[Black Stuart]

haloxt,
you got it partly right - the 'professionals' to a large extent have been programmed/brainwashed to 'believe' that cables don't make a difference - hav'nt you ever tried to have a dialogue with a religious ( the actual religion is irrelevant) or political (the actual political belief is irrelevant) fanatic - it's impossible unless you accept that everything they spout is the truth.
 
As to the second part of your argument - take a look at all original supplied h/phone cables, what do they all have in common - simplicity. This means cheap to produce = bigger profits.
 
Of course a h/phone cable must be flexible unlike an i/c which is 99% of the time fitted and forgotten about behind the equipment. Flexible does'nt have to mean thin - it's all about materials used and how they are used.
 
Look at a lot of i/cs that have been designed by performance testing and nearly all of them now use multiple conductors, many use air as a dialectric. Very few of them are easy to build, I myself wish they were but if the only criteria is quality of sound conveyance, this is how it has to be.
 
I'm going to apply what I have found to work with i/cs to h/phone cables, to be precise the Senn 600/650 but already I have a problem. Look at the connectors that have to be used - they are really designed to accept only (1) conductor each for pos&neg. So to start with I have to cut away the bottom part of these plugs to allow me to use multiple conductors - I'm not happy about that but have to accept it.
 
My h/phone cable will not look anorexic but neither will it be heavy or inflexible, now will it be microphonic, that's down to materials and design and a single directive - to make a cable that will allow more of the signal to reach the Senns by imprinting itself as little as possible onto the signal it's conveying.
 
Look at the guiding principle that Audio-gd uses - to minimize the influence of cables as little as possible. This company for one has started right but IMO made a mistake by pennypinching with the ACSS plugs. I'm reliably informed that Audio-gd tried all kinds of internal signal wire before settling on s/plated copper. They coiuld redesign the ACSS plug and specify s/plated copper, redesign the body of the plug and the solder pins and how the plug secures the cable - why hav'nt they done this because apparently these ACSS plugs are CHEAP - there you go and it's not as if Audio-gd equipment is cheap as chips.
 

 

[regal]

Quote:

 why hav'nt they done this because apparently these ACSS plugs are CHEAP - there you go and it's not as if Audio-gd equipment is cheap as chips.
 

Before you go insulting AudioGD maybe you should design and build your own DAC - ACSS-Amp with your silver plating?  Then maybe someone would take your post seriously.  As far as I'm concerned the guy is a genius and has done more for the budget minded audiophile than anyone.  At least buy some silver nitrate and plate your dam connectors before you go insulting a good company.

 

[noinimod]

I don't see why you claim he's insulting audio-gd. He merely said the plugs were cheap, not that they sucked. Pretty big difference if you ask me.

 

[haloxt]

Regal, Black Stuart is just giving constructive criticism, maybe not worded politely but he gets the point across . I don't know enough to have an opinion on stainless steel connectors though. But if audio-gd replaces it, it better not be 3 or 4 pin xlr because some dummy is going to plug his headphones into it.

 

[Newk Yuler]

Audio-GD ACSS interconnects.
 
Most of you already know this but since it gets said that Kingwa uses silver on copper wiring internal it's important to note for reference (Google key word searches) that the Sharkwire ACSS interconnects are also silver on copper.  Salmon pink SP18122G wire.  Unfortunately the reference at the Sharkwire website doesn't work properly but it's interesting to see the other cables they offer.
 
http://www.sharkwire.com.tw/onweb.jsp?webno=3333333326

 

 

[les_garten]

 
Quote:

Before you go insulting AudioGD maybe you should design and build your own DAC - ACSS-Amp with your silver plating?  Then maybe someone would take your post seriously.  As far as I'm concerned the guy is a genius and has done more for the budget minded audiophile than anyone.  At least buy some silver nitrate and plate your dam connectors before you go insulting a good company.

Those are cheap connectors.  Pure and simple.  Nothing insulting about pure fact IMO.  KW knows to the penny how much LEMOs cost.  I think it's a cultural thing as well.  I don't think his Chinese markets demanded good qual connectors like his western markets did.  He was using poor qual Neutrik knock-offs at first on for his SE headphone connectors.  Currawong pointed this out, and he changed it.  I've also heard of DC power connector failures on the Phoenix.  Bean Counters hate connectors, eats into the margins.  I would like to see him do better in the connector department.  He's almost there.

 

[Black Stuart]

Regal,
you need to pull your neck in - loyalty is to be admired but blind loyalty is pathetic. As it happens talking on the phone  and looking at the excellent reviewing capabilities of Slim and needing to get serious with my digital replay system which is primitive I am giving serious thought to the Audio-gd Dac but would never give on my tube pre-amp/mosfet o/put.
 
I repeat the ACSS plug that Audio-gd use does not equate with quality of the designs or build of this companies equipment. I mean a plug that once tightened can't be undone - that is plain ridiculous.
 
A plug body that cannot accomodate at least some part of the cable body as a whole - again ridiculous.
 
I've been pming with P/Peete and most connectors used in building i/cs  will affect the signal when what we really need are totally benign connectors, same goes for dialectric and conductor material.
 
Far from slagging off Audio-gd I think this companies desired aim to minimise the effect of cables is an excellent idea - why go and screw this up by using an easily and cheaply available plug.
 
Newk Yuler - spot on and confirms what Nordost urge people to think about - continuity of wiring and the real sonic benefits to be obtained this way. That Audio-gd can supply the Sharkwire i/cs so cheaply confirms what my buys from Hong Kong and Taiwan have proved that lots of genuine cable/wire and so on is available over there and cheaply. There is a company in the Netherlands who use this self same cable and charge plenty for their finished i/cs.
 
Les, thanks for the info re. the Neutrik knock-offs. There's an old saying the English have - why spoil a ship for a ha'puth (half penny) of tar.
 

 

[haloxt]

One good thing about a plug you can't dissemble is that no one will try to fix it or mod it, I heard that doing the pins wrong on ACSS can damage the audio equipment. Maybe Kingwa has tried different connectors and decided the current ACSS plug is fine for the task. But if we want to change the connector, I think we better all agree on a new connector type, and 3 or 4-pin xlr should be out of the question because balanced headphones are using those already.

 

[pategen]

I've been listening for the DAC-19DSP & C-2 combo connected with ACSS and feeding AKG K601s a lot this weekend. I think I'm starting to understand this gear, so I thought I'd let you know my observations.

Let's start with the music used for the testing. I've been using Spotify Premium for months now. It provides a 320 kbps Ogg Vorbis stream and to me has all the sound quality I need. I've tested flac (through XBMC & WASAPI) every now and then, and did once again this weekend with the new gear. Even with this very revealing equipment, I couldn't tell the difference on most samples and with the ones I thought I did, I needed several back-and-forth cycles to make myself convinced. So one thing that is here to stay is Spotify Premium as my number one music source. Since I don't listen to the "audiophile" stuff that much, the convenience is well worth the minor or rather neglectable sacrifice in sound quality. Spotify is running on my PC, and I tried different connections between the PC and the DAC. Integrated toslink and integrated coax sounded the same to me, but there is an issue with my motherboard that distorts the sound from time to time using the integrated digital connections. I tried the USB of the DAC-19 and it sounded ok, but had an intermittent static noise problem that was enough to steer me away. I then tried the more complicated route of using the HDMI connection of my graphics card to my TV and then forwarding the signal from the TV's optical out to the optical in of the DAC-19. Worked ok, but had me suspicious of the damage done to the signal with all the different connections. So I did some A/B testing between it and the integrated coax (which, most of the time, worked flawlessly despite the distrortion issue) and simply could not tell them apart. To me, the DSP1 seems to be doing a great job with clening the signal up. This is the kind of robustness that I was looking for when choosing to go with the DSP version. Still, I'm considering HiFace as a transport, but there might be a more imminent purchase on the horizon (more of this at the end of the review).

So, what do I listen to? I don't like genres as a concept, so I'll just list some albums that have had the spin in the testing: Faith No More: King For a Day, Fool For a Lifetime ; Pain of Salvation: Scarsick ; Dream Theater: Awake ; Pantera: Vulgar Display of Power ; Slayer: Reign In Blood ; Nine Inch Nails: Fragile ; Opeth: Ghost Reveries ; Slash: s/t ; Blackfield: II ; Eagles: Long Road Out of Eden ; Dire Straits: Brothers in Arms : Billy Cobham: Spectrum ; Dave Holland: Critical Mass ; Sibelius: Finlandia ; Zero Hour: Grasshopper ; Clutch: Strange Cousins From The West. And a couple of dozen other great titles.

On to the sound. As I wrote earlier, this is most definitely not a warm sounding combo. I've had some doubt if it's even neutral because the upper mids and the treble are that bright. But since there's absolutely no harshness on good recordings, I think it's not a symptom of overly bright gear but a clear view to the errors on the recordings them selves. What is known as sibilance is in many cases something that has been captured on the recording and, as such, should be reproduced by neutral and detailed gear. In this case, it is and it's not always pretty. Euphoric sounding this combo is not, but even if there's a lot of the upper band, there is no spikiness that would force you to turn the volume down.

The chief and commander of this combo is the DAC-19, for sure. Using ACSS the C-2 is very much a "wire-with-gain" kind of an amp that simply gives you what the DAC feeds it. I gave the DAC a good listen with my speaker system, too (Marantz PM-15S1 => Tannoy DC6 T). The same characteristics are there: clear, detailed, dynamic. What was new was the VERY fine feel of space. Now, the soundstage is of course always different when moving from headphones to speakers, but the fact that I hadn't really paid any special attention to it with the C-2 + K601 suggests that I've somewhat hit the limit of the K601s' soundstage capabilities. The DAC-19 is capable of giving a far more involving soundstage than my phones. This combined with the slightly more-than-enough nature of the treble has set me of thinking new moves regarding my headphone repertoire... A very possible scenario is me getting HD 650s to complement my AKGs. I think that would give me a good enough set of different sound signatures.We'll see what happens.

In conclusion: DAC-19DSP & C-2 are great. The DAC has qualities that I've not heard before (clearly beats my ex-CDP, Marantz SA-15S1). The combo isn't a perfect match with my music taste and headphones, but even though I've been using AKG phones more or less exclusively for the last ten years, I now find myself questioning them. The virtues of the Audio-gd combo are enough to justify a purchase of a new pair of phones, it seems. You know the thing about my wallet, right? Oh, save it...!

 

[Pacha]

 
Quote:

Regal,
you need to pull your neck in - loyalty is to be admired but blind loyalty is pathetic. As it happens talking on the phone  and looking at the excellent reviewing capabilities of Slim and needing to get serious with my digital replay system which is primitive I am giving serious thought to the Audio-gd Dac but would never give on my tube pre-amp/mosfet o/put.
 
I repeat the ACSS plug that Audio-gd use does not equate with quality of the designs or build of this companies equipment. I mean a plug that once tightened can't be undone - that is plain ridiculous.
 
A plug body that cannot accomodate at least some part of the cable body as a whole - again ridiculous.
 
I've been pming with P/Peete and most connectors used in building i/cs  will affect the signal when what we really need are totally benign connectors, same goes for dialectric and conductor material.
 
Far from slagging off Audio-gd I think this companies desired aim to minimise the effect of cables is an excellent idea - why go and screw this up by using an easily and cheaply available plug.
 
Newk Yuler - spot on and confirms what Nordost urge people to think about - continuity of wiring and the real sonic benefits to be obtained this way. That Audio-gd can supply the Sharkwire i/cs so cheaply confirms what my buys from Hong Kong and Taiwan have proved that lots of genuine cable/wire and so on is available over there and cheaply. There is a company in the Netherlands who use this self same cable and charge plenty for their finished i/cs.
 
Les, thanks for the info re. the Neutrik knock-offs. There's an old saying the English have - why spoil a ship for a ha'puth (half penny) of tar.
 

BS, did you email Kingwa already to discuss with him about your thoughts on the connectors and ACSS cables? Not any blaming intention, but suggestions. He is open minded enough I think to modify he's design if he agrees with you or on the contrary explain you his choices and justify them. Especially that you have enough technical knowledge to talk with him about the subject.
In any case, it could be interesting to see what conclusions that kind of discussion can provide.

 

[les_garten]

 
Quote:

 


BS, did you email Kingwa already to discuss with him about your thoughts on the connectors and ACSS cables? Not any blaming intention, but suggestions. He is open minded enough I think to modify he's design if he agrees with you or on the contrary explain you his choices and justify them. Especially that you have enough technical knowledge to talk with him about the subject.
In any case, it could be interesting to see what conclusions that kind of discussion can provide.

Not sure where you're going with this.  He'll put anything in there that you want.  He put LEMO's in all my gear during the build.  I had to send them to him.  For him it boils down to cost and availability.  I also don't think he would standardize on something that could cause a problem because the connector was a particular standard.  Such as mini xlr.
 
It would be up to him to ferret this out.  Only he knows what is available and inexpensive.  He's very open to suggestions.  Within reason.

 

[kunalraiker]

Quote:

I've been listening for the DAC-19DSP & C-2 combo connected with ACSS and feeding AKG K601s a lot this weekend. I think I'm starting to understand this gear, so I thought I'd let you know my observations.

Let's start with the music used for the testing. I've been using Spotify Premium for months now. It provides a 320 kbps Ogg Vorbis stream and to me has all the sound quality I need. I've tested flac (through XBMC & WASAPI) every now and then, and did once again this weekend with the new gear. Even with this very revealing equipment, I couldn't tell the difference on most samples and with the ones I thought I did, I needed several back-and-forth cycles to make myself convinced. So one thing that is here to stay is Spotify Premium as my number one music source. Since I don't listen to the "audiophile" stuff that much, the convenience is well worth the minor or rather neglectable sacrifice in sound quality. Spotify is running on my PC, and I tried different connections between the PC and the DAC. Integrated toslink and integrated coax sounded the same to me, but there is an issue with my motherboard that distorts the sound from time to time using the integrated digital connections. I tried the USB of the DAC-19 and it sounded ok, but had an intermittent static noise problem that was enough to steer me away. I then tried the more complicated route of using the HDMI connection of my graphics card to my TV and then forwarding the signal from the TV's optical out to the optical in of the DAC-19. Worked ok, but had me suspicious of the damage done to the signal with all the different connections. So I did some A/B testing between it and the integrated coax (which, most of the time, worked flawlessly despite the distrortion issue) and simply could not tell them apart. To me, the DSP1 seems to be doing a great job with clening the signal up. This is the kind of robustness that I was looking for when choosing to go with the DSP version. Still, I'm considering HiFace as a transport, but there might be a more imminent purchase on the horizon (more of this at the end of the review).

So, what do I listen to? I don't like genres as a concept, so I'll just list some albums that have had the spin in the testing: Faith No More: King For a Day, Fool For a Lifetime ; Pain of Salvation: Scarsick ; Dream Theater: Awake ; Pantera: Vulgar Display of Power ; Slayer: Reign In Blood ; Nine Inch Nails: Fragile ; Opeth: Ghost Reveries ; Slash: s/t ; Blackfield: II ; Eagles: Long Road Out of Eden ; Dire Straits: Brothers in Arms : Billy Cobham: Spectrum ; Dave Holland: Critical Mass ; Sibelius: Finlandia ; Zero Hour: Grasshopper ; Clutch: Strange Cousins From The West. And a couple of dozen other great titles.

On to the sound. As I wrote earlier, this is most definitely not a warm sounding combo. I've had some doubt if it's even neutral because the upper mids and the treble are that bright. But since there's absolutely no harshness on good recordings, I think it's not a symptom of overly bright gear but a clear view to the errors on the recordings them selves. What is known as sibilance is in many cases something that has been captured on the recording and, as such, should be reproduced by neutral and detailed gear. In this case, it is and it's not always pretty. Euphoric sounding this combo is not, but even if there's a lot of the upper band, there is no spikiness that would force you to turn the volume down.

The chief and commander of this combo is the DAC-19, for sure. Using ACSS the C-2 is very much a "wire-with-gain" kind of an amp that simply gives you what the DAC feeds it. I gave the DAC a good listen with my speaker system, too (Marantz PM-15S1 => Tannoy DC6 T). The same characteristics are there: clear, detailed, dynamic. What was new was the VERY fine feel of space. Now, the soundstage is of course always different when moving from headphones to speakers, but the fact that I hadn't really paid any special attention to it with the C-2 + K601 suggests that I've somewhat hit the limit of the K601s' soundstage capabilities. The DAC-19 is capable of giving a far more involving soundstage than my phones. This combined with the slightly more-than-enough nature of the treble has set me of thinking new moves regarding my headphone repertoire... A very possible scenario is me getting HD 650s to complement my AKGs. I think that would give me a good enough set of different sound signatures.We'll see what happens.

In conclusion: DAC-19DSP & C-2 are great. The DAC has qualities that I've not heard before (clearly beats my ex-CDP, Marantz SA-15S1). The combo isn't a perfect match with my music taste and headphones, but even though I've been using AKG phones more or less exclusively for the last ten years, I now find myself questioning them. The virtues of the Audio-gd combo are enough to justify a purchase of a new pair of phones, it seems. You know the thing about my wallet, right? Oh, save it...!

Nice review mate.

 

[Pacha]

 
Quote:

 

Not sure where you're going with this.  He'll put anything in there that you want.  He put LEMO's in all my gear during the build.  I had to send them to him.  For him it boils down to cost and availability.  I also don't think he would standardize on something that could cause a problem because the connector was a particular standard.  Such as mini xlr.
 
It would be up to him to ferret this out.  Only he knows what is available and inexpensive.  He's very open to suggestions.  Within reason.

I know that he's open to put inside what you'd ask as a replacement.
I meant that it could be interesting to have his reply or final word about the ACSS connectors choice as it may reply to some questionning from BS who ask why there is such difference in quality between the connectors and the rest, over the obvious state of balance between price/quality and no confusion with existing standards that we would have guessed to be his choice.
If only there are other reasons of course.

 

[darckhart]

thanks for the rock music impressions!

 

[slim.a]

Concerning the ACSS connectors, I agree that they look cheap and that they are probably extremely cheap to acquire. However, I don't think it is problematic in the context of the DAC19 DSP/C2. At least, it is not a problem in my mind.
 
The whole point of the ACSS transmission was to redruce the effect of the cable which it does perfectly. I have 2 sets of cables in both RCA and ACSS. The Black Stuart ones and the stock Sharkwire. Below are the differences I find:
Sharkwire RCA vs. Black Stuart RCA: big difference (100% difference)
Sharkwire ACSS vs. Black Stuart ACSS: small difference (10% difference)
My guess is that using better ACSS connectors might improve the sound, but it would be marginal. Given the difference I heard between the 2 ACSS cables, I don't believe that spending $200 on the official Krell Lemo connectors is worth it considering the $1000 price tag of the combo.
 
Given my experience with the dac19dsp/c2, I would recommend to people to upgrade first their power cables (and eventually their power filters) before starting worrying about the ACSS wire or connectors.
By the way, for those who think that power cords and vibration control devices do not make a difference, I invite you to read the following paper made by Nordost: http://www.nordost.com/downloads/New%20Approaches%20To%20Audio%20Measurement.pdf By using a signal music (and not a static tone), they found a measurable difference in the output of a CD player after replacing its stock power cord and using vibration control devices. Those differences are in the time domain and not in the frequency domain and that is why we haven't been able to measure them so far (RMAA for example only measures the frequency domain of a device which far far less important than the time domain performance when we consider the musicality of a a device).

Back to the ACSS connectors and cables, I believe that Kingwa aimed for 90% of the performance with 10% of the price which is fine for me. As Les Garten pointed out, those willing to have those Lemo connectors installed can send him those connectors and he usually accept doing that kind of "mods".
 
As for suggesting another type of connectors, haloxt was right. It should be different from what is already being used by regular electronics and headphones. There is always a possibility that a user connects the ACSS output of a source (by mistake or ignorance) to a voltage input of an amp or vice versa. I bet that the outcome of such wrong connection won't be pretty.
This doesn't mean that we shouldn't push Kingwa to use better connectors. If someone has an idea about (affordable) connectors that would be different from the regular ones (XLR, ...) and that would push the quality higher, I guess that we can make pression so that Kingwa change the connectors in the future.