Stoney
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2003
- Posts
- 926
- Likes
- 20
I'm still kicking and still listening.
The Meridian is still a joy to listen to. By tweaking the settings on Pure Audio, I'm finding the synergies. Going to upsampling on Pure Audio does after all improve voiced to a scary degree... I seek realism without "enhancement" such a false "clarity" from emphasis of transients or treble and removal of grain or edginess which indeed can sound at first like more clarity. Meridian in general is brilliant at avoiding those pitfalls. I don't have time (ugh) or energy to compare, so I just grabbed it.
The LCD-X, I modified by adding a bit of spacer (short length of plastic tubing) to the "back side" of the inside (near the driver grille) of the earpiece. This keeps it from collapsing as much from the headband force, and thus removes some of the excessive warmth. Yet, there was still with this combination a lack of "illumination" of the upper voice partials and lower treble. So I added a 1-2dB parametric boost around 5.5kHz and with a Q somewhere around 2.2. Can click in and out at will. Straight from iTunes I most often take it out. But from Pure Audio, I put it in.
The upsampling setting on Pure Audio at first makes it seem less bright, not what I was looking for. Yet over time, I realized that this setting removed a glare of sorts and now voices sound like the electronics between them and me is removed and I am hearing a real mouth, a real head, at a specific distance in a specific acoustic. Glare/edge gone. Good Donald Fagan now sounds like the real guy, for example. Treble is cleaned up, and sometimes I miss the energy in the lower treble, but over time I've noticed that shakers, bells, cymbals, etc sound real in ways they didn't before. I recognize real instruments whereas before I was more focused on the sound but didn't "get" it as a real instrument I can go out and buy. So, voices and instruments now sound more like themselves rather than some trick of production that had turned it into a more artificial but exciting sound.
I'm sure there are better, but this amp also has enough energy to drive the X rather well, whereas the similarly priced Chord did not have as much power/voltage. Plus the recessed, smooth volume control in the Chord drove me nuts. This one has a "champagne glass" shaped knob I can hit while half asleep in my recliner to tweak to my heart's desires.
The Meridian is still a joy to listen to. By tweaking the settings on Pure Audio, I'm finding the synergies. Going to upsampling on Pure Audio does after all improve voiced to a scary degree... I seek realism without "enhancement" such a false "clarity" from emphasis of transients or treble and removal of grain or edginess which indeed can sound at first like more clarity. Meridian in general is brilliant at avoiding those pitfalls. I don't have time (ugh) or energy to compare, so I just grabbed it.
The LCD-X, I modified by adding a bit of spacer (short length of plastic tubing) to the "back side" of the inside (near the driver grille) of the earpiece. This keeps it from collapsing as much from the headband force, and thus removes some of the excessive warmth. Yet, there was still with this combination a lack of "illumination" of the upper voice partials and lower treble. So I added a 1-2dB parametric boost around 5.5kHz and with a Q somewhere around 2.2. Can click in and out at will. Straight from iTunes I most often take it out. But from Pure Audio, I put it in.
The upsampling setting on Pure Audio at first makes it seem less bright, not what I was looking for. Yet over time, I realized that this setting removed a glare of sorts and now voices sound like the electronics between them and me is removed and I am hearing a real mouth, a real head, at a specific distance in a specific acoustic. Glare/edge gone. Good Donald Fagan now sounds like the real guy, for example. Treble is cleaned up, and sometimes I miss the energy in the lower treble, but over time I've noticed that shakers, bells, cymbals, etc sound real in ways they didn't before. I recognize real instruments whereas before I was more focused on the sound but didn't "get" it as a real instrument I can go out and buy. So, voices and instruments now sound more like themselves rather than some trick of production that had turned it into a more artificial but exciting sound.
I'm sure there are better, but this amp also has enough energy to drive the X rather well, whereas the similarly priced Chord did not have as much power/voltage. Plus the recessed, smooth volume control in the Chord drove me nuts. This one has a "champagne glass" shaped knob I can hit while half asleep in my recliner to tweak to my heart's desires.
