2. digital
  3. 1265889044

Can Mac/PC compete with High End CDT??

Dear All,

I want to believe (do you?) that the Mac or PC approach can work, at least be good enough. Being that my prime source is analog digital music is secondary but at the same time compulsory for recent and actual recordings.

Reading reviews and opinions floating around online I was curious to hear for myself in a high end system, a sort of A/B singular test was needed; away from commercial pressures and inexperienced ears.

Full of great expectation I head to a fellow audiophile's den, both of us motivated to get to the bottom of this question ourselves.

So we got ourselves organized and ended up with a promising menu: Esoteric P0, Weiss Dac 2 D/A converter, Mac with Amara/iTunes then Kondo Dac with the Esoteric P0 and then Weiss Dac 2 D/A converter using fire wire interface from Mac/Amara/itunes via the Kondo DAC.

All the “virtual music” was obviously uncompressed format.

Preamp Absolare, amp New Audio Frontiers Ref 845 and Acapella Triolon Excalibur and some very good cables.

Being used to the sound of Kondo electronics and Goto horns that furnish my listening room, fed by micro seiki SX8000, CEC TL0x Cd transport at 1st I must say that I was disappointed with the sound that the P0 was delivering via the Weiss Dac.

I will not be long-winded here: this was not good. The sound seemed broken, out of pace, lousy trebles, one-dimensional bass and very nasal voices.

The resolution of the electronics and speakers told the cruel truth in this 70m² dedicated listening room. No fine-tuning I have ever encountered could solve this even with the widest stretch of imagination.

So the Mac/Amara/iTunes? Okay no gain no pain! Here it was no pain all gain, I mean, it sounded the same including the flaws but with the added advantage of mac based music selection as opposed to cd loading. This seemed promising, made me jump to the conclusion that the culprit was the Weiss DAC, not the fire wire interface.

So in goes the Kondo DAC driven by the P0, okay! I will lack vocabulary here it is truly amazing. My host and I within the 1st seconds looked at each other, not even in the listening seats, we agreed with each other without saying a word! Then we let the CDs play on, simple as that!

We kind of played around here knowing deep down that the next step was the “juge de paix” (for those who don’t master French that is “peace judgment”).

So we wired the Weiss Firewire/spdif interface to the Kondo Dac using the Mac/Almara/iTunes.

As it stands I had spoken to Daniel Weiss (owner/designer of Weiss Audio) a few days before and he explained to me that CD transport and Mac/PC was fundamentally the same thing; delivering 0 and 1 and the interface was just passing those 0s and 1s to the DAC.

So? I may have to repeat myself here : The sound seemed broken, out of pace, lousy trebles, one dimensional bass and very nasal voices.

The Kondo DAC was telling us all about the sources. I walk way from this with knowing that Mac/PC is not ready to replace a CD transport in high end system dedicated to experiencing music and all the emotional treasures that it has in store for us to enjoy.

So what does this mean? I think that in certain preamp/amp speaker combinations the hard disk be it mac or PC may work and certain reviewers will confirm this. However, if that system resolution comes to change, that its goes up the ladder, then the flaws in this approach will become apparent.

It would be advisable to ascertain your future with music and the associated audio equipment before marching towards the immaterial virtual music world.

Well a good friend of mine who hides in the shadows of the Bavarian landscape warned that no hard disk system could compete with the better CD transports, he is perfectly correct!

Tim
soundlistening
tbg
5,263 posts
 
Acrylic, for the last ten days I have had a modified Oppo 83 with the mods done by Exemplar Audio. Last evening I carefully compared it with my Mac/Amarra/Firewire/Minerva. It is very close with the Oppo with all the mods being $2500 and the Mac server being about $7800. I'm keeping both as the Oppo will play sacds and blu-ray.
soundlistening OP
26 posts
 
Maybe something to read : http://hifiadvise.com/PC-audio-versus-CD-info.html
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,087 posts
 
Soundlistening,

Interesting article but I think it overlooks a few things.

First is that the DAC has as much to do with how the computer sounds as it does in a CD player.

Second is that I would assert that a bit perfect digital stream is always preferable to one that is not, and that this is easier and more cost effective to obtain from disk storage (assuming the rip from optical to disk process is able to retrieve all or most bits in the source at least as well as occurs aboard a CD transport or player, which I think is a good assumption these days). Once you have all the bits in the data stream that should be there, then the end flavor of the sound will be determined by how those bits subsequently get converted to analog sound, which involves the things like a clock, DAC, jitter, and other factors in both cases.

The advantage of a good CD player will be that all these things that determine the end sound are integrated into a single box (or group of carefully matched boxes) by a knowledgeable vendor for you so you do not have to worry about mixing and matching the components well yourself. Good players will do all this very well but you will probably pay a premium in the end for an integrated end product. If you attempt to integrate the parts yourself, well this stuff is not simple and YMMAV.

I prefer using a networked music player (wired or wireless) with a network connection to the music server to connecting a computer directly. This approach helps keep the computer, which is an inherently noisy device in general nicely isolated from the audio system both physically and electronically.
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,426 posts
 
Mapman - Very interesting point. Rip I use (MAX) reads CD like data CD - multiple times if necessary to get correct checksum while CD player cannot do this since it is operating in real time. For that reason CD player has very loose error correction. It gets of course much worse with used CDs (small scratches) while my server will never loose quality. Music on hard drive cannot get "scratched".

I also keep computer at the distance (and at different outlet), to avoid noise contamination, and transmit music wirelessly do Airport Express. Stereophile tested AE for transmission errors and found none. Received S/pdif information was identical to data sent. Word jitter was very low 258ps and my Benchmark DAC1 has huge jitter rejection.
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,087 posts
 
"Rip I use (MAX) reads CD like data CD - multiple times if necessary to get correct checksum while CD player cannot do this since it is operating in real time."

That is a key point. Ripping can re-read to get data correct. CD players have real time constraints that creates limits. I believe most good players do some in-memory caching of data that can help significantly if done well.
More to discover