Musical Fidelity A3 24 What R My Ears Telling Me?

I have no personal experience with either of your units, but I for one am certainly willing to believe what you're hearing is the truth. The only fly in the ointment is that the other problems you detail would seem to make it questionable whether or not the DAC is functioning entirely properly, either by itself or in combination with the new player. However, since nowhere do you say that you think the MF, when assumed to be working correctly, sounds any different than you remember it sounding before you got the Sony, I'd say it might be time to downsize it. (You might find it interesting to click on my >Threads< below, and read the one entitled, "Upsampling put to the test: Are you ready?")

My guess is that the A3-24 is defective. Take it to the shop where you purchased it from and have them do a side by each comparison with a known good unit. If I'm not mistaken, Sam Tellig had a defective A3-24 for his first review sample - it can happen. And although the Sony ES series stuff is of very excellant quality I find it hard to believe that the DVD player should sound better than a DAC that has been raved about by more than just a few members of the audio press. Good luck.

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-