Musical Fidelity A3 24 What R My Ears Telling Me?

Joseph,

I have 2 guesses. 1, also that the unit may be defective, which was common with the first batch of these as mentioned, but no problems on newer units, at least according to my dealer. Second guess is that the Sony makes for a poor transport. I've paired my MF A3 24 dac with a handful of transports, and, for example, it sounded plain awful with my DVD player, mundane with a Pioneer elite cd player or Jolida JD100 as tranpsorts. When attached to a Theta dedicated transport its pure magic. There is no way the Sony 999 can touch it in redbook, even in sacd with the Sony I would probably still favor the MF on redbook for a more fleshed out presentation while still having exceptional openness, clarity, smoothness, presence, detail retrieveal and extension into the heavens, this on the hundreds of cd's I own, not just the 5 SACD would ever buy with what is out there currently. It really can be that good. Again, this dac is extremely transport dependent, what may have worked with other dacs won't for sure work with this one, at least in my experience with it. If garbage goes into the dac on more trash comes out, it is highly revealing and unforgiving.

I have been thinking of purchasing the Musical Fidelity A3 24 for use with my Meridian 506.20 I guess I am better off Purchasing the SONY SACD 777ES. Can anyone tell me if the SONY plays redbook CD's as well as the Meridian - Musical Fidelity Combo.

Thanks to all for the response. This is a very difficult situation in that I really want for the MF to work, but I believe that there are some problems. According to MF, this DAC was made with the sole purpose of working with all transports of all quality levels. I don't buy the Sony is trash theory because MF uses Sony transports on their CD and the DVP 999ES is a $1500.00 unit, certainly not the top of the line for Redbook or SACD but certainly a very respectable player. I have thousands of CD's and my main purpose for buying the MF DAC was to unleash the "sonic magic" in them. I bought the MF in late September/early October of 2002 so I believe that it is one of the later units shipped. Now that I recall, I remember doing A/B comparissons with my other 2 players and I would have to say that it was 50/50 on the improvement side depending on the music. There was usually an improvement with the high end and some harmonic excitement but I'm really beginning to wonder how much of a difference it actually made. There were times when the "downsampling" took place, so I'm sure that this is not an exclusive problem to just the Sony. I'm pretty hard to fool as I have a home recording sudio and have done a number of remastering jobs. Sometimes we find ourselves convincing ourselves that things are are such and such a way when they really are not...this could be
the case here. I boght this because of the Tellig article. When I heard a demo of the unit, I really did not hear much of a differnece but I chalked that up to being in a demo situation and since I had 14 days to return the item, I decided to take the plunge. My ears are telling me that the sound of the Sony by itself (using Tara Lab interconnets, ML Aerius i with ML cables, and Classe amps) sounds superior to that of MF processed sound. On follow up articles, Tellig also admits that at times he cannot tell the difference between the processed and unprocessed sounds (In particular with the New McIntosh Multi disc player and others). My 0.2 cents..or actually $1300.00 worth!

-JB-

Just because it is an expensive box that plays multiple formats doesn't in any ways mean it makes for a good transport to drive an external dac, acutally the opposite is most likely, as the vast majority of DVD players make awful transports, what comes out of their digital output can be pretty ugly. Look inside a good dedicated transport and you'll be amazed at how different it is compared to your Sony, or most every sub $3k CD player on the market for that matter. If you're happy with the sound from the Sony, by all means, use it, but I wouldn't discard the MF dac so quickly, not before mating it with a quality dedicated transport. Another problem with good equiptment is its revealing nature. If other pieces in the chain have flaws, good sounding gear can be forgiving and it can go hidden, but great sounding gear can sound like crap in the wrong system, and the fault can be wrongly placed on the newly inserted piece of gear, whereas it is simply exposing a problem or shortcoming elsewhere. Just some food for thought, I've been down a similar path recently and am sure it is a common occurance with other systems as well....

And, again, "Downsampling" should never happen with this player, unless your unit is ill and needs servicing.

This relates more to getting even better sound out of the Sony. Apparently not common knowledge, but by default, the Dynamic Range Control is set to actually give you compression-that setting should be changed to "Wide".

Also by default "CD Direct" is turned off and this should be turned on. I'm not sure whether either of these settings would have an effect on the data being sent with the Sony being used strictly as a transport, but they are supposed to make a significant difference in sound quality when it is used on its own. Might be worth a try either way.