Thanks George. I'm a huge fan of Bruno's NCORE module! Can't wait to hear what he can do with a converter.
The MSB line conditioner arrived yesterday. I hooked it in and ran the little ground wire to my amp as described in its manual. I've never used any type of system wide grounding system for my room since I ran the electrical myself and was meticulous with running identical power line lengths for each outlet back to the dedicated breaker panel. I tried the conditioner with the ground isolated and shared with the amp. In my system I didn't really notice a difference, which may be because of what I just described I don't have enough understanding of ground loops and such to give a better answer.
The conditioner itself was on par with my Shunyata Hydra conditioner I currently use. I A/B'd them basically. I never ran the DAC straight to the wall. I'm going to hold onto the conditioner and try it on my ODSE to see if it makes a difference.
Regarding the MSB Diamond DAC:
Fit and finish are Statement level as you would expect. It's the most attractive and well built DAC I've had in my room. I had the black but would have preferred the white/silver. Controls and remote were well laid out and easy to use, as was the back panel. Nothing was in the way of anything and the cable layout flowed elegantly. The settings, as I said, were limited (which i prefer) and I ended up leaving them default. The upsampling softened the overall gestalt and decreased the height of the soundstage. And I could not discern a difference between upsampling #1 and #2. So I left it off, default setting. The filters caused a more dramatic change but not for the better. Default was 32x; which I preferred 95% of the time. The other 2 settings reduced low frequency extension, exaggerated the upper mids and highs and gave the sound a more technical nature. The background became the foreground with the 3rd filter setting; quite strange an effect really. So settings, as such, remained default which is what Vince suggested when I spoke with him at RMAF.
I initially ran it through my Burmester 077 preamp. The DAC has a recognizable warmth. This was decribed to me by the dealer as a result of removal of all noise and jitter, leaving behind just the music. It was not overwhelming and clearly something many will prefer. At first it felt natural and flowed but over time I became more aware of it; sometimes good and sometimes not. Staging, imaging, tone and texture were all dead on as were leading and trailing edges (which I found more easily identifiable with the MSB then any other DAC). The 16x filter removed the warmth almost completely, but the magic of the MSB also faded. It was sweat, engaging and felt right many times. But I didn't feel like I was getting quite the accurate portrayal of what was recorded. That was provided more naturally, to my ears and in my system, by the Emm Labs unit.
I then tried running it direct from DAC to amps. As any of you who have been reading since the beginning (and you know who you are, you crazy pathological dedicated few) know, I have consistently preferred running my DAC thorugh a preamp over direct to the amp. The MSB is quite an accomplishment in engineering regarding fits volume control. With the DAC run direct, the warmth was stepped down a notch or two. It was still there, but for the first time I thought I preferred my DAC run direct. I felt I gained a level of analytical detail and removed a touch of warmth and for that I preferred direct. After more listening felt that I lost a sense of air, complexity and depth that made me eventually put the preamp back in. If I were ever going to run a DAC direct, this would be it. Which is good because at +/- $42k, saving money on a preamp would be a very good thing. If I were going to run a DAC with a lesser preamp I would go direct honestly. But the previous Rowland Criterion and my current Burmy 077 are SO good that I think they just give me what I need to complete the whole scenario. Maybe it's just me...
In the end, I prefered the more natural sense of tone, realism, complexity and depth that the Emm gave me. I was given the opportunity to acquire an early run of the brand new SOTA Emm Labs statement DA-2 just shown at RMAF. I couldn't pass it up and placed a deposit. If it's better then the dac2x, which I can't imagine its not, then I should be quite happy with the results. For now, the MSB goes back with no misgivings and my ODSE is back in. The DA-2 should be here late 2015/early 2016. So I will hold off on any additional DAC trials until the DA-2 has arrived and is well burned in.
That being said, I seam to have people send me dacs to try out and compare. If/when that happens I will report and let you know. For example, my neighbor's Berkely Ref DAC with usb/SPDIF converter should be arriving early next week. We will burn it in on his system and then I will borrow it and report. He also just got an Aurender N10 music server so I can start playing with that and will report shortly as well. I want to give that 100-200 hours to burn in.
In the meantime I received a very unique product from Waversa that I was asked to play with and evaluate. It is called the W Smart Hub and is probably amongst the first of a new line of product that will start to emerge with the onset of Renderer's, NAS drives and Internet integration. It is essentially a battery isolated Audiophile grade Data Hub. It has both usb and Ethernet ports on back. Usb goes between server/DAC and Ethernet between NAS/network and between server/renderer. Each signal is repowered from the battery, totally isolating it from any external power and then each port is filtered to isolate noise. It sounds cool but I have not had time to actually install it in the system. I'll try the Ethernet part first, then the usb, then both. Let's see.... I can say it's built to a very high quality level with a very nice fit and finish.
The MSB line conditioner arrived yesterday. I hooked it in and ran the little ground wire to my amp as described in its manual. I've never used any type of system wide grounding system for my room since I ran the electrical myself and was meticulous with running identical power line lengths for each outlet back to the dedicated breaker panel. I tried the conditioner with the ground isolated and shared with the amp. In my system I didn't really notice a difference, which may be because of what I just described I don't have enough understanding of ground loops and such to give a better answer.
The conditioner itself was on par with my Shunyata Hydra conditioner I currently use. I A/B'd them basically. I never ran the DAC straight to the wall. I'm going to hold onto the conditioner and try it on my ODSE to see if it makes a difference.
Regarding the MSB Diamond DAC:
Fit and finish are Statement level as you would expect. It's the most attractive and well built DAC I've had in my room. I had the black but would have preferred the white/silver. Controls and remote were well laid out and easy to use, as was the back panel. Nothing was in the way of anything and the cable layout flowed elegantly. The settings, as I said, were limited (which i prefer) and I ended up leaving them default. The upsampling softened the overall gestalt and decreased the height of the soundstage. And I could not discern a difference between upsampling #1 and #2. So I left it off, default setting. The filters caused a more dramatic change but not for the better. Default was 32x; which I preferred 95% of the time. The other 2 settings reduced low frequency extension, exaggerated the upper mids and highs and gave the sound a more technical nature. The background became the foreground with the 3rd filter setting; quite strange an effect really. So settings, as such, remained default which is what Vince suggested when I spoke with him at RMAF.
I initially ran it through my Burmester 077 preamp. The DAC has a recognizable warmth. This was decribed to me by the dealer as a result of removal of all noise and jitter, leaving behind just the music. It was not overwhelming and clearly something many will prefer. At first it felt natural and flowed but over time I became more aware of it; sometimes good and sometimes not. Staging, imaging, tone and texture were all dead on as were leading and trailing edges (which I found more easily identifiable with the MSB then any other DAC). The 16x filter removed the warmth almost completely, but the magic of the MSB also faded. It was sweat, engaging and felt right many times. But I didn't feel like I was getting quite the accurate portrayal of what was recorded. That was provided more naturally, to my ears and in my system, by the Emm Labs unit.
I then tried running it direct from DAC to amps. As any of you who have been reading since the beginning (and you know who you are, you crazy pathological dedicated few) know, I have consistently preferred running my DAC thorugh a preamp over direct to the amp. The MSB is quite an accomplishment in engineering regarding fits volume control. With the DAC run direct, the warmth was stepped down a notch or two. It was still there, but for the first time I thought I preferred my DAC run direct. I felt I gained a level of analytical detail and removed a touch of warmth and for that I preferred direct. After more listening felt that I lost a sense of air, complexity and depth that made me eventually put the preamp back in. If I were ever going to run a DAC direct, this would be it. Which is good because at +/- $42k, saving money on a preamp would be a very good thing. If I were going to run a DAC with a lesser preamp I would go direct honestly. But the previous Rowland Criterion and my current Burmy 077 are SO good that I think they just give me what I need to complete the whole scenario. Maybe it's just me...
In the end, I prefered the more natural sense of tone, realism, complexity and depth that the Emm gave me. I was given the opportunity to acquire an early run of the brand new SOTA Emm Labs statement DA-2 just shown at RMAF. I couldn't pass it up and placed a deposit. If it's better then the dac2x, which I can't imagine its not, then I should be quite happy with the results. For now, the MSB goes back with no misgivings and my ODSE is back in. The DA-2 should be here late 2015/early 2016. So I will hold off on any additional DAC trials until the DA-2 has arrived and is well burned in.
That being said, I seam to have people send me dacs to try out and compare. If/when that happens I will report and let you know. For example, my neighbor's Berkely Ref DAC with usb/SPDIF converter should be arriving early next week. We will burn it in on his system and then I will borrow it and report. He also just got an Aurender N10 music server so I can start playing with that and will report shortly as well. I want to give that 100-200 hours to burn in.
In the meantime I received a very unique product from Waversa that I was asked to play with and evaluate. It is called the W Smart Hub and is probably amongst the first of a new line of product that will start to emerge with the onset of Renderer's, NAS drives and Internet integration. It is essentially a battery isolated Audiophile grade Data Hub. It has both usb and Ethernet ports on back. Usb goes between server/DAC and Ethernet between NAS/network and between server/renderer. Each signal is repowered from the battery, totally isolating it from any external power and then each port is filtered to isolate noise. It sounds cool but I have not had time to actually install it in the system. I'll try the Ethernet part first, then the usb, then both. Let's see.... I can say it's built to a very high quality level with a very nice fit and finish.