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Hey Elwappo99,
I'm using it single ended. Unfortunatly I'm not listening to the same recordings.
I have listened to alot of very good recordings, 3 albums from Chesky for instance, and it never reached the levels of seperation and detail that I heard in the store (no recording did). And I have listened to hundreds of songs.
Thanks for your help
Ok, one more time. Since the headphone amp analog component is the same unit as used in the store. What were the differences?
1) Headphones? Or did you buy the ones that were also demo'ed in the store? As I recall, you had HD800s. Those phones are going to be very revealing and open even before they are "broken in", so unless you have a damaged set of HD800 or cables (and especially if you actually brought home the demos), I just can't see it being the headphones.
2) You had analog cables on your source side at the store. Cables are typically measured in how much or how little they degrade the signal. Adding cables in this case just couldn't make the signal that much better than the tiny connections between the DAC and Amp sections of the HDVD800.
3) You were not using the DAC in the HDVD800 (which, of course means that you were not using any of the digital input circuitry on the HDVD800 either) It seems very odd. The HDVD800 appears to have a very good DAC in it. I suppose that there is always a possibility that the DAC itself or it's digital interface that you are using has something wrong with it. But when it sounds so "good" as it is (maybe not terrific but it is functioning), that would be an odd failure mode. Just doesn't seem as likely.
4) You are not using the same digital recordings as at the store. This also doesn't seem to explain the difference because you should still be able to hear some "air" on other decent recordings that you have access to that would be similar to the recordings at the shop.
Which leads me to the last 2 things I can think of:
5) The "transport" mechanism that you are using for your source is completely different than in the shop. The CD player has the advantage of having its master clock inside the same box with both the DAC and the CD transport itself which can assist a bit in jitter control. I think I remember you saying that at home you are using a computer as your digital source. If your home source is producing a lot of jitter it could potentially produce a reduction of focus. Also if you are set up to operate your USB in Adaptive transfer mode instead to Asynchronous mode, you jitter could be a bit worse than just using TOSlink or another S/PDIF interface. Are you using an audio program designed to bypass some of the generic OS audio handling processes on the PC? I know that on my iMac, this DOES make a difference for me.
6) This last item is rather subjective. Sometimes, you can have a sound A that seems nicer than sound B even though sound B is more accurate. I learned this many years ago with intermodulation distortion. On some amps, the distortion would add a very low level and subtle extra sound or hash that would occur synchronously with the real sound coming from the recording. I've also seen this in some cases where jitter related artifacts are present. They would add extra "body" to the sound that could make it more "rich" and "Musical" to listen to. But that "richness" was from artifacts not in the source recording. It wasn't until I noticed that when I got that "richness" and extra body in the music, the sound stage would tend to collapse due to the true sounds of ambience in the recording being overrun with a fake kind of "ambience" created as a result of jitter or intermodulation distortion. I know that this isn't quite what you were describing, but it might be something to think about.
So if you can't get your hands on that CD player to check it's output both from its analog and digital outputs, I'd do some reading and revisit how your computer system is set up to output the digital tracks that you have stored on it.
Again hope this gives you some ideas.
- Jeff
