 2/TT2/Qutest.
But as I mentioned, I also found transients to be better (in all your musical examples), which is also an effect of the WTA2 filter. For example, when Callas was singing Mon coeur… you can hear a blurred soft violin sound in the background on the left due to the limited recording quality but when M-Scaler is at 1 million taps, the blurred violin still sounds like someone is bowing the strings whereas when it is bypass through my DAVE, the violin didn’t sound like someone is bowing the strings but just some blurred violin notes.
But it is helpful in my mind that most people it seems on reflection praise HMS mostly for the holographic sound, rather than for the improved transients. It explains better to me why some people who initially liked HMS eventually preferred other software products while I find those same software products to have poor transient reproduction. I think we listen for different things in our gear. But ultimately, if it’s what we enjoy…
Anyway, thanks for that Callas recommendation as I’ve never heard her sing that aria before. It is fantastic.