NDS with 555ps vs Klimax ds

Posted by: Cris on 05 October 2012

I am lucky that my local Naim dealer (Cymbiosis in Leicester) is also a Linn dealer and I had the pleasure of being able to do a head to head comparison of an NDS with one or two 555ps vs a Klimax ds using a 555 pre amp, a 300 power amp and Kudos c30s.

 

I am currently using a HDX into a 555 powered DAC with the above amplification set up and the same Kudos speakers.

Firstly the NDS with a single 555ps was easily better than my current Naim powerd dac both in terms of detail and musicality. When we compared this to the Klimax Ds I have to say the Klimax was better in terms of delivary of detail - the Naim was probably more exciting but the Klimax more musical.

 

When we added a second 555ps to the NDS this is when it became interesting. I was expecting a straight race and an easy decision x was better than y - this is not the case (to my ears anyway). Both streamers were excellent in terms of detail. Their presentation of the music was very different- we listened to a range of music including a number of high res files everything from The Carpenters to Jazz, Rock, Coldplay, Nils Lofgren etc. The Naim was better on some tracks and was certainly more aggressive / exciting with the delivery but the Linn was better on others. In a perfect world where money was no object I would recommend both!! The Naim is better with Live music they both work well on most other types of music and the Linn is better with 'easy listening' tracks.

 

I must thank the boys at Cymbiosis for an excellent afternoon. But they did leave me with a dilemma....which streamer?

 

If only I could afford both.............

Posted on: 10 October 2012 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Guy, thanks for the link, but what a wasted opportunity he had. The differences are goingtto be small and probably incorporate non harmonic frequency differences. So you would need to look at the low level bit differences which you can't see on his graph as you would be looking at one 10-20,000 of the height of the resultant chart. Further to deduce a meaningful output from the resultant a FFT could be performed, which would show the frequency spectra. This spectra could then be compared between different formats.

Of course thinking about this, one could simply take the DAC output and record that and remove the errors from a microphone and audio pickup.

Id be surprised if the low level spectra will be the same between decoding different formats, as it is this almost certainly our brains our picking up on.

Simon.

Posted on: 10 October 2012 by Hook
Originally Posted by Guido Fawkes:

> What I am having trouble understanding is how WAV can sound different than WAV.

 

Hello Hook


Hi Guy -


Have interwoven my reply below...

 

If I have two CDs of the same recording is it possible they could sound different. [I don't know]. Some people claim if they burn a CD-R then it can sound better than the original CD especially if you use a Yamaha burner.


I think that there is a plausible explanation for this.  It's a function of the CD manufacturing process.  Not all lands and pits are created equal, and so CD players have different error rates when reading the different CD's, and a higher error rate results in poorer sound quality.


I don't understand if the same digital stream is coming out of a computer in to a buffer in a DAC and being re-clocked and played from the buffer how it can possibly sound different ... the DAC has the same stuff in its buffer however it got there.


The only theory I have heard that has any possibility of explaining this is that the DAC can be effected by EMI and/or RFI generated by a transport.  The bits are the same, and you may even be using Toslink, but there may still be some proximity effect where noise can impact the output stage of the DAC.  Way back when, even good ol' Andy S agreed that this was possible (albeit somewhat improbable).


There are lots of things I don't understand ....


Me too.  Frustrating at times, but not so much so that I want to give up trying to comprehend stuff.  I think that losing our curiosity would be a terrible thing!


Do you here a difference between WAV and WAV? Perhaps the transcoded WAV is not the same as the vanilla WAV and the receiving streamer has more work to do to strip out the PCM?


I do not hear a difference.  But I respect what others are hearing, and I do think you may be on to something here.  Perhaps, even if it is the same PCM is being delivered, it could be that it is not being delivered over the same time period, nor in the same sized packets.  Perhaps the WAV file is being steamed with larger chunks of PCM data, and the on-the-fly transcoded to WAV file is being streamed with smaller chunks.  That's kind of why I thought it would be interesting to have the output from a sniffer looked at by a networking expert.  Perhaps the player is getting more interrupts, and having to do more work, to put all those smaller chunks back together.  I have no clue if this is plausible, but it would be nice to find out!


Does a file with embedded artwork sound as good as one without?


Gosh, I sure hope not! 


In the end if you can sing along then I think that may be all that matters ... altogether now, one, two, three, four, can I have a little more, five, six .....


Key of C?  Ok, here it goes...altogether now



All the best, Guy 


Cheers!


Hook

Posted on: 10 October 2012 by DrMark

I remember as a young teen coveting in a most severe way my best friend's older brother's machine:

 

 

It all sounded so cool - even if just through a Pioneer receiver.  Had something called "4 channel Simul-Synch" (sp?)  I wouldn't mind having one now...it was all so...analog!