Wing
Head-Fier
- Joined
- Jun 22, 2001
- Posts
- 80
- Likes
- 10
It was Saturday a week ago, KurtW came over to pick up the cables he lent me after the first BA Headwize meeting. It so happened that I had arranged with Music Lover to buy her Silver Sonic ICs at the same time, thus the unofficial get together. KurtW surprised me by bringing over a nice Musical Fidelity XDAC for me to try out as well as a pair of Mapleshade cables.
Music lover brought the Sony CD3000 headphone. It sounded surprisingly good. I was told it is a closed headphone but it was not too hampered by it's design. There was also a fair amount of sound leakage. It was much more efficient compared to my HD600 and DT831, and had a sound that could rival the HD600 depending on your tastes. It is brighter than the HD600 and cost almost twice what I paid for the HD600. I could easily live with this headphone as my office phones if it didn't leak music.
The Silver Sonics sounded good. It seemed quite balanced but according to Kurt, the Mapleshade ultra thin cables he brought were even more neutral. I would love to own a pair of Mapleshades too but for the fact that it looks very fragile and probably is. At this quality of cables it was hard for me to tell the difference although it did seem that the Silver Sonics were brighter than the Mapleshades.
The XDAC based on my somewhat limited listening time, is better than the rear rca outs of the fl 8550. If you've opened up the cd player you may be able to guess why. For one the, output is connected to some cheap looking wire that gets wrapped many many times around a ferrite ring. The output from the headphone jack is surprisingly good as KurtW can attest. There is a slight difference to my ears between it and the output through the MG Head from the XDAC. Both of them have a surprisingly similar tonal balance. Where the cd player loses out is that extra air of realism that I attribute to the XDAC output having a higher bandwidth. I think there is more high frequency information from the XDAC through the MG Head. I'm toying with the idea of getting the XDAC and tweaking the headphone out of the CD player using the xdac/MG for comparison. Then I can use the DAC and MGHead on other sources. I've also built power supplies in my younger days so I may take a crack at building
one for the XDAC.
All in all it was a great informal meeting. Till the next time.
Music lover brought the Sony CD3000 headphone. It sounded surprisingly good. I was told it is a closed headphone but it was not too hampered by it's design. There was also a fair amount of sound leakage. It was much more efficient compared to my HD600 and DT831, and had a sound that could rival the HD600 depending on your tastes. It is brighter than the HD600 and cost almost twice what I paid for the HD600. I could easily live with this headphone as my office phones if it didn't leak music.
The Silver Sonics sounded good. It seemed quite balanced but according to Kurt, the Mapleshade ultra thin cables he brought were even more neutral. I would love to own a pair of Mapleshades too but for the fact that it looks very fragile and probably is. At this quality of cables it was hard for me to tell the difference although it did seem that the Silver Sonics were brighter than the Mapleshades.
The XDAC based on my somewhat limited listening time, is better than the rear rca outs of the fl 8550. If you've opened up the cd player you may be able to guess why. For one the, output is connected to some cheap looking wire that gets wrapped many many times around a ferrite ring. The output from the headphone jack is surprisingly good as KurtW can attest. There is a slight difference to my ears between it and the output through the MG Head from the XDAC. Both of them have a surprisingly similar tonal balance. Where the cd player loses out is that extra air of realism that I attribute to the XDAC output having a higher bandwidth. I think there is more high frequency information from the XDAC through the MG Head. I'm toying with the idea of getting the XDAC and tweaking the headphone out of the CD player using the xdac/MG for comparison. Then I can use the DAC and MGHead on other sources. I've also built power supplies in my younger days so I may take a crack at building
one for the XDAC.
All in all it was a great informal meeting. Till the next time.
