Is D for Dry? Class D...

@viber6

Keep in mind the dac in the now ~ 10 y/o 105 is far from SOTA, as is the AA dac/pre, meaning a significant dac or dac/pre upgrade might well be more accurate without being hot, but... Typically, dac/pres are a rare breed, and separates may, or may not, be a significant upgrade, depending on additional; iso devices, power cords and cabling. Alas, those are $$$$$, and since everything is a compromise, one must choose their poison based on wallet.

Underwood is now selling a wide range of Audio-GD kit. Their R2R dacs and preamps look excellent, with extraordinary build quality. Their R2R-1 FPGA PCM/DSD DAC @ $1,199.00 might be an upgrade to my now 5 y/o AA DDP-1. For the well heeled; R7HE MK2 State of the art Resistor Ladder DAC FPGA controlled upgradable DAC w/regenerative power supply $4990.00

https://www.underwoodhifi.com/products/audio-gd
hth

tweak1,
As I understood your earlier post, the WW optical cable seemed to be the factor rounding off the original "hot" sound of the EVS1200.  Which cable produced the "hot" sound?

As you know, my limited experience of GaN with the Merrill Element 114 only, showed warmish sound.  I am certainly open to hearing about other GaN amps, but so far, the IceEdge 1200 module seems to be SOTA.

ricevs,
Thanks for posting the hometheaterhifi review of the IV7.  His reference amps are the BAT and Pass, which are euphonic.  All the musical and movie examples he cites show more clarity/detail from the IV7 than from his reference amps.  At the end, he claims that the IV7 still has a tiny bit of treble grain.  This shows a lack of understanding of HF detail.  The real thing--live unamped instruments and voices--can be quite irritating heard at close range where microphones are placed even at only moderately loud SPL's.  Many euphonically oriented listeners say that the unpleasant HF detail is treble grain.  I interpret that review as 100% glowing enthusiasm, if you know how to review the reviewer.  It is still useful, and I commend his descriptions of musical examples.

As for your one customer who preferred his $14K/pr tube amps to the EVS1200, you know what I would say to that.  Everyone is entitled to his preference, but so far, I have not heard anyone who did an A/B of an IceEdge 1200 AS1 amp with any expensive "SOTA" amp say that such a "SOTA" amp had better clarity/information retrieval.  The most informative person is zephyr24069 who didn't have the Esoteric Grandioso M1 mono blocks at the same time as his Legacy IV4 ultra, and made a judgment in retrospect that they were comparable.  But he said that the Esoteric A-02 stereo was warmer.  So I'll go on record here and say that nobody has yet heard any amp of better clarity/detail than the best implementations of IceEdge 1200 AS1.  The highbrow types that own and dealers who sell, uber expensive amps would never submit to an A/B with a cheap great class D amp and report the results in an unbiased manner.  Their egos and businesses are at stake.

The tube amps that were preferred are less than $8K for the PAIR. This person just got an all out, very latest McCormack DNA 0.5 and thinks its the best amp....tube or solid state...he has ever heard. The DNA amps are not produced anymore so you have to find a used one and send it to Steve and have him do all his latest mods and tweaks.....apparently, everything is rebuilt.

Here is a review of some other persons mod to his DNA-1
https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/amp/messages/24/240679.html

Modders rule....he he


You omitted his statement:

• Soundstage width and depth presentation not quite as “big” as some other reference-level amplifiers.

Did you read the 10 Audio review I posted? He does not think it is anywhere near as good as his Benchmark or many other amps.....only rated it an 8 on his 10 scale. There are tons of people who have sold stock IceEdge module amps (Mivera amps, for instance) as these stock IceEdge amps did not compete in their system.

I am not saying you should not buy the IceEdge based Rouge and sent it to me. Just trying to give some perspective. Truth is not a guessing game. In my direct experience, the modded IceEdge are very good. Stock, I found it boring and Blah.

I don’t see much point in interacting in this kind of debate if the mods are going to delete/ban people for having a different opinion.

@dougeyjones  Its not the difference of opinion that got your posts removed, it was that you violated a forum rule. As an example, you can't call someone 'stupid' or anything like that. You **can** call the comment the person made stupid. The distinction is 'attack the post, not the poster'. If you follow that rule you won't get posts removed.


I've auditioned a number of mics against my Neumann U67s and find that they are actually quite neutral. Just because something is tube does not mean that it has to be colored- so much depends on topology. For example, to get rid of the 2nd order to which so many solid state advocates object, we designed our tube amps to be fully differential from input to output. In this manner the even orders cancel in the amp, not just at the output. By doing this our primary distortion product is the 3rd harmonic. It masks the presence of the higher orders and so the amps sound very smooth, and because the even orders are mostly cancelled, also very transparent. This is BTW how a lot of solid state designers do it also!


You can make a solid state amp that makes a lot of the 2nd order, and it too will sound smoother; Sunn very famously did that with their first solid state guitar amps in the late 1960s, by making almost the entire amplifier single-ended (which is where most of the 2nd order comes from). Its more about topology than it is tube or solid state. Our class D amps have a distortion signature that looks a lot like a tube amp (as does the AGD Audion) and no surprise, these amps sound nice and smooth. 


@tweak1  To be clear, the moderators are not 'PC' so much as someone reported a post you made- that's how moderators find out about forum violations. I'm a moderator on a different site if you're wondering how I know this.