Please people, before making such wildly speculative conclusions about Hifi News reviews or British Hifi magazines in general, just go read the darn review first! The Hifi News reviews are technically sound. Their review process consists of two independent test tracks: one performed by the reviewers by listening and comparing to other similar equipment, and the other by thoroughly measuring the equipment. The measurements are done by Miller Audio Reseach - you can download the measurements for yourself from http://www.milleraudioresearch.com/avtech/. After all that's been done the reviewers try to correlate what they heard through their listening tests with the independently recorded measurement results. It's usually quite amazing how well the listening tests correlate with the measurement results!
Here's an excerpt from the Miller Audio measurement results: "Measured via its fixed balanced outputs using both 48kHz an 96kHz/24-bit data, the Transporter emerges as an impressive and slick design that offers an excellent technical performance (low THD and wide S/N), only partially let down by a relatively weak jitter rejection. ...[snip] Measured against this backdrop, the moderate 1000psec jitter is a tad disappointing and, being largely data-induced in nature, looks to be a by-product of the S/PDIF input receiver rather than the DAC itself..." After noting that the Townshend CDP sounded much better than the Transporter the reviewer writes the following: "This outcome might seem surprising in light of the Transporter's mostly exemplary measured performance, but the results of Paul Miller's jitter test may hold the key. While data-induced jitter can make reproduced music sound bland, in Paul's words, the jitter figures recorded here are moderate, rather than debilitating" Then a paragraph later the reviewer writes: "But there is still a puzzle here, in that Stereophile's recent review of the Transporter - published after I'd already begun my assessment - elicited much lower jitter figures, despite using the same measurement hardware, and reached more positive conclusions about its sound quality. This may suggest that our review sample wasn't in the rudest of health but, until we test another, we have to assume that it is representative of the 230V incarnation. However that pans out, the conclusion for now has to be that the Transporter, despite its broad capability, attractive design and fine perfomance on the test bench in most respects, doesn't quite deliver on its promise of high-end sound quality. It simply lacks the resolution to mix it with the best of conventional audio." For those that didn't read the Stereophile review of the Transporter, they can find it here: http://www.stereophile.com/mediaservers/207slim/ The measured jitter results in the Stereophile test was in the region of 250psec - a third of what was measured in the UK version of the Transporter. For comparison purposes, really good DACS and CD players have jitter figures in the region of 20psec. So, in my mind the Hifi News review was objective and very honest - that's something that can't be said of many other Hifi magazines! -- Jaco ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jaco's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10726 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33276 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
