search
The soundstage in the early listening was veiled, almost hazy. I found it difficult to step into the original acoustic of the performance. The decay of transients was obscured, so it was tough to hear far into the soundstage. Soundstage transparency improved gradually as the Revolution continued to break-in. This speaker requires a long break-in period—on the order of 100 hours. While it never reached electrostatic-like transparency or even matched the best dynamic designs in this regard, at least with a good tube amp I did not find its level of performance here an obstacle to musical…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Three-way dynamic loudspeaker with a dipole bass dispersion pattern and a cardioid treble and midrange pattern. Frequency response: 50Hz-20kHz ±2dB. Minimum impedance: 5 ohms. Sensitivity: 86dB/W/m. Recommended amplifier power: 50-250Wpc into 4 ohms.
Dimensions: 39" H by 18" W by 16" D. Weight: 50 lbs.
Serial numbers of units reviewed: 106/107 (1995), 108/109 (1997).
Price: $3999/pair (1995). Approximate number of dealers: 15.
Manufacturer: Gradient, Ltd., Levyspänkatu 28 FIN-04440, Järvenpää, Finland. Tel: (35) 8-0291-7875. Fax: (35) 8-…
Sidebar 2: Measurements
DO estimated the Revolution's sensitivity at 82dB/W/m (footnote 1). My B-weighted measurement was a little lower, at 81.7dB/2.83V/m. This speaker will definitely need plenty of watts to come to life—leave your low-powered single-ended tube amplifiers in their shipping cartons! The impedance curve (fig.1) will also make life hard for the accompanying amplifier, dropping to 3 ohms in the power region of the upper bass. The high range of the impedance magnitude—from 3 ohms at 60Hz to 26.5 ohms at 2.1kHz—will also make the tonal balance of the speaker very dependent…
John Atkinson wrote about the Gradient Revolution in March 1997 (Vol.20 No.3):
When listening critically to a product for review, you can spend so much time trying to detect faults that it only slowly dawns on you that not only is the product doing almost nothing wrong, it is actually performing superbly well. Such was the case when I auditioned the Gradient Revolution loudspeaker. Back in May 1995 (Vol.18 No.5), Dick Olsher raved about the performance of this unusual floorstanding loudspeaker from Finland. Combining an aperiodic mid/treble head-unit featuring a SEAS-sourced concentric…
I have a warm spot in my heart for MSB's approach to product development. They come from a tweaker heritage and still practice the art: MSB will happily install a 24-bit/192kHz upsampler in your CD player, a 5.1-channel input in your DPL amp or receiver, and true 24/96 outputs in your DVD player. Their standalone products, starting with the original Link DAC, are designed from the start to include space for later additions and enhancements.
In fact, the most significant trend I see in the progression from the original Link DAC to the DAC II and DAC III is the ease and…
The Platinum Link Plus has the same footprint and is twice as high and exactly twice as heavy as the Link DAC III. The Link Plus's built-in power supply is the P1000 Power Base, which I thought was a profound improvement when I reviewed the III in September 2000.
DAC on the Block
I seem to experience a feeding frenzy of DACs every year or two, and the Platinum Link Plus arrived while I was in the midst of the latest one. On the one hand, these frenzies make it easier to set up comparisons that emphasize specific differences; on the other, they make it hard for me to keep an…
Was the sound worse without upsampling and/or interpolation? Only by a very little, and this was revealed only by a slight loss of the MSB's smooth frequency and spatial integrity. MSB has done their homework in adapting their algorithms to interact optimally with each other, and that's the best we can ask of a design team. In fact, one might question the necessity of having these as options and not as fixed settings.
I found the Phase Invert switch and the filter-slope adjustments useful. The need for the former is, despite much debate, still controversial among many audiophiles.…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Platinum Link Plus Sign-Magnitude Ladder digital-to-analog converter. Inputs: 5 digital, S/PDIF coax, S/PDIF TosLink, AES/EBU, 2 MSB Network, 1 pair balanced (XLR) analog bypass. Outputs: 2 pairs analog output jacks (RCA, XLR). Sampling rate: 32-96kHz input (192kHz via MSB Network). Upsampling ratio: 4x. Interpolation: 8x, 16x. Dynamic range: 136dBA Signal/noise ratio: 136dB. Channel separation: >130dB. THD+noise: 0.006%. Analog outputs at 0dB: 3.6V RMS (RCA), 7.5V RMS.
Dimensions: 17" W by 3.5" H by 14" D. Weight: 36 lbs net.
Serial number…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog source: Heybrook TT2 turntable, SME III tonearm, Ortofon SME30H cartridge.
Digital sources: Meridian 508.24 CD player, Meridian Reference 800/861 DVD-Audio player/control unit, Sony SCD-XA777ES SACD player; Mark Levinson No.360S, Musical Fidelity A324, and Weiss Medea DACs.
Preamplification: Sonic Frontiers Line-3 line stage, Audiolab 8000PPA phono stage.
Power amplifiers: Bel Canto EVo2, Sonic Frontiers Power-3, Classé CAM-350 monoblocks.
Loudspeakers: Revel Ultima Studio.
Cables: Interconnect: AudioQuest Anaconda, Python, balanced;…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
The MSB Platinum Link Plus locked on to S/PDIF and AES/EBU datastreams with sample rates ranging from 32kHz to 96kHz. However, at the highest sample rates, the 4x oversampling button LED changed to 2x oversampling, meaning that the DAC chips run at the same high rate when fed 44.1kHz and 88.2kHz data. The maximum output level at 1kHz was 7.046V from the balanced XLR jacks, 3.522V from the unbalanced RCAs. The latter is almost 5dB higher than the CD Standard's 2V RMS, meaning that care needs to be taken to match levels in A/B comparisons. The Platinum didn't invert…