pandasharka;678718 Wrote: > I think you may have hit the nail on the head with your line: > > "What more do I want? It's all there." > > Exactly. Maybe Everest has been climbed. Maybe you have managed to > squeeze out (excuse the pun) everything available from SB Touch with > TT3.0 & all other environment mods. > > Remember, it is a budget piece of kit that with your mods has bought it > into a league way over its price point. > > Be satisfied with what you have achieved and what you have shared with > this community. >
There is always room for improvement. I'm sure there will be new, never before thought of ways to squeeze even more music out of the Touch. The age of endless tweaking had just begun, and you want to close the chapter on it already? I've been doing a lot of critical listening myself, especially with the recent mods that ensued when TT3.0 got released. I've concluded that, on my system, all the improvements are first and foremost detectable in terms of resolution, separation, lowering the noise floor, eliminating the digital artifacts such as glare and grit. However, no matter how polished these tweaks may be, the fact still remains that the resulting sound is unmistakably digital. I wanted to see if I could cheat mother nature and approximate the illusion of playing a high end analog source while streaming to the Touch. Here is what I did: There is an ultra high-end audio store a few blocks away from my house. I've spent a few days in there, doing my pre-Christmas shopping (basically, doing a LOT of auditioning and chatting with the owner as well as with the unavoidable onlookers. The end result -- I've brought home three Shakti stones and a Shunyata power cable. OK, so this sounds like I've gone mental and succumbed to the worst case of audiophilia nervosa and all that voodoo. But hear me out. I place Shakti stones on my DAC, and on the preamp and power amp (it's important to place them above the transformers in each component). Then I replace my Nordost power cable with the Shunyata power cable and, lo and behold, the CHARACTER of the sound, as if by magic, radically changed. The best way to describe the change is to say that the sound became much 'wetter'. Wet as in luscious wet oil paint. So yes, wet, greasy, oily, juicy, in short -- organic and very much analog-like. Removing the Shakti stones and the Shunyata power cable brought back the old familiar dry, analytical, clinical sound. Put the Shakti stones on again and connect the power amp with Shunyata, and voila! the wet, greasy sound is back again. It feels as if the sound has been amplified, even though the volume level hasn't changed. But the subjective impression is that now I'm listening to a louder, more present sound. The effect is similar to loading a photo into the Photoshop and then cranking up the color saturation. I highly recommend this tweak. It'll revitalize your system, especially if you have it all modded to its gills with Soundcheck's TT3.0. Shakti stones are marvelous in reducing the EMI and the RFI glare, and Shunyata power cables are world renowned for their exquisite 'liquid' sound. Believe me, it's worth a try, because it will get your system sounding like a high-end vinyl rig. -- magiccarpetride ------------------------------------------------------------------------ magiccarpetride's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37863 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=91322 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
