CD Player/Transport Reviews

The Viking's ability to expose Gieseking's morphing tempos enabled me to revisit and mind meld with Gieseking's transcendental Debussy via a four-CD box set of his performances of Debussy and Maurice Ravel (New Classical Adventure/Audiophidelity LC 12281). These CDs are digital remasters made from a digital source, most likely several steps removed from the original analog masters, yet the Viking found the room, air, microphones, and-I swear, during the quietest passages-some faint tube glow and a few momentary hints of these recordings' magnetic-tape origins. These are subtle things I've never noticed while streaming, not even when streaming CD rips from local storage.

More obviously, and more importantly, the Viking put Gieseking's minutest tempo changes front and center where I could "watch" them and be captivated by them. Streaming rarely exposes tempi this minutely. The Viking CD player made me feel like CDs were somehow preserving the timing more perfectly than streamed files. I wondered whether Holter's tinkering with the master clock might have enhanced this effect.

On some tracks, I watched my mind as it watched Gieseking execute these tempo changes, from a vantage point slightly above the piano, where I presume the microphones were hung. From that vantage point, I watched volumes of harmonically charged energy spread out in sync with the movements of his hands. This raw piano energy was framed and absorbed by energy echoing off what sounded like nearby walls of a not-large room. Echo chambers and artificial reverb were scarce to nonexistent during Gieseking's lifetime, so it's likely these performances were recorded in a small studio or recital hall. The Viking showed me a small, moderately lively room.

These recordings contain so much intense pianism that I was more than curious to see what would change when I used a strand of AudioQuest Cinnamon digital cable to connect the Viking's digital output to the Denafrips Terminator Plus DAC's S/PDIF input (footnote 3).

When I played these Gieseking-Debussy CDs through the T-Plus, in my preferred NOS mode, I observed an almost jolting increase in dynamic expression. With the Viking as a transport with the Terminator Plus DAC, the range of dynamic shading between the softest and loudest notes was greater than it had been with the Viking's DAC-obviously so: Soft notes were softer and loud notes were louder, with more distinct gradations of loudness in between.

With the Viking feeding the T-Plus, bass had a larger, stronger force behind it, coming through more solidly than it did with Viking's AKM-based DAC. These forceful bass dynamics were hardly more noticeable than how much the Denafrips made the sky open through the top octaves. Treble detail was more present and discernable. But what caused these differences? My brain chalked these sonic improvements up to the Denafrips's high-power current-to-voltage conversion and its multiple overspec'd power supplies. Its non-oversampling architecture is another obvious candidate.

While not as wham-pow as the Terminator, the Viking's conspicuously strong drive and tempo reproduction are testimony to the quality of its current-to-voltage conversion and its linear power supply.

To finalize this DAC-to-DAC comparison-this is also commentary on the (apparently high) quality of the Viking transport-I decided to listen using a simple, single-microphone recording that I know extremely well and have used to analyze a wide range of digital processors: "Buddy & Maria Elena Talking in Apartment (Undubbed Version)," recorded during the first weeks of 1959, from a three-CD set entitled Buddy Holly Down The Line Rarities (Decca B0011675-2). To zero in on this recording's atmosphere, I used the state-of-the-art Meze Elite headphones powered by the extraordinary headphone amp in the Elekit TU-8900. This amp-headphone combination is extremely insightful, and I felt confident in its ability to show me what I needed to hear.

When I played the Buddy & Maria Elena talking track through the Viking's balanced analog output, I thought the track's opening section with Fifth Avenue street noise coming in through an open window sounded thick and not as airy or transparent as it usually does. This part of the recording always pleases me because I know I am listening to the sounds of actual 1950s automobiles sitting in traffic in New York City in 1959 and, more remarkably, the sounds of Buddy and Maria enjoying themselves privately (smoking pot?) in their apartment just weeks before Buddy died. That's audio verité.

With the Viking's DAC, street sounds sounded muffled, but 30 seconds in I realized that Buddy's and Elena's voices sounded nearer than usual to the microphone, which made them sound clearer and rawer and more like real people talking. This "real people's voices" part really grabbed me. The room sounds were less spacious and well-defined than I am accustomed to, but Buddy's and Maria's voices sounded right there, like they were sitting together on the couch by the coffee table (which maybe they were), and I was there with them.

When the Viking's digital output was feeding Denafrips's Terminator Plus, Buddy's wife Maria was back where she usually was, maybe a dozen feet behind the table-mounted microphone, possibly in a kitchenette, talking on what was surely a wall-mounted Bakelite telephone. (I can tell by how it sounds when she hangs up the receiver.) I felt like an invisible guest sitting on the floor by the couch.

With the Terminator Plus, full-room spatial mapping was dramatically more specific and three-dimensional, but the Viking with its own DAC felt more solid, more being there real.

I was happy to have gotten this Viking DAC–to–Denafrips DAC comparison out of the way at the beginning of my auditions because the real value of the Viking CD player resides not in how effective it is as a transport (very effective) or even how its DAC compared to a $7500 NOS R-2R DAC (a comparison where the Viking also did very well) but in how it felt to use it and how exciting it made playing CDs.

CDs are for collecting
Talk about collectable CD box sets: You ain't lived till you broke the paper seal on You Ain't Talkin' to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music (CD, Columbia Legacy Recordings AC3K 92780), which comes in a wooden cigar box with an R. Crumb portrait of Charlie Poole stuck to its lid. Inside are three CDs in rag-paper sleeves and a luxuriously produced 35-page booklet explaining the origin stories of the 72 78rpm transfers made by Christopher King and restored and mastered by Andreas Meyer and Darcy Proper, respectively. In my experience, digital masters from 78s can sound anywhere from dull and robotic (because the noise-reduction software was wielded with a too-heavy hand), to moderately delightful, like the tracks on this Charlie Poole set. These 78s came from the collections of Joe Bussard and John Coffey, and I bet they sounded goosebump-level vivid on their 78-optimized systems. Through the Hegel Viking, these highly processed remasters sounded quieter than necessary but enjoyably sweet and folk-poetry authentic.

The Viking showed how carefully the remastering cats tried to strike an appropriately tasteful balance between raw 78 sound (which I love) and civilized modern sound, but to my taste, on these CDs, they went too far. Nevertheless, Hegel's Viking did its job perfectly, keeping my sound critique to a minimum, and my heart locked on to all 72 tracks of this important box set.

As a vocalist, I put Bob Dylan right up there with Little Richard and Frank Sinatra, and I've bought nearly every record he's released. But I've always cringed at how bad his Columbia recordings make his voice sound: opaque, compressed, slurred, and muffled in a manner that would have killed a lesser artist. Therefore, I've also purchased a lot of bootleg CDs of Dylan's live concerts because I felt these performances got me closer to Bob's songs than his studio issues do, even though the sound quality on these live bootlegs was usually pretty rough and rowdy. In the early '90s, Columbia decided to cut in on the bootleg action and began releasing a series of "bootleg" CDs featuring studio outtakes that sounded more intimate and less overproduced than their official releases. These bootlegs came in luxurious Deluxe or Collector Edition packaging and featured multiple studio outtakes of Dylan's most iconic songs. These beautiful sets were carefully mastered to come through just-washed fresh and Dylan-scholar curated.

Through the Hegel Viking, the "Cutting Edge Deluxe Edition" of Volume 12, Bob Dylan 1965–1966 (Columbia 88875124412) consumed a whole day of my life, and by the time I'd heard six versions of "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," I felt closer than ever to my hero. I would characterize the sound through the Viking as not hard, or soft, or blurred, or shallow, or tone-shifted in any way. All three discs came through crisp but supple and straightforward, leaning toward slightly dry. Most of these Volume 12 tracks were not close to the final album arrangement, so it was wild watching Dylan experiment, searching for better and better arrangements to support his lyrics. The Viking recovered these tracks in a sturdy, musically satisfying manner that exposed Dylan as a master of bent words, eccentric phrasing, and meaning-laden poetics.

Which brings me to a dumb Herb-question: When audiophiles rip their CDs to hard drives, what do they do with the deluxe packaging?

The silver disc is still alive
Hegel Music Systems' Viking presented every CD with enough verve, transparency, and natural detail to make each disc sound distinctly different, which shows that the player's sound was not swamping the disc's sound. This ability to disappear and put the character and vital energies of recordings up front made the Viking exciting to use, and that is my highest compliment. Highly recommended

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Footnote 3: The most current Denafrips Terminator Plus, the 12th Anniversary Edition, retails for just over $7500-substantially more than the Hegel Viking-and of course it includes no transport. When the model I own was replaced, it cost roughly $6400.