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Post by Martin John Butler on Jun 7, 2018 8:21:09 GMT -6
Bram, I was refering to the S2. I was curious if anyone had used it with an Apollo.
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Post by jimwilliams on Jun 7, 2018 9:44:48 GMT -6
I use glass optic cables for my HD24XR I/O. It does help and makes a fine resolution difference I can hear. For SPDIF I use 1.5 meter Pangea SPDIF cables made with ultra pure Cardas copper with a silver plating. Those are like a low cost version of Kimber and it made a huge difference from my Sony Blue Ray player into the Pre Box S2 over using the plastic 1 foot fiber optic feed from the 4k UHD TV.
My hot-rodded PCM1792 based RMA superbeast II also has limited resolution compared to the ESS 9038 based S2. The surround circuits are all first rate so the 1792 chips are the limiting factor heard here. The same applies to the PCM/DSD1704 Mytek/Mark Levenson DAC with individual LT regulators for each chip and super fast 7000V/us slew rate THS 3061 current feedback analog sections with a sallen-key 65k hz Bessel low pass filter.
I have good audio test gear here but I don't have a $50,000 Agilent network analyzer so I can't qualify much of this stuff without one of those. Ray Kimber has one but I doubt any other high end cable manufacturer does.
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Post by professorplum on Jun 7, 2018 12:06:19 GMT -6
Quite the glowing review Jerome!
I know you touched on parts of it (BLA MKIII), but I'm curious as to your total monitoring chain before you got the Pro-ject S2? Only wondering because you make it sound like such a great improvement. I'm definitely interested...
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Post by bram on Jun 7, 2018 13:11:15 GMT -6
Bram, I was refering to the S2. I was curious if anyone had used it with an Apollo. The S2 just arrived today. I won't be able to hook it up to the BF Apollo 8 in my studio until I get the Digital out card for the Dirac miniDSP (Hardware room correction). The D/A on the miniDSP is pretty close to the Apollo. The digi out card should arrive next tuesday and will remove the miniDSP conversion from the equation. I'll report back when I can properly AB then. In the mean time I've hooked the S2 up to my Macbook using the USB source, going into some old Auratones. It's a MASSIVE difference between the 1/8 analog out and the S2. It completely opened up the high end, with great transient detail and clarity. The Auratones almost sound too good with the S2. Kind of defeats their purpose. lol I tested out a few headphones with Spotify tunes. DT770 (250ohm) - Surprisingly sounds fantastic. I was reading that higher impedance headphones didn't perform so well AKG K7XX (62ohm) - Not wow'ing me nearly as much as the DT's AKG K271 (55ohm) - Sound gritty and low-fi
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Post by Martin John Butler on Jun 7, 2018 22:01:49 GMT -6
Good news Bram, good luck. Please keep us posted.
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Post by winetree on Jun 7, 2018 22:44:17 GMT -6
"In the mean time I've hooked the S2 up to my Macbook using the USB source, going into some old Auratones. It's a MASSIVE difference between the 1/8 analog out and the S2. It completely opened up the high end, with great transient detail and clarity. The Auratones almost sound too good with the S2. Kind of defeats their purpose. lol "
Are you able to go out of the S2 right into the Auratones. It's got enough power without an amp?
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Post by bram on Jun 7, 2018 23:12:41 GMT -6
Nah, I’ve gone out of the S2 into a power amp.
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Post by jeromemason on Jun 8, 2018 2:54:03 GMT -6
Bram, I was refering to the S2. I was curious if anyone had used it with an Apollo. The S2 just arrived today. I won't be able to hook it up to the BF Apollo 8 in my studio until I get the Digital out card for the Dirac miniDSP (Hardware room correction). The D/A on the miniDSP is pretty close to the Apollo. The digi out card should arrive next tuesday and will remove the miniDSP conversion from the equation. I'll report back when I can properly AB then. In the mean time I've hooked the S2 up to my Macbook using the USB source, going into some old Auratones. It's a MASSIVE difference between the 1/8 analog out and the S2. It completely opened up the high end, with great transient detail and clarity. The Auratones almost sound too good with the S2. Kind of defeats their purpose. lol I tested out a few headphones with Spotify tunes. DT770 (250ohm) - Surprisingly sounds fantastic. I was reading that higher impedance headphones didn't perform so well AKG K7XX (62ohm) - Not wow'ing me nearly as much as the DT's AKG K271 (55ohm) - Sound gritty and low-fiMy Ultrasone 750's are 40ohms...... The S2 like I said make those cans sound totally kickass. Something to look at, the Tidal service is one I'm seriously considering ditching my Apple Music for. $19.99 a month gets me HiFi streaming and also access to MQA. What I like about Tidal is that you can set it up to take over the S2 regarding settings when an MQA file starts streaming. The way the S2 sounds playing MQA's is really remarkable.
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Post by jimwilliams on Jun 8, 2018 17:05:41 GMT -6
Audio Advisor has a couple of S2 demos on sale for $50 off.
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Post by winetree on Jun 8, 2018 19:13:15 GMT -6
Jim, I don't remember what you said. What power amp are you using with your C.D. > S2 > ? > Emovia bench setup?
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Post by bram on Jun 8, 2018 21:51:05 GMT -6
Audio Advisor has a couple of S2 demos on sale for $50 off. That's what I ended up doing. Arrived at my door 2 days later.
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Post by bram on Jun 8, 2018 21:55:20 GMT -6
Something to look at, the Tidal service is one I'm seriously considering ditching my Apple Music for. $19.99 a month gets me HiFi streaming and also access to MQA. What I like about Tidal is that you can set it up to take over the S2 regarding settings when an MQA file starts streaming. The way the S2 sounds playing MQA's is really remarkable. Hell yeah! The MQA's have been super useful for reference tracks. I've been able to find just about every track I've needed, so I've been considering freezing the Spotify subscription.
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Post by jimwilliams on Jun 9, 2018 11:04:09 GMT -6
Jim, I don't remember what you said. What power amp are you using with your C.D. > S2 > ? > Emovia bench setup? My 1987 Magnavox CDB 624 CD player has a custom made S/PDIF output card I installed. It uses three 74HC4007 gates to drive the digital output with excellent symmetry. That feeds a short run of Kimber AGSS 19 awg pure silver 3 braid as the S/PDIF cable into the Pre Box S2. The TV room uses a 1.5 meter Pangea ultra hi def S/PDIF cable, also excellent for the $.
The S2 then feeds one of my highly modified Adcom GFA 545 power amps with a 1 foot run of Kimber 3 braid pure silver "Black Pearls" wire. The Adcom is rebuilt with all Vishay VAR naked bulk foil resistors and Mills wirewound resistors for the power transistor emitters. The gain set caps are silver foil types. That is the best stuff on earth and you do pay for it.
That feeds an 8 foot run of 10 awg Sound Runner speaker cable. I didn't want to spend $300 for Kimber in the shop, that's saved for the studio and TV room.
The Emotiva B1's crossovers are modified with a pair of bypass caps added to the tweeter's mylar crossover cap. I used an InfiniCap .1 uf/400V polyprop and a .01 uf InfiniCap 630V polystyrene. Get that from www.michaelpercyaudio.com
A lot of stuff sounds amazing, hidden gems are heard on familiar tracks. Some stuff sounds like crap. I ran Synchronicity yesterday and it ripped my head off. That old SSL 4040 dbx 202 VCA grind is truly a damper. Still, it's great to be able to detect all that because the better sounding stuff makes it worthwhile. Anyone hear the MQA version of that record?
The Stone's "Stripped" by Bob Clearmountain also sounds great on the S2. Rattling strings and slides, all there.
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Post by jeromemason on Jun 9, 2018 11:37:51 GMT -6
I listened to Hans Zimmer live in MQA and when the full orchestra was playing I could clearly hear the popping of the keys on the clarinets etc. Pretty wild.
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ericn
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Post by ericn on Jun 9, 2018 15:30:47 GMT -6
Jim, I don't remember what you said. What power amp are you using with your C.D. > S2 > ? > Emovia bench setup? My 1987 Magnavox CDB 624 CD player has a custom made S/PDIF output card I installed. It uses three 74HC4007 gates to drive the digital output with excellent symmetry. That feeds a short run of Kimber AGSS 19 awg pure silver 3 braid as the S/PDIF cable into the Pre Box S2. The TV room uses a 1.5 meter Pangea ultra hi def S/PDIF cable, also excellent for the $.
The S2 then feeds one of my highly modified Adcom GFA 545 power amps with a 1 foot run of Kimber 3 braid pure silver "Black Pearls" wire. The Adcom is rebuilt with all Vishay VAR naked bulk foil resistors and Mills wirewound resistors for the power transistor emitters. The gain set caps are silver foil types. That is the best stuff on earth and you do pay for it.
That feeds an 8 foot run of 10 awg Sound Runner speaker cable. I didn't want to spend $300 for Kimber in the shop, that's saved for the studio and TV room.
The Emotiva B1's crossovers are modified with a pair of bypass caps added to the tweeter's mylar crossover cap. I used an InfiniCap .1 uf/400V polyprop and a .01 uf InfiniCap 630V polystyrene. Get that from www.michaelpercyaudio.com
A lot of stuff sounds amazing, hidden gems are heard on familiar tracks. Some stuff sounds like crap. I ran Synchronicity yesterday and it ripped my head off. That old SSL 4040 dbx 202 VCA grind is truly a damper. Still, it's great to be able to detect all that because the better sounding stuff makes it worthwhile. Anyone hear the MQA version of that record?
The Stone's "Stripped" by Bob Clearmountain also sounds great on the S2. Rattling strings and slides, all there.
Yeah if Syncronicity sounds great something is very wrong! Had a friend in high school who used it as his primary reference for building his audiophile system, he never understood why all the great records stank on his system. He would come over and listen to the Magnepan system or the TAD/JBL custom monitors in the studio and be blown away by all the main reference disks, then he had to put in Stncronisity or the Yes 90215 CD and it sounded like crap! Moral of this chose your references wisely.
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Post by Bob Olhsson on Jun 9, 2018 17:26:09 GMT -6
The real excitement with early TosLink and SPDIF was incompetently designed transceiver chips that generated so much clock jitter that converters couldn't deal with it. The TosLink was especially amusing because you could move the interconnect around and literally hear the image move. I hate to think how much audiophile exotica was sold thanks to those crappy chips.
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ericn
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Post by ericn on Jun 9, 2018 20:59:47 GMT -6
The real excitement with early TosLink and SPDIF was incompetently designed transceiver chips that generated so much clock jitter that converters couldn't deal with it. The TosLink was especially amusing because you could move the interconnect around and literally hear the image move. I hate to think how much audiophile exotica was sold thanks to those crappy chips. I remember an audiophile dealer who sold the Revox CD player in droves as a transport because you could wiggle the toslink connector and not have any problems. In fact the first time I saw a demo using Toslink and some megabuck transport the subs caused all kinds of problems, switched to copper no problems.
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Post by jimwilliams on Jun 10, 2018 11:11:32 GMT -6
Yes 90215 was mixed on a Soundcraft 2400 at Trevor Rabin's Studio City home. The later "Open Your Eyes" was tracked at Billy Sherwood's Van Nuys airport studio. The console was a modified Tascam M600.
None of the other band members saw each other, they came in alone to track their parts with Billy. They don't get along.
Come mix time they booked the Enterprise SSL 9k room with Ultimation. They hated it and left. They could not get the same big @ss sonics they got with that modified Tascam M600. So they rented a bunch of outboard and mixed it on the Tascam.
It was an incredible sounding record, but you won't know that listening to it. Billy strapped an old Neve compressor on the stereo mix and that ruined the sonics, at least for me.
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Post by bram on Jun 11, 2018 18:25:27 GMT -6
I connected the S2 to my main system today. Doing a proper level matched A/B between the Apollo 8 BF and the S2 was unfortunately not possible with my current setup, so take what I say next with a grain of salt as I was roughly level matching with the output volume every time I switched sources. I'm listening through a pair of Barefoot Footprint 01s and testing with 24/96 master quality songs on Tidal:
There is a difference for sure, but it's not as large as I might have expected from all of the hype. If anything, the Apollo 8 sounds more pleasant/warm/round, while the S2 sounds crisp/detailed/clinical. Compared to the Apollo 8 BF, the highs are relatively harsh through the S2 on my system. Whereas music was perhaps more enjoyable through the Apollo, now my system sounds more like I can hear all the crap more good. I didn't notice a major difference in the stereo field between the two.
I can't say if I'm properly gain staging on the S2. It's gain is wide open at 0dB, 96k, the default "Optimal Transient" Filter, and Distortion Compensation set to "On". There might be more appropriate settings to use. Those of you who are using one, have you ventured out to the other filters? There's not much documentation about what any of the filters are actually doing.
Anyways, with all the recent talk about Apollo converter quality, I just want to say for those of you rocking them and considering something else, hey, the grass is always greener. I think the Apollo sounds great.
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Post by jimwilliams on Jun 12, 2018 9:37:21 GMT -6
I run mine with the OTF and the THD set to "clinical". Low THD settings sounds best with my stuff. I do notice many recordings have zero details and air up top, ride cymbals are missing the attack transient and the natural open sonics. Many older recordings have that information encoded, something is amiss with most modern stuff 20 years old or newer.
I have older analog recordings that sound stunning next to most of the modern stuff. Besides mass compression it's like a low pass filter is used at 10k hz. Is this a Pro Tools or DAW issue? It doesn't happen here but I don't use PT or a DAW.
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Post by jeromemason on Jun 12, 2018 15:02:19 GMT -6
A lot of times when someone upgrades to a DAC that is much more detailed and reveals more there is always the response of "it's so much brighter, my old converter was nice and warm"
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Post by bram on Jun 12, 2018 21:36:16 GMT -6
A lot of times when someone upgrades to a DAC that is much more detailed and reveals more there is always the response of "it's so much brighter, my old converter was nice and warm" Guilty as charged.
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Post by svart on Jun 13, 2018 8:21:41 GMT -6
I connected the S2 to my main system today. Doing a proper level matched A/B between the Apollo 8 BF and the S2 was unfortunately not possible with my current setup, so take what I say next with a grain of salt as I was roughly level matching with the output volume every time I switched sources. I'm listening through a pair of Barefoot Footprint 01s and testing with 24/96 master quality songs on Tidal: There is a difference for sure, but it's not as large as I might have expected from all of the hype. If anything, the Apollo 8 sounds more pleasant/warm/round, while the S2 sounds crisp/detailed/clinical. Compared to the Apollo 8 BF, the highs are relatively harsh through the S2 on my system. Whereas music was perhaps more enjoyable through the Apollo, now my system sounds more like I can hear all the crap more good. I didn't notice a major difference in the stereo field between the two. I can't say if I'm properly gain staging on the S2. It's gain is wide open at 0dB, 96k, the default "Optimal Transient" Filter, and Distortion Compensation set to "On". There might be more appropriate settings to use. Those of you who are using one, have you ventured out to the other filters? There's not much documentation about what any of the filters are actually doing. Anyways, with all the recent talk about Apollo converter quality, I just want to say for those of you rocking them and considering something else, hey, the grass is always greener. I think the Apollo sounds great. You're not wrong. Once you're using gear up on the peak of the curve, you're dealing with subtle differences that are more taste than anything. Some folks love to expound virtues of something, only for others to listen and hear very little difference, usually to the retort of "but I have golden ears" or " you don't know what you're listening for" or something.. but it's as simple as you like what you like. Don't let anyone else tell you that you're wrong for liking something. But the truth is that the differences between well-designed pieces of professional gear are painfully small, and you're only splitting hairs. When I designed my converter, I got a lot of feedback about it lacking bass compared to other converters.. To which I did even more excessive frequency sweeps than I did when designing it, that showed it being 0.1dB flat from something like 10Hz to 50+Khz.. And did tests with competing converters that showed their anti-aliasing filters were already cutting the high frequencies considerably by 10Khz onward, leading to bass-heavy and more "warm" tone. Even though my design thread was full of people asking for excellent flatness, transient response, etc, it turns out that people (for the most part) actually didn't "like" the sound that comes with those attributes, they wanted a more "hi-fi" sound with exaggerated lows and highs. So what you're hearing is an open top end, but it's not to everyone's liking at all.
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ericn
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Post by ericn on Jun 13, 2018 8:31:16 GMT -6
I connected the S2 to my main system today. Doing a proper level matched A/B between the Apollo 8 BF and the S2 was unfortunately not possible with my current setup, so take what I say next with a grain of salt as I was roughly level matching with the output volume every time I switched sources. I'm listening through a pair of Barefoot Footprint 01s and testing with 24/96 master quality songs on Tidal: There is a difference for sure, but it's not as large as I might have expected from all of the hype. If anything, the Apollo 8 sounds more pleasant/warm/round, while the S2 sounds crisp/detailed/clinical. Compared to the Apollo 8 BF, the highs are relatively harsh through the S2 on my system. Whereas music was perhaps more enjoyable through the Apollo, now my system sounds more like I can hear all the crap more good. I didn't notice a major difference in the stereo field between the two. I can't say if I'm properly gain staging on the S2. It's gain is wide open at 0dB, 96k, the default "Optimal Transient" Filter, and Distortion Compensation set to "On". There might be more appropriate settings to use. Those of you who are using one, have you ventured out to the other filters? There's not much documentation about what any of the filters are actually doing. Anyways, with all the recent talk about Apollo converter quality, I just want to say for those of you rocking them and considering something else, hey, the grass is always greener. I think the Apollo sounds great. You're not wrong. Once you're using gear up on the peak of the curve, you're dealing with subtle differences that are more taste than anything. Some folks love to expound virtues of something, only for others to listen and hear very little difference, usually to the retort of "but I have golden ears" or " you don't know what you're listening for" or something.. But the truth is that the differences between well-designed pieces of professional gear are painfully small, and you're only splitting hairs. When I designed my converter, I got a lot of feedback about it lacking bass compared to other converters.. To which I did even more excessive frequency sweeps than I did when designing it, that showed it being 0.1dB flat from something like 10Hz to 50+Khz.. And did tests with competing converters that showed their anti-aliasing filters were already cutting the high frequencies considerably by 10Khz onward, leading to bass-heavy and more "warm" tone. Even though my design thread was full of people asking for excellent flatness, transient response, etc, it turns out that people (for the most part) actually didn't "like" the sound that comes with those attributes, they wanted a more "hi-fi" sound with exaggerated lows and highs. So what you're hearing is an open top end, but it's not to everyone's liking at all. Oh the simple contradiction of the digital age of recoding; as we have developed better more transparent tools for the professional, the market has shifted and the part time home recordist has dominated the market who translates good sounding as what makes me sound good.
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Post by jimwilliams on Jun 13, 2018 9:06:50 GMT -6
A lot of times when someone upgrades to a DAC that is much more detailed and reveals more there is always the response of "it's so much brighter, my old converter was nice and warm" They are not brighter, the older converter is just plain duller. It's chewing your audio food for you. The same thing happens with slow audio electronics that act as a low pass filter.
Some like the LPF on playback, I don't. I love hearing new tiny details on familiar recordings. It's audio archeology.
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