Why hard disc?

The only way to satisfy your quest for first quality, and best value, replay of digital encoded music, is to audition the various possibilities.

And here is a problem, if Lavry is one of the things we have to listen to. As I read the website you have to buy it directly from the US, hopefully capable of running on European power, but I could be wrong here. I know that Benchmark is imported to Denmark, but almost all here agree that the Lavry is the DAC that you must listen to.

Dear Peter,

I have never come across a Macbook to Supernait combo, but in recent times I had resigned myself to never really having a first quality digital source again. The HDX is too expensive for me, and as I already have a nice balanced set of Naim antiques for amplifiers with Royd Minstrels, I do not really want a new integrated, which once agian is more than I could afford. However I have had a long experience with the CDS2, and hence my comparison, which does not leave the Lavry DAC in the shade as I sampled, fed from a MAC. As I understand it the Macbook [with large HD capacity] is about 900 GBP, and the Lavry D 10 is about 600 GBP, so perhaps adding the cables will take it a tad of 1500 GBP, but a CD 5x is more than that, and certainly no CDS2 with it.

My view is that this combination diserves a good audition, and certainly having ordered the Lavry, I hope to save enough to get the MAC this year at least. Then I guess I shall have a set that will be something I can let others sample and try for themselves before too long.

If I had not found this solution I would have gone for a second hand CD5 in time, as a long term solution, but not as fine as this by any means.

Naturally I am very pleased.

ATB from George

PS: Dear Claus, I would suspect that the Lavry will soon enough be found in the more enterprising high class Hifi dealers, and will be more eassily auditioned. I made a round trip of 345 miles for five hours with it. Well worth the time, but I was invited by a kind person to their home for the listening, which is not such a generally available option for everyone, as the situation exists today.

George,

I'm a bit confused. Was your laptop/DAC comparison directly against a CDS2 or against your memory of what a CDS2 sounds like?

regards,

dave

George,

I'm a bit confused. Was your laptop/DAC comparison directly against a CDS2 or against your memory of what a CDS2 sounds like?

regards,

dave

Dear Dave,

Against a six year practiced memory of my old player! Towards the end of its time it was beautifully serviced at Naim HQ, and sold shortly after that. In particular I made sure to compair the Linde Consort Bach Brandenburg recordings mentioned above, which also figured in my listening to the HDX. A real benchmark musical performance that can sound very well, or if the set is wrong unduly edgy.

I took other things to play over as well, specifically a good transfer of Bach's Fourth Brandenburg from direct cut 78s transfered [expertly] to CD from the Danish Royal Chapel Orchestra under Mogens Woldike, recorded in 1950. It is all too easy to get very good replay from an easily replayed recording of quality, but much harder from these less easy recordings. Thus my benchmark tests are great music making, in whatevfer recordings these great performances happen to come in. This is a much tougher test than taking so called audiophile recordings!

ATB from George

PS: Though Norman Solomon is no friend of mine these days, he would at least no doubt, concede that I have an unerring ability to spot great replay, and spot with great speed any failings. I found no irritating factor at all in the MAC/Lavry combo, and honestly I have not found any completely acceptable CD or digital replay for less than several times thie cost of this combo in the past. I hope that contextualises the situation.

Thanks for the reply, George. I know you're a tough man to please when it comes to musical performance. Therefore, I'm sure the MAC/Lavry combo must very special!

best,

dave

I hesitated to mention the Lavry earlier, since this is a Naim forum, and I have the highest respect for Naim - both the people and the gear. But - I second what George has stated. I repeat below what I mentioned a prior thread by 'james n', to George in response to his eloquent description of his musical values - which should lend weighty credence to his opinions:

quote:

Originally posted by CharlieP:
George,

I share the musical values which you have articulated so well. It is hard to describe music with words... These are the qualities which I enjoy in my Naim system, which now uses a music server as source through a Lavry DA-10 DAC.

I cannot compare with a CDS3, since I have not had the pleasure of owning one or hearing it in my home. I will say that my current sound is so far superior, in the values you so well described, of my CDX + XPS that it must surely be approaching comparison with a CDS3.

Music servers still require one to be a bit of a computer "geek" to set up and use. I find the pleasure of accessing my music in this way is compelling. The sound quality potential, IMHO, rivals that of the very best CD players, at a fraction of the cost. If you have the inclination and the willingness to fuss with computers and networks, you owe it to yourself to hear this.

Best Regards,

Charlie

In a separate thread I compared the Mac as a source with a modded squeezebox SB3 (which costs more and arguably has a more clumsy interface); these digital sources were nearly indistiguishable. In my opinion, it is the Lavry DA-10 which delivers the magic. Try searching the forums on "Lavry".

Happy Listening,

Charlie

quote:

Originally posted by Claus-thoeg:

And here is a problem, if Lavry is one of the things we have to listen to. As I read the website you have to buy it directly from the US, hopefully capable of running on European power, but I could be wrong here. I know that Benchmark is imported to Denmark, but almost all here agree that the Lavry is the DAC that you must listen to.

From the DA10 manual:

The DA10 automatically adjusts to AC power inputs in the range of 90 to 264 Volts AC and line frequencies between 47 and 63 Hertz. There are no settings to change.


Michael

Dear George,

I am in a similar position to yourself, having had to downsize recently from a more expensive set-up (CDS3, 252 etc) to a much more modest CD5i-2, Nait5i-2 and n-Sats. I must admit that I didn't even consider the hard disc option, partly I suppose out of familiarity with CD replay and the hardware, an unwillingness to change I suppose, and partly because I cannot identify any particular need for hard disc in my circumstances. (my CD collection is relatively modest in size, probably around 500, which I suspect is minute compared to many on the forum. This does not present a storage/space problem. As an aside, I can see little point in owning thousands of recordings as there simply wouldn't be enough time to listen to many of them more than once!). I find my present set-up to be extemely musical, far beyond what it's price would suggest, perhaps because of a particularly good synergy between the components. In some ways (I know this will anger some people) it challenges my previous far more expensive set-up. I have a theory why this should be (it is a phenomenon I have come across before) but I won't go into it here. For all this, the hard disc option is quite fascinating, and I shall be very interested to hear how you get on. Best of luck and happy listening.

Regards,

Peter

HI there,

Two quick questions, so hopefully you won't mind me not starting a new thread.

1. How many minutes/hours of lossless music per gig (I know this varies but a ballpark figure would be good.)

2. If using a macbook I presume you can stream wirelessly from other computers. Is this right and does quality suffer?


Thank you. I did google this, but no joy.

David

I'm in the process of re ripping all my music using Apple lossless onto my 250GB macbook pro.

At the moment iTunes is showing 2040 songs, 6 days, 29 minutes and 53 seconds of music using 49.69 GB.

Providing people have selected "share music" in their iTunes preferences they can play music [stream] wirelessly through my network.

I imagine the quality would only be determined by the original rip.

quote:

I imagine the quality would only be determined by the original rip.

And the transport/decoding process.

quote:

Originally posted by David Scott?:
HI there,

Two quick questions, so hopefully you won't mind me not starting a new thread.

1. How many minutes/hours of lossless music per gig (I know this varies but a ballpark figure would be good.)

2. If using a macbook I presume you can stream wirelessly from other computers. Is this right and does quality suffer?


Thank you. I did google this, but no joy.

David

My avereage over 100+ Gb is 2.77 hours per gig.
( Flac lossless, 44.1/16 sample rate)

[QUOTE]Originally posted by pjl:
my present set-up to be extemely musical, far beyond what it's price would suggest, perhaps because of a particularly good synergy between the components. In some ways (I know this will anger some people) it challenges my previous far more expensive set-up. I have a theory why this should be (it is a phenomenon I have come across before) but I won't go into it here. For all this, the hard disc option is quite fascinating, and I shall be very interested to hear how you get on. Best of luck and happy listening.

I sometimes have the same feeling that a good entry level Naim system is very hard to beat! Also any hifi system worth considering must be able to play as engaging as a standard kitchen radio. I find Naim systems can do this, but that many hifi systems give you lots of details, base trebble but in the process kills the music.

quote:

Originally posted by Claus-thoeg:
Also any hifi system worth considering must be able to play as engaging as a standard kitchen radio. I find Naim systems can do this, but that many hifi systems give you lots of details, base trebble but in the process kills the music.

Excellent..... Naim is as engaging as a kitchen radio.

I bet you a squillion Euros that Naim won't use that in any of the sales literature !

quote:

Excellent..... Naim is as engaging as a kitchen radio.

I bet you a squillion Euros that Naim won't use that in any of the sales literature !

I bet they don't, but it's a sensible comment for all that. I well remember noticing one day that my very old television sounded more musical than my Linn/ Audiolab/ Mission hifi. I bought some Naim amps which solved the problem so I think the Claus-thoeg test has merit.

Thanks to all for the answers to my questions above.

quote:

Two quick questions, so hopefully you won't mind me not starting a new thread.

1. How many minutes/hours of lossless music per gig (I know this varies but a ballpark figure would be good.)

2. If using a macbook I presume you can stream wirelessly from other computers. Is this right and does quality suffer?

David,

I have a little over 800+ disks in 180 gig, in a mix of WAV, FLAC, and Apple Lossless.

I compared sharing an iTunes library over wireless, vs file on the hard drive (see my post in another thread) and could hear no difference. Caveat: iTunes must be running on both (all) machines. There may be other ways to add network storage to the Mac as well.

Cheers,


Charlie

Thanks Charlie.

My music library is 4725 tracks in 96.2Gb. This is on a network attached RAID5 array to give me some resiliance in case of a disk failure.

Sorry forgot to add - all FLAC

quote:

Why hard disc?

Beats me.

I detest hard disks (prehistoric technology) - noisy, error prone and of course you can write to them lots of times (so connect them to the Internet and you are vulnerable) - the computer industry moves at such a slow pace with virtually little innovation - dinosaur companies like Microsoft and IBM just hold everything back - we have made little progress since the early 70s - Unix is still the dominant OS and then there's Windoze (surely they're having a laugh). Apple at least writes decent software and has a go even if it is basically Unix in disguise. You'd think the Commodore Amiga had never existed - multi=tasking pre-emptive OS with GUI in 128k.

At least CD is read-only and you don't need a lot of junk to play one. Hard disks are horrible things IMHO.

What we need is solid state storage and purpose written code to extract the data from it and sends it to the DAC - just a small machine code program that does the job.

With the present state of technology, the hard disk is one of the only mass storage devices available. Consequently, companies creating music servers are lumbered with it, but thankfully not for too much longer. The MacBook Air seems a good move to me with its 64GB solid state drive - give it a couple of years and we'll have a 1TB model.

The whole idea is not to have moving parts.

Just a few thoughts, Rotf

None of this invalidates the HDX - designers must work within the constraints of what is available and can be delivered - it is a remarkable achievement given the state of art IMHO.

ROTF,

With respct, you may be missing one point. It seems to me that music servers use any storage medium available to store files, then deliver a digital stream to a DAC to produce the music electrical signal. Today that medium might be a hard disk (local or on network) or flash memory. Tomorrow it may be - who knows? The function of storage is separated from the function of DAC, in modular fashion.

Charlie

ROTF,

After re-reading your post, I get your drift. Yes, this technology is changing fast. The music server playack systems (most) are leveraging the consumer computing market with its intensive development and high sales volumes. In my experience a music server using generic computer file storage and retrieval can surpass, in music quality, all but the most expensive CD players.

Yes, Tb memory chips are likely not far away. Amazing stuff...


Charlie

What the HDD based world is exposing is the hitherto hidden world of the DAC. These little animals have been hiding in the bowels of cd players for years, responsible for 90% of the quality of the output but never mentioned. Nowadays DACs have come out of the hifi closet and names such as Lavry, Benchmark, Beresford are used all over the shop. No longer can cdp manufacturers charge a few thousand more pounds by putting in a DAC worth a few quid more.

This is a good thing, and the more people that understand that DACs are friendly creatures, and that jitter isn't a dirty word (well it is, but you know what I mean)the better.

Whether or not HDD persists or not is not really relevant, nor is the method of getting the bits away from first base. Laptops, macs, hard disc, solid state, toslink, coax, usb, wireless....... lots of choice but no method is a stand out star. The most important part is the DAC..... what does it do to the bits it receives and how good is it at doing its job, ie reconstructing the analogue signal that the bits came from in the first place. And it doesn't have to be expensive, as Stanley Beresford has proved, and DAC manufacturers will continue to make DACs and become more and more successful. Companies like NAIM have a problem; they have tried to shift the DAC from the cdp to the amplifier (Supernait)with some success, but they're still intent on hiding the thing away from prying eyes eg the HDX.

quote:

Originally posted by Michael Trotz:
Another advantage of the Laptop/Macbook->DAC approach is the ability to carry your entire music collection with you wherever you go

Michael

And lose it!!!

quote:

Originally posted by Fender:

quote:

Originally posted by Michael Trotz:
Another advantage of the Laptop/Macbook->DAC approach is the ability to carry your entire music collection with you wherever you go

Michael

And lose it!!!

Or, have a back-up copy of your collection on and off site, and be in a better recovery situation than you were with just the discs.

Steve