GryphonGuy

Sorry for late reply. I have auditioned this Audio-gd HE-9 headphone amp in Kuala Lumpur. Just a stunning presentation. With the original HE-1000 headphones (version 1) the presentation was indeed holographic but these headphones have a tendency to make the soundstage appear about 1 metre outside of your head with resulting loss of immediacy. However the HE-9 presents the soundstage as a deep and wide image. I had my old Sennheiser HD-650's with me and it made me want to purchase those headphones again as the performance of the HE-9 lifted the HD-650's higher than they'd ever been lifted before in performance levels. My only concern is with the manufacturer and supporter being in China, it would be a costly freight exercise should anything need attention. But if you are willing to take that risk, the performance of the HE-9 on headphones is simply sublime. Regards GG

John Atkinson has commented on the Mark Levison 534 review: It wasn't possible for Larry Greenhill, who now lives in California, to ship this amplifier to New York in time for me to measure it. John Atkinson Editor, Stereophile

I still have Gryphon gear but my big rig is Krell amplification 400w per channel Class A into B&W 802 diamonds. Kimber cabling. The DAVE is running as a pre-amp so is directly connected to the AMP. Laptop is HP and feeds USB signal using Roon and HQPlayer combination again through Kimber cabling.

I have had my DAVE for over two weeks. Getting towards the 100 hours mark. I have silver cabling in my system and the DAVE is so engaging I have battled sleep wanting to listen more. Nowhere near sounding digital and bright. The instrument timbres are so real. You can definitely hear and psycho-acoustically feel the emotion in guitars and pianos. Drums (Master of Chinese Percussion album with the first track Poem of Chinese Drums) has no speakers in the room. The many drums are in the room and all their different tones can easily be heard but the sound is musically coherent at the same time especially foot tapping when the drum sticks are hit together and on the rims of the drums. Mind-blowing apparent transparency (I was not at the recording so I cannot state it as fact but boy does it sound real!). This is from 16bit 44.1kHz CD image feeding the DAC from laptop using Kimber KS2436 USB cable. Violins on the 2L free "Mozart: Violin concerto in D major - Allegro" download at 352.8kHz quality is having the violin next to you and able to hear each and every change in the bow direction and it's pressure applied against the strings. But again, musically coherent. They say it gets better with more time. I don't care. It is the best DAC I have ever heard and makes my current system perform like it never has. GG.

Lite DAC83 seems to have a competitor in Audio-gd. The Reference 7 DAC was a competitor to the DAC83 but has now been upgraded recently to the Master 7 DAC. Whilst I have not heard this particular device from Audio-gd, I have auditioned their massively sized Master 9 headphone AMP and if their DACs are anything like their headphone amps, it will be a sublime DAC. I am keeping the Master 9 on the back-burner for myself to purchase once funds are available. Very impressive sound.

I have a Synology DS508 that has been running reliably for over 6 years now operating nearly 24x7. Extremely satisfied with the Synology product and am planning the upgrade to new and supported model. I used to run Seagate Enterprise disks but they have a tendency to fail after a year or two of continual use despite their MTBF numbers of over 1 million hours. I changed to Western DIgital enterprise disks. Not one has failed in the last two years and they run much cooler in temperature and don't have any soft errors in the smart log. So WD disks are flavour of the month for over two years for me. Regards GG

The OP has already converted his ISO to 96kHz. GG

Presumably your system is using 24 bits per sample. If you are happy with the sound that emerges from the up-sampled music then simply be happy. If you'd have asked about down-sampling to 24-bit 44.1 kHz then I would have said yes because you are using half of the source data samples available. But by up-sampling from 88.2kHz to 96kHz, and the mathematicians can prove me wrong here, you will be almost guaranteed not to be using any of the original samples for your listening and then cutting that new data in half...well...my original statement is applicable. That is, if you are happy with that sound, then be happy. But my point is, if your system can't handle 88.2kHz sample rate and you want to listen to as much of the ISO image that you went to the effort of extracting, then I would recommend downsampling to 24bit 44.1kHz. Best Regards, GG

+1 for the Herbies way excellent turntable mats. made my vintage technics TT sound way excellent!

I have a few 45RPM clarity pressings of Holly Cole and I agree with a previous poster that Classic Records didn't do a good job as some of the pressings in the one album are scratchy and distorted in places yet other pressings in that same album are sublime. So when "they" get it right it sounds really great but I don't have the normal black vinyl in the same album cut at 45RPM to test against. The translucent clarity vinyl pressings don't tend to collect as much crud in the grooves as the black vinyl does but that might be because they are one-sided only and I take more care of them since they were about 4 times the price of a regular black vinyl album. GG

Sumiko Blackbird is a spectacular cartridge at the upper end of your budget that extracts maximum lushness and warmth that is in the vinyl grooves whilst somehow minimizing the noise. That's my personal experience anyway. Being a high-output MC cartridge, it doesn't sound too bad on both MM and MC phono pre-amps. I preferred it on the MC circuit of the phono pre-amp with low amplification (which is why the noise might be minimized but that is just a guess). Anyway, worth a try if you can audition one. GG

My SME arm with the Ayame cartridge crushes the top end and sound stage with any anti-skate yet my vintage Technics MUST have almost text-book anti-skate set. C'est la vie! GG

To the OP and back on topic, I had an acrylic "slab" custom cut to 500x400x20mm. I can remember the actual cost but it was around the $150 mark. In conjunction with BDR cones my turntable doesn't seem to audible reproduce external sources of vibration. GG

I might have been a bit hasty and hence made an inexcusable error. I think you are correct. I believe the Lavry and Weiss ADC's have the external clocking capability so that the multi-channel digitization will be all running off the one clock and therefore the samples should have the same consistency or inconsistencies in them from whatever the central clocking is rather than the 3 or 4 ADC boxes each running their different clocks on different channels of the live performance being recorded. Sorry if I offended. GG

You seem to be talking about locking multiple DACs together or simply externally clocking one box. If that is the basis of your argument then I would tend to agree with you as I've already said in my original post. However, my original post is also about having a separate source transmitter "box" to a separate DAC "box". When the two are synchronized by an external clock using the time-based protocols of AES/EBU or S/PDIF, my original statement then comes into play. Also if you are monitoring a raw recording via an ADC/DAC combination then synchronizing both "boxes" via an external clock is beneficial. If the source and DAC is already inside one box and already run by one good-quality internal clock, then that's where my one-box statement comes in and I would seem to be in agreement with you and Dan Lavry. My "magical" statements concerning one source "box" and one DAC "box" are based on first-hand experience. GG

I use a Big Ben to synchronize my transporter and Metronome Technologie DAC with astounding success. GG

What do you mean by your phrase "mythical clocking ideas"?

His consumer-grade appliances don't have clock inputs but his professional stuff usually does. I think his point is that just using a "better clock" for one box has very little influence over the end result whereas everybody in the pro-audio world knows (as does dCS and Estoteric) that when external clocks are used to synch two or more digital devices, the resulting music is magical. Dan also does not believe that anybody needs more than 88/96kHz samples in a digital world. GG

In a previous life, I wanted to replace the mat on my Technics SL1700MkII suspended turntable. I selected Herbies Way Excellent mat II with an appropriate thickness to retain VTA of the tonearm. The mat arrived but there was something wrong. The Technics rubber mat weighed approx 500gms and the new Herbies mat was only a fraction over 100gms. The sounds were not right. I tried a make-shift weight on the platter on top of the playing LP and voila! sounded awesome!. That weight was approx 340gms, much closer to the original loading of the rubber mat on the suspension. To cut a long story short, my investigations found a company in canada called TT Weights and they were excellent to work with and have a number of threaded weights as well is unthreaded gravity-based weights. Their designs are Aluminium based. Chers GG

Hmmm. The sounds. The effective length setting, for me, affects the sound staging. When its spot on the depth of the sound stage is immense with the foreground sounds being obvious and background sounds can sometimes be perceived to be several metres behind the foreground sound. Vary that effective length by a fraction of a millimetre and the sound stage depth collapses. The question of SRA vs VTA is rather a moot point. If my experience is like everybody else's, then the cartridge is firmly bolted/screwed to the headshell and therefore the SRA is only changeable by varying the height of the tonearm. So I suspect we are actually tuning the SRA relative to the record groove by varying the VTA by raising or lowering the tonearm at its fulcrum. When the arm is too high at its fulcrum, we get the upper notes being accentuated with very little bass response. The upper notes can be distorted too, so that a cymbal ring doesn't sound like s symbol ring, it sounds like a distorted shrill. lowering the arm too much, in my experience, makes the bass response more pronounced but very much looser than it should be. I think the young ones call this "phat" bass or something similar. as a direct consequence, the upper notes are recessed, not properly fleshed out or not reproduced at all. What my actual SRA is is unknown by me since I don't have any documentation on what it should be nor do I have a microscope and angle measuring device to tell me anything. After starting with the level tonearm method and setting things up as precisely as I can using the Feickert protractor and the Feickert software to measure other things like azimuth angle etc, I use my ears to tell me how close the fine tuning is and whether today's listening sessions needs a tweak of something or not. Let me say that the ZYX Ayame is a spectacular cartridge but is in the Formula-1 style class in that every time you take it for a spin, unless ALL conditions are identical, it will let you know that there is a variation to last time, whether good or bad. I will repeat that when the Ayame is dialed-in it is the most magical experience in analogue on my rig at least. Finally, the difference in height question and the angle that represents. Hmmm. my tonearm is 308.8mm from pivot to stylus. therefore the circle circumference is 1940 or so millimetres. 1 degree change in the arm means a height variance of 5.38mm (or so). therefore if my maths is correct, for a height change of 0.16mm (average variance of thin to thick records) the angle change of the tonearm will be 0.029 of a degree. which means my equipment (ears included) can detect very small movements. your reference of 1/1000" equates to 0.0254mm. I am unaware if I can tell the difference of this variation as I have no reference point to be able to say one way or the other. I can tell the difference of 0.16mm though because I do have a reference for that. Cheers GG

I did a small survey of my own record collection with a digital micrometer and found that the largest variation between thickness of a regular "thin" record and an obviously thicker 200gm record was just 0.2mm and the average was 0.16mm difference in thickness. Sad to say that I had to set the VTA (my SME arm does not have on-the-fly-adjustments) to the best sound of the 180-200gm records and now the regular "thin" records have an ever so slightly more brighter sound that is entirely acceptable to my ears but the darker and fatter bass that came out of the 180-200gm records if I set the VTA for the thinner records was not acceptable. So I can hear the difference between an average 0.16mm VTA variation in my system but the biggest change that seems to vary with ambient room temperature and humidity variations is effective length needs adjustment sometimes by approx 0.1mm (measured by reference points on tonearm protractor) or the stylus pressure by tenths of a gram (measured by digital stylus pressure gauge). So ther you have it. I am one of the unlucky ones who can hear minute differences and it is annoying and horrible when the settings are wrong but oh so heavenly and full of escapism when the settings are right. Sort of like good sex and bad sex really. LOL! GG

You might like to check out an existing topic on this done some time ago: Hypothetical-upgrade-question

I run KREL FPB-400cx on my B&W 802D's. The CAST connection makes ALL the difference and a stunning difference too especially with the Nordost CAST cables (marketed by Krell as CAST MMF) instead of the standard Krell CAST cables. So your suggestion of FPB-300cx should be a good match for the B&W 803's especially if you can add the zing provided by the CAST system between the Amp and pre-amp (requires Krell pre-amp obviously to use the CAST system).

Since jitter only occurs on conversion from digital to analogue that chain will have nothing to do with jitter. However, so many conversions in protocols and media may bring signal loss or noise introduction into your digital data stream. Reduce the conversions. If that means reducing the clutter, then that's good, but reduce the signal conversions as a first priority. Unless you have a special implementation of toslink, it will be inferior to the SPDIF and AES/EBU signals. This last statement will be seen by many as a red-rag-to-a-bull. It is not my inention to start a flame war. This is my experience. YMMV. Personally I have one direct AES/EBU connection from source to DAC/Processor or if a component only supports SPDIF then I have a single and direct SPDIF cable from source to the DAC/Processor. I don't allow my home theatre processor to switch any signals (like video, for example). GG