Last weekend I traveled back to Italy for a surprise visit to the family.
My father's into audio as much as I am, and he owns a very respectable home theater setup, so I decided to bring by my Bifrost 2 to try it out in his system.
There wasn't too much time for it, so we couldn't really run any comparisons between the Bifrost 2 and his heavily modded OPPO BDP-105EU—but we did go through a number of my albums in FLAC and there were a few surprises.
First thing's first, the audio chain.
We used the
OPPO BDP-105EU as a digital transport, feeding the
Bifrost 2 via SPDIF.
The
Bifrost 2 was hooked to dad's heavily modded
Krell HTS 7.1 via balanced interconnects, and from there to a
Krell TAS amplifier also via balanced interconnects. For those of you into cables, the interconnects were all van den Hul Thunderline, and speaker cables were van den Hul The Nova. Speakers were a pair of
Dynaudio Confidence C2 (the older, better-looking series
shown in this video.)
The room is relatively large (about 40 square meters) with some room treatments. Going by memory from when the room treatments were made, deep bass response was much better than average but the rest of the spectrum could use additional correction. Regardless, the whole setup is very satisfying to listen to.
So how did it go?
- It had been a long time since I last listened to proper speakers and holy cow, is it vastly superior to headphones. Yeah, I know what you're thinking: This should go without saying. I still dropped my jaw and wished I didn't live in a small apartment with thin walls...
- The albums I thought would sound the best, didn't.
- I own three Guns N' Roses albums in their Mobile Fidelity incarnation, whose analog-to-digital conversion was handled by Mike's GAIN system. Because the GAIN system is essentially a True Multibit product in reverse, I was expecting these albums to blow everything else out of the water when played back through a True Multibit DAC. However, while they did sound pretty good, they weren't the best of the best.
- Albums I thought sounded very good were just good.
- I'm talking Avenged Sevenfold's "The Stage" (2016), Carcass's "Heartwork" (Full Dynamic Range edition; 2013), and Omnium Gatherum's "The Burning Cold" (HDTracks; 2018)
- Albums I thought sounded good weren't that good in the end.
- Especially the HDTracks release of Insomnium's "Heart Like A Grave" (2019). Having a higher DR score couldn't save this one.
- Albums I thought were good turned out to be jaw-dropping.
- I'm talking top of the class: Iron Maiden's "Fear of the Dark" (Australasian digipack) slayed everything else with its perfect clarity, amazing drum sound, punch, and sound stage. A veritable demo disc. Runner-up was the recent re-release of Avenged Sevenfold's "Diamonds in the Rough" I purchased on HDTracks. Really good punch and clarity on this one—much more than I perceived through my cans. My DVD-Audio rip of Deep Purple's "Machine Head" also sounded much better through speakers than it did through headphones, and was up there with these two and the GNR albums.
All in all, I was surprised not only by how big a difference it makes to listen through floorstanders, but also by how differently I perceived the sound quality of various albums compared to headphones. I can tell the difference between a good and a bad recording on my chain (Bifrost 2 -> Asgard 3 -> Focal Elegia equalized to the Harman Target Curve), but it's never quite as apparent as it was through my father's setup using the same files and DAC. I used to like the sound on
Avenged Sevenfold's "
The Stage" better than on "
Diamonds in the Rough", but it was the complete opposite on my father's chain.
I wish we could have spent more time listening to different albums and even comparing the same album on the Bifrost 2 vs the OPPO. Maybe next time. Until then, I hope this was an entertaining read
