I was born the year CD was launched. My childhood was spent with cassettes and teenage years with Cd and then mp3.
I discovered vinyl in my 30s and I got into it for its aesthetics and collecting culture. I never thought vinyl sounded any better or worse when I had the rp10, lp12 majik or the p9. This is the first time I’ve taken my time to put together a vinyl playback system and I’m just reporting what I’m hearing.
Now the difference isn’t so big that it renders other mediums unlistenable. Absolutely not. I will still listen to CDs and stream music. More so than I will listen to records. But I’m just surprised to find out that a record pressed from a digital source can still sound more real
I do sometimes wonder whether all these streaming services that claim to be streaming studio master, bit-perfect music are really doing so. How do these platforms store millions of songs with zero compression? The server space involved must be gigantic. And where have these studio masters actually been procured from?
As you may be able to tell from these comments, I don’t profess to fully understand the process of storing and streaming so-called studio master recordings, but I’d say there’s tons of room for screw ups in how this content is being handled way before it reaches our routers at home
My CEC TLOX is a highly regarded transport and that’s feeding my SW1X DAC III balanced with additional upgrades -higher quality transformers etc. so my digital setup is very much high end. It actually cost me quite a bit more than what I paid for the analogue setup. For instance my phono pre is level 2 whereas my DAC 3 is closer to a level 4 system. IMHO it’s not the components here but actually the medium.
I would have to disagree. I don’t think a modest digital setup sounds better than vinyl. The Rp10, p9 and linn majik were partnered with sub 1k phono preamps but even so I thought they were on par with DACs I had that were around the 1-2k mark.
I was also surprised that the CD transport going into the same DAC was a marked improvement on the streaming setup I have. I know I don’t have a dedicated streamer but my Mac Pro into Berkeley Alpha USB into my DAC is no slouch. It’s seen off streamers in the past so I’ve never felt the need to splash on a dedicated streamer.
You can compress a file without losing data. I would guess that they are stored as flac (and MQA for Tidal so-called masters) - but indeed the required capacity will be huge by domestic standards, but I suspect not by datacentre standards.
My apologies - I certainly was not ignoring price or quality of your DAC - perhaps I should have been clearer.
If you have tried some high-end streaming sources against your Mac and USB approach and found the latter better to you, then that too is a great and money-saving result. It certainly isn’t what I have heard or what friends at my house (who didn’t know what source they were hearing) picked, but if you have tried the ‘proper streamer’ option and found it worse than MG-1 and worse than your Mac, the latter is surely the more surprising result.
Just as a question, what LPs have you compared to CD and streaming? Are they all 180g, perfect condition and jazz? All analogue masters?
Also, have you tried testing with someone else swapping between sources and not telling you which you are hearing? We have found the results of doing that illuminating, but you may be a better or more dispassionate listener.
I am unfamiliar with your sources, both in their quality level and individual performance, however your experience does not match mine in terms of general experience, though I have heard individual instances of vinyl sounding better than CD (but see next paragraph). Also it is unclear if by streaming you mean online or from your own local music store - online has more challenges, and personally I only stream from my own stored music (rips or downloads).
Meanwhile it is important to recognise that with any comparison the mastering is very significant - if my understanding is correct the same title on vinyl is rarely the same master as on CD. There are a lot of badly mastered CDs out there, especially those that have been the subject of the so-called “loudness wars”. Whilst any comparison of releases that have different masterings is a valid comparison of what is available to buy, though not necessarily a comparison of the ability of the media capability.
Apparently he uses also one of the best cd transport available ( CEC TL0) with a high dac. That pairing is on the level of the best streamers available today.
To us, DAVE still sounds a bit analytical or sterile, even when fed by the Grimm MU1.
There are comments in several forums that the MU1 and the M Scaler duplicate upscaling so you may not need both. We tried the MU1 with bare DAVE and then with M Scaler + DAVE. We remain unconvinced by MU1 with bare DAVE but MU1 with the Chord combo sounded phenomenal to us, a clear step up from our current server + opticalRendu.
However, we still want to minimise box count while narrowing the performance gap to the MG-1 set up, so if we find a single box dac that outperforms the Chord combo with the MU1, then we will probably swap out both the server and the Chord combo later this year.
Auditions will take a few months due to other commitments.
It will be hard to find a one box dac outperforming what you have, not ?
The DCS needs a clock, the MSB an outboard ps, the Mola Mola you already tested, as the Nd555.
You are not a fan of Linn too, but maybe the Klimax Organik ?
The Berkeley, not sure for the Prat.
The top Esoteric streamer ?
The Denafrips terminator ?
The quality of his/ her CD source overall looks high enough that it would beat several of my tatty old LPs even on the Stiletto LP12, unless the CD itself is poor, though I’d back vinyl over CD on many other albums.
However, the result that streaming from his / her Mac is at least as good as from a high quality streamer into that DAC is more of a surprise.
I don’t know what digital sources the OP has, or what particular version of the turntable/phono stage, etc…
I would suggest though that you’d have to spend at least as much on a digital source AND choose it as carefully as your turntable (i.e., to your tastes) for this comparison to be fair.
I’ve heard digital sources which sound beautiful. The original DCS Rossini was one…
A dac I only heard once a hifi fair was by CAD, I believe there were some Innous boxes involved but to me sounded surprisingly good. I looked them up after that, they seem to do some things their own way and I would definitely explore more if going down a “usb dac-path”… Possibly an alternative?
That’s fine I’m not offended. I’ve compared Led Zeppelin iv, pink Floyd the wall. Worldbeat and a few MJ albums. These were all original first or second pressings. These are usually my test albums as I know them so well. Compared them to tidal versions.
The real surprise was with the Indian movie albums. These are all repressings that have been released in the past few years due to the resurgence of records. These are all pressed from digital sources, confirmed by the distributor that I bought them from. When compared to the CDs and streamed files the record had a thinner sound which I can only guess was a shoddy digital to analogue conversion. However when you move past this the music is actually more complete. It just sounded more intelligible. It’s like the brain is not working as hard to make sense of the music. Sorry that’s the best way I can explain it.
What are these levels? Where are the boundaries between each? It’s not a stratification into ‘levels’ that I know - though admittedly I don’t really follow hifi in detail.
