[438555]

[QUOTE="

- put me on the list again for a CD player."[/QUOTE]
Can't see myself getting a CD player. Just a good drive to rip lossless.

 

[Pietro Cozzi Tinin]

Ok a few thoughts:
-Up thread amp comparisons could use speaker type please.

-Vidar and Yaggy showed the other day but cash flow and indecision has me on the fence about speakers still :/

-sensible balanced cables, cost over function, between Yaggy/Freya/Vidar then Vidar/speakers. Seems insane to pay hundreds of dollars...

-put me on the silver Schiit spinner list. Like I mentioned on my last comment the music we all have is CDs. Am I wrong? There must be numbers out there or perhaps the Schiit generation is all digital. Laughing to myself thinking we're one could go with that.

- put me on the list again for a CD player.

Please read up in this thread.
Cables, speakers (in combination with and without Vidar) are all discussed ad nauseam here.

 

[Pietro Cozzi Tinin]

- "put me on the list again for a CD player."
Can't see myself getting a CD player. Just a good drive to rip lossless.

I think if Schiit will ever make a spinner (which I seriously doubt) it would be transport only.
They have top-dacs in abundance to link it.

 

[M Paul]

I think if Schiit will ever make a spinner (which I seriously doubt) it would be transport only.
They have top-dacs in abundance to link it.

Just being lazy...

And transport is what I am thinking... I actually spent some time doodling on a napkin and hours online educating myself on what a transport actually is i.e. the key elements.

It seems to me the purest (A nervouvosa types) would insist on sending a signal direct to DAC from the transport rather then ripping/storing/read back/ etc.

My wet dream was/is a CD changer. Hours on the napkin, never made it to the CAD stage but who knows, I'm only 51 years young!

 

[Pietro Cozzi Tinin]

Then you are a young puppy indeed.
Point is, there's a lot of very good cd-transports out there.
Jason once said they do not have the intention to Schiitify every audio product on the market.
And indeed they should not.

 

[wout31]

Primarily due to the output impedance being higher than you can realize with an active stage, this fact combined with cable capacitance results in high frequency roll off.

Use Freya very often as a passive pre-amp. No noticeable high frequency roll off to my ears.

 

[belgiangenius]

Can result in high frequency roll off. A properly matched source & amp will not suffer these effects.

Yes, there are some hoops to jump through to make a successful system using a passive pre. But there are a lot of rewards if you do so.

Some of those rewards include having less circuitry to get between you and your music. Another one is having one less component to feed increasingly hard to find NOS tubes to.

The only time I've ever heard a passive preamp sound good was with a tube powered DAC that had a tube preamp stage built-in. With any solid state based DAC I tried a passive preamp with, it sounded like crap.

...and it had nothing to do with high frequency roll off. It was more related to dynamics and heft.

 

[rlow]

Just read TAS and their decision that non MQA believers are Luddites and will need to die off before MQA is fully accepted as the new way forward. I remember hearing somewhat the same with DSD.

I understand Jason and Mike's position on MQA. I have no bone in the game one way or the other. So once I upgraded my Audirvana to the new version with the MQA software decoder, I tried an experiment. I posted this on another Headfi thread I found after doing a Google search to see if I could find others with similar results as mine:

-------------------------------
I have spent the last 3 hours on Tidal A/B playing Master versions of various albums with and without MQA using Audirvana in exclusive/hog mode for the first unfold to my Schiit Yggy/Rag/KEF LS50 setup fed via AOIP from Dante/Mac Mini. These were also compared to my personal versions of each album stored as FLAC 16/44.1 on my NAS drive feeding the same set up.

I can detect ZERO significant differences among the three options with just a very slight edge leaning towards my personal storage approach.

So unless I'm major league missing something here, MQA is a bust to me and I can quit worrying about it at least in its present concoction. The MQA sonic ejaculation being rammed by the likes of the major mags just isn't there for me anymore than their DSD version wasn't there either. 16/44.1 through Yggy still hasn't been beat to these ears. I've got no bone in the fight. Audirvana can decode it or not for the same cost to me. In my set up there is no perceptible difference. I'm hard pressed to believe that an MQA approved DAC would magically add something with the next unfold if I perceive no benefit from the first.

Thoughts?

You're unlikely to find a lot of dessenting opinions on this thread regarding MQA. Afterall, most here are big Schiit fans and have bought into the feeling that MQA is likely just another gimmick to make you rebuy all your music.

And this may very well be the truth. However for your particular test, doing the software "unfolding" has only really given you a potentially higher sampling rate on the files (up to 96/24)..many say they can't really hear much difference in these different sample rate files under other circumstances as well, so it doesn't surprise me you didn't really hear much of a difference. In addition, the "folding/unfolding" technique no doubt introduces some level of compression, possibly negating most of the sample rate improvement anyhow.

I think if you were really going to give MQA a "real chance", you need to be doing full MQA hardware decoding (which apparently does more than just higher sampling rates), and the ability to turn it on/off on that same hardware (aka DAC), in order to do a proper comparison.

I may give MQA a proper whirl at some point in the future with the proper hardware, just for the heck of it, but I honestly don't expect to much of a diff, if any. However IMO the only way to judge something properly is to hear it for yourself - otherwise you are just being dogmatic about it all.

Right now however my setup with Gumby and Gen5 USB sounds frickin fantastic with my lowly old 16/44 FLAC.

 

[pctazhp]

You're unlikely to find a lot of dessenting opinions on this thread regarding MQA. Afterall, most here are big Schiit fans and have bought into the feeling that MQA is likely just another gimmick to make you rebuy all your music.

And this may very well be the truth. However for your particular test, doing the software "unfolding" has only really giving you a potentially higher sampling rate on the files (up to 96/24)..many say they can't really hear much difference in these different sample rate files under other circumstances as well, so it doesn't surprise me you didn't really hear much of a difference. In addition, the "folding/unfolding" technique no doubt introduces some level of compression, possibly negating most of the sample rate improvement anyhow.

I think if you were really going to give MQA a "real chance", you need to be doing full MQA hardware decoding (which apparently does more than just higher sampling rates), and the ability to turn it on/off on that same hardware (aka DAC), in order to do a proper comparison.

I may give MQA a proper whirl at some point in the future with the proper hardware, just for the heck of it, but I honestly don't expect to much of a diff, if any. However IMO the only way to judge something properly is to hear it for yourself - otherwise you are just being dogmatic about it all.

Right now however my setup with Gumby and Gen5 USB sound frickin fantastic with my lowly old 16/44 FLAC.

Thank you for your balanced, sensible, rational post. It's difficult to read about MQA here without feeling like I'm reading a religious treatise. In the end MQA will likely succeed or fail based on what the market determines. As popular as Schiit is, it certainly doesn't dominate the market. In the meantime, I'll be upgrading to Gumby soon and I'm sure I will enjoy it, just as I'm now enjoying my Bimby, as all this gets sorted out over time.

 

[sublime9]

Nice simple answer there.

No actual math here, but:

Source impedance -> cable resistance, inductance, capacitance -> passive controller resistance, inductance, capacitance -> cable resistance, inductance, capacitance -> load impedance can easily add up to some really mediocre sound.

In the real world, simple answers are rarely complete solutions.

J.P.

 

[AudioBear]

The fate of any new format or processing CODEC is hard to predict. Success depends mostly on how it's marketed and maybe only a tiny bit on how good it is. I get the general impression the MQA folks have a very good business plan and marketing scheme. That's really all that matters since there is an overwhelming tendency for consumers to go out and buy the latest and greatest if you lie to them right.

I tried the Audirvana plus MQA - Tidal decoding comparo. Honestly, I thought the MQA decoded tracks sounded quite good but I couldn't detect any real difference with it switched off. I'd say that as I did the experiment it didn't help, didn't hurt. MQA is by definition the producers definition a lossy compression system and it applies DSP to the bits. The fact that is sounds good suggests to me that the audio nervosa's fears of compression and DSP may be way overblown--at least for my ears. Some DSP produces a pleasant and desirable effect, others don't. If anyone wants to be a purest and demand bit perfect everything, that's fine with me but for my preferences if you can process the music and make sound better to me I really don't care if it's "not real." I just don't think MQA pushes the ball very far on improved audio quality. What remains to be seen is how much disk space or streaming bandwidth it saves. It may turn out to be useful if you can get the same quality sound at half the bandwidth. With storage and bandwidth getting cheaper by the day this is becoming less and less important.

It makes me wonder all the more what the Manhattan Project will really be.

 

[sublime9]

Nice simple answer there.

No actual math here, but:

Source impedance -> cable resistance, inductance, capacitance -> passive controller resistance, inductance, capacitance -> cable resistance, inductance, capacitance -> load impedance can easily add up to some really mediocre sound.

In the real world, simple answers are rarely complete solutions.

J.P.

In the real world, I deal with PCIe gen3, gigabit Ethernet which can be driven over 200 meters of 28 AWG twisted pair, SATA 3, when I sweat a state of the art connector which has 3 dB insertion loss at 30 GHz, eDP. I have no patience for the preening audiophool who is worried about .0000001 dB loss at 20 KHz. So, in the real world, when the signal loss is less than a teaspoon relative to the Pacific ocean, the mediocre sound is between your ears and buried in your checkbook and personality. It's 20 KHz. I don't care if you are not an engineer. You can still learn V=IR, Z=2*pi*w*L and Z= 1/(2*pi*w*C). It is not math, it is arithmetic if someone gives you the formulas. 20 KHz is DC when it comes to impedance, reactance and admittance. Want to borrow my calculator?

 

[sublime9]

Sorry double post.

 

[sublime9]

w is radian frequency, 2*pi*w(w is omega) = Hz. Sorry for being obscure, but that is engineering talk.

 

[jimmers]

w is radian frequency, 2*pi*w(w is omega) = Hz. Sorry for being obscure, but that is engineering talk.

Either w OR 2*pi*f , not 2*pi*w (w is 2*pi*f)

or w/2pi (w is omega) = Hertz as you like it.