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MDAC first listen (part VII)

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Carlos68 said:
Me neither but there again I've never heard of Steve Dobbs :confused:

I would certainly be more inclined to buy a new product if I new John had a part in its design after hearing the sound quality of the MDAC and seeing the support he and Dominic have offered on this forum :)
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Whoops
 
Carlos68 said:
Me neither but there again I've never heard of Steve Dobbs :confused:

I would certainly be more inclined to buy a new product if I new John had a part in its design after hearing the sound quality of the MDAC and seeing the support he and Dominic have offered on this forum :)
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Yep me too.
 
I tried adding my tube pre-amp between the Mdac and the tube amp ... even tough the sound was very warm and inviting.. very analogue... it did loose too much detail and excitement... went back to just the Mdac direct to the amp ... hummm.... may sell the pre-amp now... about 2-3x the cost of the mdac.... (already had it before the Mdac..)
 
Flampy said:
So the big question is do you have an Audiolab product which is a brand you have looked to own for years or a John Westlake product. Don't know about you but when I show off my iPad to my kids I do not mention Steve Dobbs.
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To be honest I never looked to own an Audiolab product (let alone for years).., and have only bought the Mdac because of the excellent feedback. I have to say though, having now found out about the excellent quality of John and Dominick's engineering work and their extraterrestrial customer service, I will be looking attentively for all the products they are going to design!
 
Quick question: replaced the CDQ with a Cambridge Audio BD650 as a transport (liberating the CDQ for the second system).

When connected using the digi coax, the MDAC would show the cd playback time when playing cds, but this doesn't happen with the BD650 when connected and set to output PCM. JohnW, is that to be expected?

It does show this when set to output Bitstream data but the MDAC doesn't seem to work with Bitstream inputs as no sound is heard.
 
JTC said:
It does show this when set to output Bitstream data but the MDAC doesn't seem to work with Bitstream inputs as no sound is heard.
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Are you talking about playing CD's or Bluray movies ?

If the later then no it wouldn't read the bitstream from a Bluray but i think it should from a CD ?
 
CD of course - the clue is here:

cd playback time when playing cds
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I reckon it ought to read bitstream from cd - could be a setting on the BD player though.
 
JohnW said:
Be interesting once you have had an extended listen if you feel there's a difference in SQ between 0.96 and 0.99...

John
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Just a little, John. I'm currently using the Minimum Phase filter & find the dynamics, bass & detail improved over v0.96. I have no way to confirm (unless I reload) but I also suspect this version is improved over the original (v0.90?)

If users find it a little tiring then perhaps the "Optimal Transient XD" will suit better. As has been pointed out, the filter choice can depend on the recording but hell, I'd prefer to settle on just one filter! Did the absolute phase get inverted in 0.96?
 
finally got the SBT working with Triode's firmware over USB .... it was already spectacular over coax... I think the timing has slightly improved over USB ... but it could be my wishful thinking... I only have 2 albums in 24/192 (which the sever then downsamples to 24/96)... so for most occasions USB will do just fine....

now all is well ...
 
for the next tweak... I'm playing with FLAC compression ratios to see if I can hear any differences.... so far I can't ....
 
There's more data on the flac website here: http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison_all_cpudectime.html

Notice how small the differences in decode time are between the different levels of compression - flac was designed to be fast to decode, the trade off is that it may take a while to encode, particularly at the highest compression levels.

If you drill down into the detail you will also see that, for particular tracks, higher compression levels are sometimes quicker to decode than lower ones, so I wouldn't be believing all the folklore about the less compression the less load on the decoding CPU.
 
if your LMS box has enough horsepower and you're not short on network bandwidth you can do the FLAC decode on the server and just send PCM to the SBT, which should render the compression-rate issue moot.

Then again, piecing together more TCP/IP packets is itself a load on the SBT...so....

My system decodes to pcm then sends to SBT (via a wireless bridge and wired ethernet to the SBT), and that passes bit-perfect, so I don't know what further benefits there would be in messing around with the source any more.

There'll be someone out there claiming that one or other flavour of FLAC has a 'deeper sound horizon' or whatever ;)
 
After spending some time comparing the bitperfect coax output from my STX to the M-DAC with the bitperfect USB I'm really having trouble noticing any real difference between them. Initially I thought the coax input sounded very slightly tighter in the bass with less harshness to vocals, but for other tracks the USB input sounded slightly better. It's so subtle that I'm willing to accept the likelihood that it's not a real difference (that I can detect) but largely imaginary. The STX apparently has very low jitter on its digital output anyway which might result in differences below my detection threshold.

In any case, the M-DAC is burning in nicely and it really does sound phenomenal through headphones with a very noticeable improvement since I first switched it on. Then, the STX headphone output sounded a bit better (less harsh/brittle and a touch more three dimensional with more "body" to the vocals) but the M-DAC has caught up since I think, though I haven't been particularly rigorous in comparing them so may just be a superficial perception. Nice to know I have two excellent headphone outputs to choose from...
 
Just because it's bitperfect doesn't mean it's jitter perfect, they can still measure differently and thus sound slightly different.
 
sq225917 said:
Just because it's bitperfect doesn't mean it's jitter perfect, they can still measure differently and thus sound slightly different.
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fair enough, although I'd be interested to know the relationship between jitter and the bit-perfect test in the MDAC... would a high-jitter source pass?
 
when I connect the SBT via Coax, it sounds perfect to my years.. however the signal varies slightly .... its always 9597 or 9601 etc.. never 96.... via USB is dead on perfect.... it could be that via the USB the actual signal is not properly reported...

the only caveat on my system by using USB is that I have 2-3 albums which are 24/192 and the Slimserver then decodes it and re-encodes it to 24/96.... I am not sure if I am imagining sound differences or not... I thought the 192 sounder more relaxed... and the CPU on my server gets high .. but never a problem ...

so I'll probably just leave it on USB, and not worry about FLAC compression... only did 3 discs to compare (normal vs no compression) and I honestly could not tell any difference between them ....
 
with the new firmware (.99) and my GX300 speakers, only perfect albums I use the XD filter... the normal transient and DD sound better for me now... the XD on bad recordings reveals too much information! both good and bad....
 
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