Rives PARC or Tact 2.0 AA for room correction?

Hi Onhwy61

Using an EMC CD1 as my primary source. I'm not sure if I'll go back to vinyl, but intend to do so in the future.

It doesn't make much sense to use the Tact unless you're going to just use the EMC as a transport and rely upon the Tact for D/A conversion. There is absolutely no reason to add extra A/D and D/A stages to your playback chain. The Tact's D/A may or may not be an improvement over the EMC, only comparison listening will give you that answer. Your original post says you're looking for an analog EQ device, that eliminates the Tact and leaves the Rives, or any other analog parametric EQ device.

BTW, I own a TACT 2.0 and think it's a marvelous piece of equipment. It has a very steep learning curve, but it is capable of serious sound alteration. If used correctly, it's wonderful, but it doesn't sound like it's the piece you're looking for.

Onhwy, I don't understand your suggestion that the TACT is inappropriate for this application and assertion that analog equalization is the optimal solution. The reason to add an "extra A/D and D/A" stage in the playback is to remove room effects which have a great negative impact than any intermediate processing steps.

Candidly, the 'digital artifact' argument (not made by you) is a bit specious, for analog equalization also introduces phase and amplitude artifacts to the playback. So it's more an issue of minimizing the negative effects of the improvement activity. And on this score, we fall into the subjective realm of what people are looking for in their system. If time coherency is paramount to the listener, then there is one product which can assist. If frequency flatness is desired, however, then there are two approaches (which have pros and cons).

What Mr. Rives writes is very interesting. I remember reading a recent article about the TacT in Hi-Fi News, I believe, in which the reviewer clearly says that any filtering beyond 4th order is very audible as distortion. Let's remember that one of the supposed advantages of digital correction is the very high-order filtering possible.

Funny, you never see any TacT reps hanging around these forums like Mr.Rives.