Hey Guys, that was fun - and thanks again to EricR for hosting at his office. The problem with these meets is that the conversation is so good, that it is hard to take the time to actually listen to all the goodies that are spread around us. It is not too often in life to be surrounded by those that share the same passion. It would have been easy to have stayed all night into the wee hours of the morning. If it wasn't a work night with morning meetings, I would have probably stayed much later.
The shinning stars of the night were multiple this time:
- HE1000: snip
- The ROK: Again, thank you JohnJen for allowing me to hook his new Schiit Ragnarok into my system to give it a great audition. Bottom line, this amp will drive any HP to its best quality. It is transparent in its delivery, but very dynamic in its SQ that squeezes everything it can out of the sound file. The be fair, this may not be your mothers Ragnarok as JJ never leaves good enough alone. If you are interested in how JohnJen, upgraded this beast, you will have to ask him, but it sounds awesome. snip
- Garage 1217 Project Sunrise 3: AtomicBob's MSD192 DAC > Sunrise 3 AMP setup was a real surprise. Listening through HD650s, I was treated with what was called a reverse mod A/B with the mod removed. It was a two step process that required an extra piece of cable in the chain and a software change, so it wasn't instantaneous, but it was reasonably fast to do. The idea is that by reversing the channels so that one was pulling negative current from the amp and the other positive rather than both pulling from the same side, the amp had more juice in both channels to drive the headphone and maybe less interference from the other channel. The result was stunning. The sunrise sounded incredibly black to begin with if you read about its build, but the mod took it to another level. This is a mod that I would like to figure out how to apply to my home stereo as well as my desktop to see the results.
- Junk vs. High-End Cables - Power and RCA Interconnects: We A/B'd generic verse nice power cables and were surprised by the results. We had generic power cables to compare to a Cryo'd Copper power cable and a Silver power cable. Immediately, I could hear the copper and silver power cables widened the sound stage considerably with surprising results. Playing Chesky demo tracks, the sound became lifelike and behind me where I turned around and looked thinking it was someone in the room behind me. Then the A/B was a bit shocking - however, only done on the ROK. All 3 that were blind tested thought that the silver power cable was the best, but confused the generic with the Cryo'd. Yet, we all heard the difference between A/Bing the generic and Cryo'd with not blind testing. Regardless, the test was enough to convince me to get a new power cord for both the amp and the DAC. The silver and copper RCA upgrades felt like they made a difference as well, with the silver being better. I will need to purchase the upgrade RCAs myself to be able to do some long term testing to better determine the percentage value. In the end, I think that the effect is additive as I put the best of everything together to conclude and the result was stunning with the HE1000 and my LCD2.2.
NOTE: JJ pointed out that the power strip had limited the output that was provided by the wall plug that was a cheap plug limiting the total power provided. He had a test unit to show total potential. So the results may have been significantly different with a short straight run from the panel into an audiophile grade outlet like at JohnJen's house that he measures a 10x increase in total power on tap. My feeling is that smaller pipes are noisier than bigger ones and every bend in the pipe (connection) creates additional noise in an additive way. So big, short, straight pipes = quiet.
I too want to thank our generous host for the evening, just enough of everything with a fine collection of folks with enough curiosity and willingness to try a bunch of crazy ****.
My kinda crowd…
I brought my ASCC tester (Available Short Circuit Current) and the plug in strip being used roughly cut the near instantaneous current delivery in half, from the wall plug it was plugged into.
I've been running tests and gathering data about various aspects of this and the results are interesting to say the least.
Atomic Bob's setup was the schitz, it astounded me at how good it sounded. And being able to (fairly) easily play with the channel reversal trick by 'turning it on and off' was a way to gain further insights into what's going on.
I encourage everyone to try it for themselves to see if it makes any changes let alone an improvement (and I have yet to notice a lack of improvement…)
It's a DIY'rs dream come true.
It costs nothing in terms of parts, and can be easily incorporated into any system with but few limitations.
And they are…
You HAVE to be able to reverse the polarity of the digital signal being sent to the DAC in only ONE channel.
This usually requires DSP (Digital Signal Processing) to accomplish.
AND
You need to be able to revese that same channels wires as they connect to the driver either in the headphones OR in the cable that feeds that very same channel.
This essentially runs one channel 'backwards' in terms of polarity with respect to the other channel.
The 'effects' of this mod are especially noticeable when you have an amp which uses dual triodes where the left and right channel are present in the same tube.
Lastly it shouldn't make any difference whether you are running in balanced or SE mode.
Of course, if you implement this mod PLEASE report back with any observations good or bad.
We do need to amass real time observations from a variety of systems and users.
JJ
ps. This mod can help power amps work mo' bettah…
