After 005’s arrival, first day I just checked it works properly. Yesterday I made some power cords and interconnects to put 005 in my system and make one empty inlet in my Stella P3 regenerator. Partly because its predecessor was ADI-2 pro whose audio io is phone jack, it took some time and labor. I had to rearrange gears and cables. It took some time to make it sound and some aspects of the setup are changed.
One minor trouble was that I once failed to update 005’s firmware. Pushing the flash erase button makes the unit not recognized as an USB audio device. After the firmware rewritten it is detected by computers again. But according to Jinbo, 005 is delievered with the latest firmware already so update is needless!
So I had some hours of listening session today and I’d like to say shortly. Its details and soundstage is great. It renders depth and layers and fills the whole space behind speakers even at quite low volume. Microdetail is superb, as many said you’ll very frequently notice what you haven’t heard yet in your familiar tracks. Dynamic constrast is also great, I can turn down the voulme further than I used to with ADI-2.
Sound color is very composed, doesn’t glitter excessively. Texture is not silky, in analogy sometimes it reminds me very high quality linen fabric. Sometimes it felt coarse, but after several hours it began to be more liquid I think. Is its sound accurate? I’m not sure yet, but I think its sound is of very high caliber and taste.
Some glitches, sometimes DoP does not work and it makes very loud pop. I coundn’t find the right routine to make it sure to work yet. (It’s partly because I use digital volume with my old mac mini and Audirvana. DSD works better with 005’s internal volume while pcm is better with Audirvana’s noise shaped volume. So switching between DSD/pcm is quite complex and some danger there. Right now I’m attenuating about -20db with 10k resister divider and further -6~-20db with digital volume. A passive attenuator might work in my case.) Another glitch is that some tracks pop with DPLL level 1, it is not consistant and the same track is sometimes ok and sometimes it pops, I don’t understand why...
So it will be a long way to put everything right, but I think it’s promising.