Hi Ryder,
Much to my dismay, I discovered differences playing our M Scaler and DAVE into a Chord Ultima Pre 2 via different interconnects.
Single ended Townshend F1 Fractal was bettered by
Atlas Mavros XLR balanced, which were bettered by
Townshend F1 Fractal XLR balanced, which were bettered by
Atlas Asimi XLR balanced.
The differences were not of the night & day scale. However, once heard, never forgotten.
They were small, incremental improvements in smoothness, absence of gritty grain, the Townshend cables sound a bit leaner/cooler than Mavros. The Asimi just sounds deliciously, creamy smooth and absolutely effortless. Damn.
Then I looked at the price of Atlas Asimi and wept, a little.
Since then, the NAC52 went back in the system, powered by a freshly serviced olive Supercap, and sounds lovely.
Hi Bluesfan,
Thanks for the experience which was much appreciated. At this level I presume the difference although not night and day would be an important one that is able to heighten the level of enjoyment. So it’s true that balanced XLR interconnects will still sound different. I have read about this on other forums and was just curious if this would apply to the Chord DAVE as well. I do not have the privilege of trying different high quality balanced interconnects with my QBD76 yet but will attempt to get at least another pair in the near future to compare with my current Acrolink 8N-A2080III (which is the only pair of balanced XLR interconnect which I have).
Hi Ryder, I so wish that it were not the case, but…
I had been hoping that the right Mogami microphone cable with Neutrik connectors for £30-40 would be more than sufficient. Sadly, experience has indicated otherwise …
… or stay with Naim and not worry about such matters!
With my MScaler/Hugo TT 2 the balanced tellurium Q ultra black were better than the same cable in RCA. Again, not night and day but enough into an Ultima 6
I finally decided to start my Tidal free trial on my ND5XS2 today, I wanted to get a few hours on it before I signed up. I must say, Tidal streaming into the Mscaler/TT2 is a lot better than I remember it being when I used it 5 years ago. I think I had it with my UQ2, so it was the old streaming platform.
So glad I went with the ND5XS2, and gave up on Vinyl again, there is a vast world of music at my fingertips again…that will not cost me $40 dollars an album. Now, off to the music room.
I noticed in the last day or so, on the Head-fi Mscaler forum, there are a few people talking about this new way to upscale files. Rob Watts seems to downplay it, but the people that have tried it seem really impressed. The thing is, it makes your file HUGE, so you need a lot of storage space. Anyone seen this, or have tried it? This might be one for Simon to have a look at. The website is called remastero.com, if anyone is interested.
As I have the HQPlayer system setup over Optical, I requested a trial… just need to be careful I don’t get my head smashed in!
The files are going to be a silly size and it’s not really a streaming option, from what I can tell. That alone would put me off but, I’ll take a listen just in case!
Hey, I’m an early 90s Smart Cam machinist. Does that program still exist? Left the trade 20 years ago. In the 80s we typed a line of code directly into the machine. You learned canned cycles fast. Before that it was punch tape
No we use Lemoine software on the machine I run. The days of programming directly at the machine controller are long gone. You have a workstation (computer) that you do the programming at, then send it to the machine controller. The controller is just used to select the program you want to run.
I figured as much. When we went away from manually typing into the machine to Smart Cam, we thought it was amazing. Did the code on a IBM DOS pc, copied to floppy disk, walked over to machine, inserted floppy, machine read code into its storage. Times have changed.
Let me know how it goes Toon, I have about 6 (1TB) western digital external hard drives I can use if this is something worthwhile. I used to download a lot of movies, TV shows, but with Netflix etc., I can erase them all and use them to store these files if they are Da Shiiit.
…then there were the days when using a key punch machine, moving cards to card reader to load to mag tape, to be loaded into a DEC PDP 11/44 with a couple of old washing machine size removable disk drives. (early 80’s) Times they keep on a changing…
I went for a job in the U.S.A. The interviewer’s opening gambit was “You crazy, crazy Brits! Why would you name an Operating System after the guy who lost America for you?”.
I learned programming on an ICL 1904s mainframe (64k memory, be nice to the Operators, otherwise they may accidentally drop your card stack for the evening run, and reassemble it in apple pie order) running George III. The interviewer had a point!
We did that at school, programming in ‘Cesil’ or was it ‘Cecil’ with punched cards, we where very lucky, our head was a computer fanatic and ran a small lunch time class programming computers. We used the local polytechnics main frame