lipidicman
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Had the opportunity to borrow one of these this weekend.
Setup was easy. It uses a standard driver so there is no messing. You can leave windows sounds through your sound card and ask foobar to route to the MF (my preferred setup). It does not appear to work with ASIO (ASIO4ALL or ASIO2KS).
The sound? Impressive, at least the match of my CD63KI >> XCANv2 >> 580. I prefer the solid state signal path, maybe the XCAN provides enough tubey warmth for me.
Through coaxial digital it provided a small improvement over my CD63KI. Very small though. I would say it sounded a shade more controlled and that is all I will venture. I would not buy it to upgrade this source. However, I have read that the Marantz has a lot of jitter so the source may be to blame here
Then I came across a problem. Listening to Pearl Jam 'Whipping' as a FLAC thorough foobar there was some crackling I have never heard before. I noticed I had the tube stage on. Switching to SS the distortion was gone (or all but gone). A fault in the tube stage? So I used the same track through coaxial digital from my CD player and both output stages sound perfect. The FLAC files are good and sound fine when burnt onto CD so what is going on here?. I have since heard the problem on other rips. Is it the USB feed (and if so why does the SS output sound OK?) Baffled
edit: Seems the unit is going through the system mixer and as the valve output is 1db louder I think the problem is some sort of clipping. Should I have the 'wave' mixer at 50%. I really dont understand the windows mixer and was hoping to get 'bitperfect with this unit!'
If the DAC would work flawlessly through USB I would keep it. However I am worried by the crackling I have hear and I am concerned at how accurate the digital stream is through the standard USB audio device driver. The DAC is great but if it receives a corrupted signal then the £1k price tag starts to look very high.
I should add that an 0404usb did not work at all on this PC (it clicked every second or so, and ASIO crackled away to nothing). So maybe a 1212PCI and use the digital out to drive a DAC at a later date. How will the 1212 stack up against my CD Player?
Setup was easy. It uses a standard driver so there is no messing. You can leave windows sounds through your sound card and ask foobar to route to the MF (my preferred setup). It does not appear to work with ASIO (ASIO4ALL or ASIO2KS).
The sound? Impressive, at least the match of my CD63KI >> XCANv2 >> 580. I prefer the solid state signal path, maybe the XCAN provides enough tubey warmth for me.
Through coaxial digital it provided a small improvement over my CD63KI. Very small though. I would say it sounded a shade more controlled and that is all I will venture. I would not buy it to upgrade this source. However, I have read that the Marantz has a lot of jitter so the source may be to blame here
Then I came across a problem. Listening to Pearl Jam 'Whipping' as a FLAC thorough foobar there was some crackling I have never heard before. I noticed I had the tube stage on. Switching to SS the distortion was gone (or all but gone). A fault in the tube stage? So I used the same track through coaxial digital from my CD player and both output stages sound perfect. The FLAC files are good and sound fine when burnt onto CD so what is going on here?. I have since heard the problem on other rips. Is it the USB feed (and if so why does the SS output sound OK?) Baffled
edit: Seems the unit is going through the system mixer and as the valve output is 1db louder I think the problem is some sort of clipping. Should I have the 'wave' mixer at 50%. I really dont understand the windows mixer and was hoping to get 'bitperfect with this unit!'
If the DAC would work flawlessly through USB I would keep it. However I am worried by the crackling I have hear and I am concerned at how accurate the digital stream is through the standard USB audio device driver. The DAC is great but if it receives a corrupted signal then the £1k price tag starts to look very high.
I should add that an 0404usb did not work at all on this PC (it clicked every second or so, and ASIO crackled away to nothing). So maybe a 1212PCI and use the digital out to drive a DAC at a later date. How will the 1212 stack up against my CD Player?
