@snopro thanks for the tip I will check out those songs on that Dan Patlansky album. In general the texture and sizzle of electric guitars is more alive sounding than I’ve heard on a full system before.
@rockrider , yes this update is with my basic interim cables still. I’ve since moved my speakers slightly apart and the sound has become bigger in scale with even more depth and dimension. As good as it was before it’s sounding even better now.
I really respect Innuos a lot and don’t want to make it seem like Grimm is good and Innuos is not, because that’s not the case. The Innuos setup has a charm to it that the Grimm doesn’t have. With the Tambaqui, Innuos is very clean and smooth, but with a large-scale overall presentation, and again that forward presentation of the mid and upper ranges. Presence. Yes, that’s it! The Innuos setup does exceptionally well with presence, ambience, and scale.
But while the MU1 may not have these qualities quite to the same degree, it heads in a totally different direction - stunning detail, tangibility, solidity, impact, and music that is totally alive and captivating with more athletic drive to it. And I get more of a feeling of people playing music as opposed to listening to reproduced music.
A few posts ago I mentioned that eighties albums (like Bowie’s) that have a narrower presentation of vocals sounded even narrower with the Tambaqui. This was when driven by Innuos. With the MU1 and the Tambaqui, that problem is non-existent and Bowie sounds natural (or at least as natural as Bowie can sound…) One track that accentuates this is Bowie’s “Panic in Detroit”. Vocals sound free and not constrained to a narrow presentation, and wow the bite and snarl on the guitars are just incredible, especially with the dual distorted guitar tracks on the left and right through the outro.
I don’t think the Tambaqui and MU1 are going to be liked by everybody and it’s going to be system dependent. If the rest of my system was neutral, I possibly may have found the Tambaqui/MU1 too lean. But my Diablo 300 adds a richness without losing detail that is just right for me. There is a rawness that I just absolutely love, but some may prefer a smoother less textured presentation like what the Innuos does. Don’t get me wrong when I say raw I don’t mean harsh, not by a longsshot. I mean that the detail and texture is fully intact. But the presentation is so relaxed and unforced yet hard-hitting at the same time, and this makes it all so easy to listen to for hours on end. If you are a whisky drinker, it’s sort of like some who prefer Johnnie Walker Blue with some ice and love that it is “smooth”, vs others who prefer a well-aged single malt that is packed with character, unchill-filtered and bottled at cask strength, with no ice and just a few drops of room temperature water. If you are into whisky you know what I mean. Both styles are valid and cater to a different audience. Also to be clear I don’t mean to compare Innuos with Johnnie Walker Blue, that would be unfair to Innuos, lol…. Innuos has far more going on than that. But it’s a good example to explain the distinction.
At this point for me I don’t think there is any ambiguity as to my preference but I’ll give it a few weeks and go back to Innuos to be sure.
And to reiterate - all this is with my interim, lowest level basic AES cable and balanced interconnects. So things will likely shift dramatically again when that changes in a few weeks.