Steve, I confirm your findings about X-01's extreme sensitivity to interconnects.
Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending a marathon open-house event at Aris Audio in Salt Lake City, where Scott Haver, Aris's proprietor, gave me free range of his excellent facilities and several systems. In particular,
I had the opportunity to audition at length a system consisting initially of X-01, Audioquest Panther XLR, Audio Research Ref 3 in its pre update config, Jaguar XLR, Theta Dreadnaught, Audioquest Pikes Peak, Vandersteen 5A.
I used for the audition a variety of chamber music and orchestra CDs from the same set I used in my original audition of the ARC Ref 3 referenced above.
While CDS that had only moderate pitch extensions yielded a very good balanced, graceful and detailed sound, any greater top or bottom extension in the recording -- as in violins high strings, high woodwinds and double basses, appear to yield shrill and distorted highs, nasal mids, bloating on the mid bass, and hazy low indistinct bass.
I was not a terribly happy camper. This until Scott suggested we change the AQQ Panther with a 3 ft length of Audio Quest Sky. The entire system started to shine. Glorious mids, highs became more extended and approx 95% free of distortion, mid bass bloating disappeared, deep Bass became clean graceful and correct down to the 16 ft range of the double bass pedal openstring notes in orchestral works.
In particular, the beginning of the 2nd movement in Dvorak's New World Symphony conducted by Leonard Bernstein became something so emotional to raise your hair on end. The initial brass fanfare was deep with that slight treble cuivre that make good brass give goose bumps. The timpanis were clean and powerful while the double basses were something to be beheld.
In addition, what had suddenly appeared in spades was the threedimensional image of the hall, with a sense of space, air and overall grace I had seldom heard before in that recording. This seems to point out once again that X-01 is a wonderful but merciless machine: it is capable of extracting mountains of information from a disk. . . and if ICs and electronics downstream are not up to handling the information. . . results may be not of our liking. I only wish I had the opportunity to switch the Jaguar to Sky as well, and the Pikes Peak to Everest. . . may be next time.
One last note, during the audition I activated in error the button on the Ref 3 remote that turns off the balanced return signal on the ICs of this device. Suddenly the overall sound became completely bloodless, thin and uninvolved, until I turned the balanced signal back on. Small lesson learned: if a device is truly optimized for balanced operations, it is best used that way.
Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending a marathon open-house event at Aris Audio in Salt Lake City, where Scott Haver, Aris's proprietor, gave me free range of his excellent facilities and several systems. In particular,
I had the opportunity to audition at length a system consisting initially of X-01, Audioquest Panther XLR, Audio Research Ref 3 in its pre update config, Jaguar XLR, Theta Dreadnaught, Audioquest Pikes Peak, Vandersteen 5A.
I used for the audition a variety of chamber music and orchestra CDs from the same set I used in my original audition of the ARC Ref 3 referenced above.
While CDS that had only moderate pitch extensions yielded a very good balanced, graceful and detailed sound, any greater top or bottom extension in the recording -- as in violins high strings, high woodwinds and double basses, appear to yield shrill and distorted highs, nasal mids, bloating on the mid bass, and hazy low indistinct bass.
I was not a terribly happy camper. This until Scott suggested we change the AQQ Panther with a 3 ft length of Audio Quest Sky. The entire system started to shine. Glorious mids, highs became more extended and approx 95% free of distortion, mid bass bloating disappeared, deep Bass became clean graceful and correct down to the 16 ft range of the double bass pedal openstring notes in orchestral works.
In particular, the beginning of the 2nd movement in Dvorak's New World Symphony conducted by Leonard Bernstein became something so emotional to raise your hair on end. The initial brass fanfare was deep with that slight treble cuivre that make good brass give goose bumps. The timpanis were clean and powerful while the double basses were something to be beheld.
In addition, what had suddenly appeared in spades was the threedimensional image of the hall, with a sense of space, air and overall grace I had seldom heard before in that recording. This seems to point out once again that X-01 is a wonderful but merciless machine: it is capable of extracting mountains of information from a disk. . . and if ICs and electronics downstream are not up to handling the information. . . results may be not of our liking. I only wish I had the opportunity to switch the Jaguar to Sky as well, and the Pikes Peak to Everest. . . may be next time.
One last note, during the audition I activated in error the button on the Ref 3 remote that turns off the balanced return signal on the ICs of this device. Suddenly the overall sound became completely bloodless, thin and uninvolved, until I turned the balanced signal back on. Small lesson learned: if a device is truly optimized for balanced operations, it is best used that way.