First on the Rega P1 was Mercedes Sosa’s Homenaje a Violeta Parra. I closed my eyes and focused on the sound. Mercedes Sosa’s towering delivery resounded hugely over a precisely strummed nylon-string guitar and thumping tribal drums. Sound in the new room was phenomenal. I had never before experienced such soundstage depth with my system…
search
My hi-fi basked in morning sunshine. The sparkling white finish of the Usher 520s reflected angular glints of yellow light across plaster walls. Birds chirped as I hoped for the best. Would my bass bloat be gone? Would I have an evenly dispersed image?
Monday, January 14, was a difficult day for the abandoned amusement park that is my body. In the morning, I packed two Lamm ML2.2 amplifiers into their wooden crates and wrestled them outside for collection by some unlucky air-freight courier. After that, I backed up my car to the tiny front porch of our house so I could unload a pair of 1966 Altec Valencia loudspeakers I'd collected the day before: in excess of 100 pounds each, just like the crated Lamms, but considerably larger.
Because our front steps are only 36" wide, I had hoped to use my utility ramps to slide the 30"-wide…
With their cabinets placed directly on the floor, the centers of the Valencias' midrange/treble horns are considerably lower than the ear level of a typical seated listener (which would be me); indeed, under those conditions, a treble level of "2" seemed to provide the right balance of bass and treble. But the quality of those trebles left much to be desired. While the Valencias' high-frequency performance wasn't as consistently harsh as that of an untreated Lowther whizzer cone—a characteristic with which I am richly familiar—I heard an aggressive and, at the worst of times, a downright…
Sidebar: List of the Month
What's playing in heaven: 20 perfectly written, perfectly performed singles.
1) "Waterloo Sunset," the Kinks
2) "Eleanor Rigby," the Beatles
3) "Lost Highway," Hank Williams
4) "If You Could Read My Mind," Gordon Lightfoot
5) "1999," Prince
6) "Street Fighting Man," the Rolling Stones
7) "Help!," the Beatles
8) "She Loves You," the Beatles
9) "Four Seasons in One Day," Crowded House
10) "Senses Working Overtime," XTC
11) "The Bitterest Pill," the Jam
12) "This Guy's in Love with You," Herb Alpert
13) "…
You know what's fascinating? As digital audio technology matures, DAC design is not converging on a single most popular or overall best approach. Multiple design paths continue to thrive, new ones are still appearing, and each variation on the DAC theme has its adherents and side trails: bitstream, non-oversampling, upsampling, various filters, DSD playback options, and on and on.
A new path for me is M2Tech's Young DAC, with its optional external battery power supply, the Palmer Power Station. I've listened to DACs with internal power supplies, wall warts, and expensive, cost-no-object…
On the back is the jack for an AC cord, and two Bulgin two-pin sockets where you screw on the cable that supplies 15V DC power to your Young DAC, or M2Tech's Joplin ADC, or both. The other end of the DC cable uses the same connector as the wall wart, so you can easily swap them out on the back of the DAC to compare power sources.
It took a little over three hours to fully charge the Palmer, at which point I turned off the AC and was able to run it for a couple days of normal listening (I turned off the power to the DAC when I wasn't using it) before I started charging it again. The…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
M2Tech Young: Solid-state, DC-powered D/A processor. Inputs: two S/PDIF (RCA, 75-ohm BNC), 1 AES/EBU (XLR), 1 optical S/PDIF (TosLink), 1 USB (female Type B). Output: single-ended on RCA female. Sampling frequencies (kHz): 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4*, 192*, 352.8**, 384** (*not on TosLink, **only on USB). Resolution: 16–24 bit (S/PDIF, AES/EBU), 16–32 bit (USB). Frequency response: 10Hz–20kHz, +0.1/–0.5dB (Fs=44.1kHz); 10Hz–90kHz, +0.1/–0.1dB (Fs=384kHz). Signal/noise: 121dB (A-weighted, 24-bit/192kHz, 20kHz bandwidth). THD+N: 0.0003% (24-bit/192kHz). Maximum…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital Sources: Apple MacBook Pro computer (2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD) running OS 10.6.7, iTunes 10.6, Sonic Studio Amarra 2.3, Songbird 1.9.3, XLD; Western Digital 2TB NAS drive; Oppo BDP-103 universal Blu-ray player; Meridian (formerly Sooloos) Digital Media System (Control 15, TwinStore x3); Apple iPad 2, 3, iPod Touch 1G, iPhone 4S; Benchmark DAC1 USB D/A converter.
Preamplifier: Marantz AV7005 in Pure Direct Mode.
Power Amplifier: Classé CAM 350 monoblocks.
Loudspeakers: MartinLogan Prodigy, Descent subwoofers (2).
…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
For the testing, I powered the M2Tech Young from the Palmer Power Station, which had been fully charged. I repeated some of the measurements powering the Young with its wall-wart supply. The testing was primarily performed with Stereophile's loan sample of the top-of-the-line Audio Precision SYS2722 system (see www.ap.com and the January 2008 "As We See It"), feeding data to the Young via an AES/EBU link. To test its behavior as a USB DAC, I installed the driver program on my MacBook Pro; the computer identified the Young as "M2TECH 384/32 async USB," with a…
After I read Brian Damkroger's rave review of the Audio Research Corporation's Reference 5 SE line stage in the November 2012 Stereophile, I was excited about getting the review sample into my system so that I could do a Follow-Up (February 2013). However, the sample had already been returned to the factory, so I called ARC to see if it could be rerouted eastward to me. Chief Listener Warren Gehl answered the phone.
"Sure, you can listen to the Ref 5 SE, but I'd assumed you were calling about the Reference 75 amplifier."
"Reference 75? What's that?"
"It's our newest…