Hi, I've upgraded everything over the last 6 months and the sonic improvements were not where I thought they would be.
My old system was: Linn Karik CDP (transport) + Numerik DAC Linn preamp + Quad 909 power amp Quad ESL 63 speakers I started by replacing the speakers with a pair of Quad 989. That made a medium improvement, as expected due to the larger sound radiating area. It used up 110% of the available WAF as well. I do have a subwoofer as well, just in case and I kept that. I then first put in a dCS Delius DAC instead of the Numerik. That made a LARGE improvement. I was stunned, didn't think I would get that size improvement here, I had expected something subtle. Suddenly there was more bass, violins started to sound good, instruments were exactly where they should be in the orchestra (and not slowly "floating" from sideways), cymbals and other transients were amazing etc. Next thing was a dCS Purcell upsampler. That also made a large improvment, about half of the BIG improvement of the Delius. The difference here was that suddenly I got extremely precise imaging. In a quartet of singers I could actually "see" exactly where they stood on the stage even if close together. I was happy with this for a while but had this suspiscion that the power amp wasn't really up to the rest of the gadgets. So when an opportunity came up on Ebay, I got a Linn Klimax Chakra Twin. Now that made another LARGE improvement - extremely noticeable in the bass which suddenly went much lower and became extremely precise. Very unexpected, again I had expected something subtle. On top of all the above, I've started to use a Squeezebox 3 as the main digital source. I also have a dCS Verdi (well - couldn't resist the SACD stuff) transport and although the sound is better even on CD's from this source, the difference to a SB3 is rather small. If it wasn't for the SACD playback, I would sell the Verdi. Next project is to improve on the 2 main weaknesses with Sqeezebox - 1) It can't be slaved to a master clock and 2) It has no balanced output. In order to achieve this, I am working on a media server PC with a Lynx 2 soundcard which has these two lacking features. I am planning to use the Sqeezebox as an interface only - not actually sending any sound through it but rather through the Lynx card via balanced digital interconnect to the DAC. It will still appear as if SB3 is doing it, normal remote control etc. Cables then - well I have all the "good" stuff everywhere. But according to my ears, no cable change made anything very noticeable to the sound quality. Maybe small differences (haven't been bothered with blind testing) but I'm not sure I would notice if someone switched back to the old cables. The only difference that really was there - was when I switched in the Klimax via balanced outputs. I suspect balanced outputs make a rather noticeable difference but haven't made any comparisons where I only switched from unbalanced to balanced. -- CarlOtto ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CarlOtto's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3581 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22000 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
