Who has Luv for the Lyngdorf 2170 and is thinking about the 3400.

Hello Cal,
I believe that the Coincident Dragons mono blocks or the Atma-sphere mono blocks would mate very well with the Pure Reference Extreme speakers. My experience with Atma-sphere amplifiers leads me to expect them to be a ’tad ’ leaner (relatively speaking) than the 211 based Dragons yet overall quite good (and they’re less expensive). All things considered I believe you’re on the right track.

I’m a little surprised that with room correction implemented you couldn’t get the Lyngdorf to work to your satisfaction with your very high resolution/transparent speakers. Both of these products are placed in the neutral camp by those familiar with them. So you’d expect an excellent pairing (at least in theory. Cal did this pairing sound thinner/leaner in the crucial midrange ?

Charles

I just got my 3400 delivered. Sounds great out of the box, although not as good as the used 2170 I got a home demo for (guessing it needs to be broken in).

At some point will compare them to my Coincident Frankensteins Mk2. (Cal, like @charles1dad, I would love to hear more about your 3400 experience).

Meanwhile can some tell me how long is the break in time for the 3400s (or your 2170s that you own).

@ essrand

Congratulation on getting Lyngdorf 3400!

I will appreciate very much if you could compare the sound of it with DAC you have.

Recently, the price of good Dac is going up without bound.

Thus 6500$ is not much if it can compete with high quality Dac.

Thomas

@essrand Sorry for the delayed feedback regarding the Lyngdorf.  Although I didn't think the unit sounded bad, I eventually came to the conclusion that all of the reasons I liked the unit were really just about convenience.  I loved streaming Tidal to the unit and controlling it from any computer/smartphone/tablet.  Super convenient.  Unfortunately I just couldn't get it to sound right for me.  It sounded smooth and easy with great bass, but gave up body, texture, and realness to the Frankensteins. 

With my speakers and in my room, I also had two other issues that seem pretty inconsistent with everyone else's opinions. 

First, it did not image as cleanly as the Frankensteins.  I was having trouble dialing in my speakers, just kind of fumbling around to get them setup to center the image/soundstage (note that I just pulled my PREs out of storage in August).  When I switched to the Frankensteins, I was able to instantly set everything up appropriately.  Every 1 cm movement was so clearly reflected by a change in the sound that I could much more easily figure out where the speakers needed to be.

Second, for whatever reason, my speakers just didn't like the digital processing.  Every time I turned off a processing feature, I could hear myself get close to the music.  This included the digital limiter, ICC (added headroom to prevent clipping), and - surprisingly - room perfect.  I don't know if I set it up incorrectly (or if it was because I was limping along with a less than ideal cabling situation - I forced to use some cheap old MITs that I'd repaired myself), but room perfect was just twisting the music for me.  It nicely centered the image and increased the fullness of the sound, but was doing something to the phasing (across the frequency band) that just wasn't right.  I could feel my body relax when I turned it off.  Once I got the speakers more appropriately setup with the frankensteins, I did discover that my natural image was kind of left of center, so maybe that and my slightly broken wires together just prevented room perfect from working correctly. 

Anyway, as I stated earlier, I eventually just came to the conclusion that the Coincident speakers were designed to work a simple tube circuit and that they don't respond well to digital and solid state amplification.  Or alternatively, that they just respond really well to amplifiers made by Coincident.  As you can see in another thread of mine, they also beat out the Atma-sphere M-60s (again in the domain of body, texture, and realism)...

@shkong788 I did try the unit simply as a DAC (in lieu of my PS Audio PWD).  Again, it excelled in smoothness, bass, and reliability (streaming just always worked right).  I felt, however, that the PWD had a fuller sound with better body.  To steal words from Charles, it was just more natural.  I absolutely agree with Charles that that's the key attribute on which to judge components.  The more natural it sounds, the more easily it pulls out emotions, at least in my experience.

I'll also say that a couple years ago I tried to upgrade my DAC to PS Audio's Directstream and actually ended up going back to the PWD.  The Direcstream had more detail, but again, the music just didn't sound as real. 

Also, just FYI, on the Lyngdorf, all my critical listening was over the ethernet input.