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
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.
"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.
This thread is killing me. I just bought a MAC computer, dcs Delius firwire DAC, and a firewire dcs Purcell upsampler to replace a high end single box CD player. Planning on upsampling regular CD to DSD sine that is the bulk of my collection......Hope this set-up sounds better than my current one.....this thread is raising doubts about this...
Jaymark, I don't know about the Delius or Purcell, but I think music servers are the future, if for no other reason than ripping to harddrives and playing them is superior to optical drives.

I guess I understand your conversion of pcm into dsd on playback, but this is something I have not explored other than a short stay with EMM quite some time ago.