PAROXYSMAL DISCHARGE

This was also posted in the computeraudiophile.com forums.

I’ve patiently waited for Esoteric’s D-07 since it was announced last year. It has still to find its way to Sweden though, apparently due to a change of distributor for western Europe. My DAC fund is still a work in progress, but today I decided to stop waiting for the D-07 and instead test the D-05 against Weiss’ DAC202, to at least get a sense of the difference in “brand sound”.

I spent two hours with them, in the Audio Concept store in Stockholm. I’m familiar with the room from previous auditions, and the equipment was MBL 1531 CD player (used as transport), MBL 5011 preamp, MBL 8011 amps in monoblock mode. Speakers were Focal Diablo Utopia since that’s what I have at home.

My main musical diet sits distinctly outside of conventional audiophile material: Lots of electronic music, often in the extreme ends of the ambient/noisy spectrum. I’m not primarily seeking the illusion of real instruments. I tend to be drawn to things like dryness, control and resolution.

Starting with Weiss, I found it exquisitely smooth and with an almost overwhelming spatiality. I found myself thinking that it’s almost as though it adds a reverb to the signal, but in the most flattering way possible. I came to think of MBL speakers with their unbeatable 3D soundstage, but now coming out of the much more directional Focal speakers. At one point I wished the sound was a little more up front and direct; The hugeness of the sound cloud, just as with MBL speakers, takes some edge off of those really ultra dry, in-your-face sounds. The midrange of this DAC is really something extraordinary though, probably the best I’ve heard.

Changing to Esoteric, there is a sense of ruthless and unrelenting precision thanks to its much drier and more direct sound. This sound is much closer to what I’m used to from other equipment, and the lesser spatiality gives the treble a greater sense of laser-like focus, projecting the sound straight into your head. The soundstage not only lost some depth but on a few tracks I found stereo imaging a bit more diffuse and unprecise as well. I even went as far as making sure I hadn’t accidentally shifted the channels! This really says something of the 3D sound from Weiss. In terms of dynamics I found them roughly equal.

Overall I felt more at home with the treble from Esoteric, but I’m aware that this might be because that’s the kind of treble I’m used to. I have no problem seeing the Weiss treble have benefits in the long run.

I tried cycling through the different upsampling modes (off, 2xf, 4xf, dsd) a few times but had difficulty hearing much difference with the music I was playing. I didn’t toy around with the filter settings or PLL modes.

Finally I went back to Weiss for a few tracks. The spatiality is really impressive, again almost to the point where it seems too good to be true. Nothing was coming out of the speakers, the sound was just there. With Esoteric some sounds were clearly centered around the speakers, as is often the case with electronic music. I was hearing the same amount of detail in the treble with both DAC’s, just presented very differently. Weiss has more detail and more liquidity in the midrange – it must be pretty much unbeatable here, regardless of price. In the bass they were roughly equal – at first I thought Esoteric had a little more omph, but then on some tracks the roles were reversed. A draw.

I found this both interesting and difficult. Weiss’ 3D capabilities were so amazing they’re borderline gimmicky, perhaps because my ears aren’t used to it, but still. Esoteric’s sense of precision and focus in the treble — without even the slightest harshness, imbalance or grain — speaks strongly to my audio instincs. Yet Weiss was at least equally detailed and so absurdly smooth…

I will listen more, but I think after round one Weiss has an edge. I would gladly make myself more acquainted with that fantastic 3D sound, and the smoothness tells me fatigue will never be an issue. It’s also a bit cheaper. Still, and I can’t help repeating this, that Esoteric treble speaks to me somehow.

I have been running a Windows-based, self-assembled computer as our home server for the last few years. It’s served us very well; The thick chassis walls, rubber-suspended hard drives and passive CPU cooling made it almost entirely silent. The dedicated RAID card kept my 4×500GB Samsung drives in order and provided both adequate speed and a basic level of security for our precious music archive (ripped from our own records, mind you). It ran Squeezebox Server for music streaming, PS3 Media Server to stream video content through our PS3, an FTP server so I could access music at work and a remote desktop client for whatever else I needed to do.

On the downside, it’s about as energy efficient as whipping cream with a helicopter rotor. On top of that, all the extra services hampered performance for music making and the system began to crash at an alarming and increasing pace earlier this year. So what I really needed was to split the computer from the storage, so that one could be turned off while the other kept chugging.

Plenty of evenings were spent reading up on NAS servers: Makes, models and reviews were scrutinized while I tried to figure out what I really needed. Maybe a mac mini with some direct attached storage would be better? Or a new PC with an iPad for sofa surfing? The web, although still just in its teens, provides a wealth of research opportinities and evaluation tools almost unfathomable a mere 15 years ago. I used Swedish price comparison juggernaut Prisjakt.nu for compiling a range of potential solutions. The site allows me to compare specs side-by-side and to find cheap prices not only on single components but on entire upgrade paths, including the tracing of price trends over time. On top of that, it aggregates both professional and consumer reviews, allowing me to dig deep into the real world performance and user experiences for each product.

My list of needs for a storage & home server solution quite soon boiled down to the following:

• Raid5 or equivalent redundancy
• 4 disk bays or more – we have a lot of data
• Reasonably quiet – It’ll be in a separate room, but I want it as close to inaudible as I can get
• Good speed – My previous experience with a ReadyNAS NV+ wasn’t overwhelmingly impressive in this department, so the new Qnap *59 series and ReadyNAS NVX & Pro units caught my attention thanks to their performance in review benchmarks.
• The ability to run Squeezebox Server – This is absolutely essential. We have all our music as FLAC, and I intend to stick with the Squeezebox Duet for the foreseeable future.
• Torrents – Our level of music nerdery requires a lot of research, and we mainly rely on BitTorrent to check out new stuff before placing orders. Having this centralized to our home server rather than running on laptops that need to be left on over night just to wait for a damn torrent is a huge convenience.

In the middle of pulling my recently acquired hair over which make and model to go with in order to make sure I’m as future proof as possible, one of my Prisjakt.nu wishlist shopping carts suddenly dropped 2000 kronor (≈€200). The reason was that one of Swedens biggest and most highly regarded retailers suddenly (and perhaps mistakenly) slashed the price of the Netgear ReadyNAS NVX. I was lusting for the 6 bay Pro version but the fact that they also had an an eyebrow-raisingly generous price for the 64MB cache version of Western Digital’s 2TB Green Power disks sealed the deal. So to conclude the ridiculously inefficient blabbering so far in this post, I now own a ReadyNAS NVX, running it with 4×2TB in their proprietary Xraid2 configuration.

So, what’s it like? While I’m taking a risk running it with disks not in the official hardware compatibility list (only the 32MB cache version of the drive is listed as of this post), I must say I don’t think I could be happier with my purchase now that everything is up and running. It wasn’t all smooth sailing though: After setting it up it immediately started rebuilding the array as one of the disks seemed to cause some sort of trouble. This may be normal operating procedure (I’m lazy and  didn’t RTFM) but it took 24 hours before I had full parity. Populating the array from the Windows Vista box was both slow and peculiar; From the Raid5 array to a SATA disk in the same box gave me about 50MB/s, from the SATA disk to the NAS about 40 MB/s, but from the Raid5 array to the NAS I got an average of just 25 MB/s over FTP. When using a normal windows file transfer through CIFS it was even worse, dropping to well below 10 MB/s. But only from the Raid5 array! It took me two days before everything was transfered, and once that was achieved I noticed that over AFP I got way better speeds, even though it involved puny little 5400 rpm laptop drives. Since we’re aiming for an all Apple home, this was just fine.

Squeezeserver came pre-installed(!) but not very up to date. Changing to the very latest version, which Logitech thankfully keeps up to date with the Windows version, was very straightforward desipte involving quite a few steps. A full scan of our 1.5TB library takes about 2-3 hours with the new version, which is very impressive. I had fears that the rather demanding web GUI, which lagged notable from the 1.86GHz dual core Vista machine, would be even more sluggish on the comparatively weak, embedded single core CPU of the NVX. I was pleasantly surprised that it runs much quicker! Everything just feels snappier, and while it’s still not completely instant, I can’t say I have any complaints. It’s certainly better than iTunes…

There’s a BitTorrent client provided by Netgear, but it wasn’t preinstalled on the NVX. Instead of that official one, I decided to go with the slightly more accomplished Transmission client. It was very easy to set up, has plenty of neat features and has been running flawlessly so far. I had a torrent that was almost finished last night, and now 24 hours later I noticed it had seeded a whopping 450GB since yesterday! This shows what an insane throughput speed the ReadyNAS NVX is capable of, with over 5MB/s on average the whole time.

Setting up user accounts with their own private shares is super easy, as is Apple Time Machine support. The DLNA server works great in our scarce few tests so far, but it lacks the live transcoding abilities of the PS3 Media Server. There might be a good alternative out there, but I haven’t looked yet.

My overall recommendation for anyone looking for a quality home server with needs somewhat similar to mine is to get the ReadyNAS NVX unless you absolutely need the corporate/enterprise features of ReadyNAS Pro or Qnap *59, or feel that a 4 bay NAS is too restrictive. I hope my storage needs are now filled for the coming 3 years at the very least.

It turns out my previous post was rather prophetic:

…We’ll see if it gets to stay.

After ruling out the option of pairing my digital amp with an ADC, I’m facing the fact that I need a new amp in order to get my system to where I’m satisfied. Since the speakers aren’t paid off for quite some time, my funds are pretty limited. So while a high-end integrated like the tried & tested Pass Labs INT-150 or the esoteric and mysterious newcomer Devialet D-premier would be tremendously exciting, I am simply unable to pay for something like that, no matter how much I’d wish to own it.

Used units of the Pass do surface on occasion, sometimes at the very outskirts of my financial reach, so perhaps it’s still an option. But buying second hand will make it very difficult to do a proper evaluation and I have no desire to buy anything blindly.

While my budget is insufficient for an integrated amp that does my speakers justice, I could cut the investment in half by just buying half the amp – I could get a separate power amp.  The problem, of course, is input selection and volume control. But if I can live with a huge bottleneck for a year or so, I could use my Allen & Heath Xone:42 DJ mixer as the preamp! Perhaps the bottleneck won’t even be that enormous – it’s one of the finer sounding mixers on the market, after all.

A benefit of the mixer-as-a-preamp approach is that by the time I’ve saved up (or acquired though forays into male prostitution)  enough money for a preamp, there might be more and better options of DAC/preamp combos than the Benchmark DAC1 PRE. Neither Esoteric nor Weiss built analog throughputs into their latest designs, so we’re probably a year or more away from proper competition in this category. With such a unit I could still get a two-box option by going with power amp and dac/pre instead of integrated and dac. Not counting the phono amp of course…

The downside of this is of course that I will have glorious speakers and a great power amp but mediocre sound for a year or more. Considering all the money and the effort that goes into this, which is about the lust for music in the end, it’s not a very attractive proposition. But neither is spending huge amounts of money on something that isn’t quite right.

On a whim (and after a beer or two), I listed my Lyngdorf TDAI 2200 amp for sale on Friday night. It got picked up by a new owner less than 48 hours later, so now I’m really in a hurry, but at least I’ve freed up some funds. The Stockholm Highend Fair is just a few days away, and hopefully I’ll find the amp of my dreams there, just like I found my speakers last year.

Over the weekend I’ve been involved in some forum discussions regarding whether USB cables can make a sonic difference when connecting a computer to  a DAC. I went into the discussion thinking it couldn’t possibly matter since USB sends CRC-signed data packets, but changed my mind as I researached the topic deeper. In short: With most current USB dac’s, the clock for the D/A is derived from the 12 MHz frequency of the USB 1.0 spec that the stream is locked to. Since this means that jitter can be a factor, suddenly the cable can make a difference, at least theoretically.

I think the deeper insight from all this is how much a consumer needs to know to make informed decisions. To confidently judge whether to spend money on a USB cable or dismiss it as placebo and a waste of money, the following needs to be understood:

• The fundamental difference between analogue and digital audio
• Pulse Code Modulation data structure, with bits and sample points
• How a clock pulse is used in D/A conversion
• The concept of jitter and its detrimental effect in the D/A stage
• Jitter supression using a Phase Locked Loop, or PLL
• Jitter supression using a memory buffer, and the inherent problems of buffer overflow or underrun
• The principles of packet data, with handshakes, tokens, data and status
• The difference between bulk and isochronous modes in USB
• How adaptive isochronous mode is fundamentally different from asynchronous isochronous mode
• Understanding the physical principles of electromagnetic interference, EMI, as it applies to cables

That’s just the basics for whether a USB cable can theoretically make a difference. No wonder the old hifi dinosaurs get it wrong.

If the ultimate goal is the best sound possible, there is no point in taking little intermediate steps when upgrading as that will just throwing money away. So with the speakers, I bought the best I could possibly afford. I would very much like to continue in the same way with all other components, but the research and auditioning is tiring work, when all I want is for it to be over with so I can forget the model names and technical data and just play music. This longing makes it dangerously tempting to slip into a mindset of looking for good enough rather than the best possible equipment. To trick myself into maintaining focus and determination, I’ll go over less optimal upgrade paths first and save the dreamy swooning over ultimate fantasy rigs for later posts.

A problem with integrateds is that you can’t upgrade single components. In my case it’s not just pre and power amplifiers that are in a single hull, but also DAC and DSP room correction. I can’t buy a new DAC since the amp has no analogue inputs, and with no analogue outputs other than speaker terminals, I can’t use it as a preamplifier either.

I actually can play vinyl still, but it’s cumbersome; My DJ Mixer also functions as a USB sound card. This means that it has built-in AD/DA. But to get that digital signal to the amp, I have to connect the USB to my Macbook Pro and then use it’s jitter-ridden optical output to the amp. Not only do I get USB and optical cables hanging like trip wires through the livingroom, but it also occupies my computer. On top of that, I don’t think the A/D of the mixer is quite top notch, regardless of how well its analogue parts perform. So to solve the most immediate problem which is that of vinyl playback, I’d need a proper A/D converter.

I’ve bought a Roland JP-8000 synthesizer, but I haven’t used it yet since I don’t have a sound card with MIDI. I could actually solve that as well as the ADC issue with a higher quality firewire sound interface, which I could also use for ripping vinyl to FLAC (Ican with the mixer too, but there’s that ADC quality concern…). But in order to make that investment really worthwhile, it should have a really good DAC section too. The RME Fireface 400 looks to be one of the finer products in the category (compared with cheaper options like still fairly potent TC Konnekt 24D) but considering how many things it does for the price, its digital circuitry is unlikely to stand even a sliver of a chance against something from Weiss or other single-purpose hardware. But those on the other hand are so expensive that I’d be better off putting that money towards an analogue amplifier, as the very point of the ADC route is to spend less money by getting to keep the Lyngdorf amp.

There is some middle ground however; The Metric Halo ULN2 is an external firewire interface just like the RME unit. At more than twice its price it’s still half of what I last saw the Weiss ADC list for, so it’s somewhat viable. The ULN2 has been getting a lot of attention in the computer audiophile circuit, where it’s used as a DAC. So I could then get an ADC to use with the Lyngdorf for now (and for vinyl ripping) as well as a good DAC for later when I upgrade the amp, and not immediately feel the need to upgrade again. So far so good, but of course there’s a drawback: It doesn’t have MIDI, so I’d still need a separate unit for music production. At it’s price, I would have needed all three legs to stand on to justify the purchase.

Even if I were to find the equivalent of a ULN2 with MIDI, I’d have to move it from the studio room to the livingroom each time I wanted to play vinyl. It would also mean that I couldn’t be making music in one room while my girlfriend plays vinyl in the other, so ultimately this path will not lead to a satisfactory solution. Perhaps if I found some sort of decent quality ADC for €100 or so, I could justify the purchase as a temporary fix. But it feels very uncomfortable pursuing a solution that is so short sighted and flawed. Back to the drawing board…

The DAC articles I bravely set out to write are on hold for now. I’ll still ramble on about sound, though.

Having poured so much time and money into my speaker purchase, it would be wasteful to lower my standards and efforts for the other components. The required patience is in short supply however, as all my hifi investments from here on will have a smaller effect on the sound than the speaker upgrade brought. It’s tempting, then, to just go with what is affordable and sounds decent and get the whole thing over with. But where patience is scarce, ambition still soars high – I know myself too well to think I can find contentment with anything that isn’t thoroughly researched, auditioned and compared.

My main problem right now is that there’s a huge ever-branching delta of upgrade routes, and each one presents different problems in terms of equipment evaluation, system coherence, audio philosophies, financing and everything in between. In an effort to make the whole endeavour a little less intimidating, I’ll try to put the available paths into words. It’s all for my own benefit, but on the off chance that someone else finds it interesting, I’ll post it here.

But before I go all Freud on issues of amplifier technology and cables, lets look at what my starting point is. After buying the Focal Diablo Utopia speakers I immediately started looking at other components, and felt that a better DAC would provide a sizeable improvement. Many people don’t realize what a huge difference in sound there can be between CD players, and this has everything to do with the DAC. I was also painfully aware that my NAD C370 amplifier wasn’t the poster child of resolution and elegance, nor were my Technics 1210 turntables with their shitty stock tone arms and DJ cartridges. Last but not least, room acoustics is a huge factor in any audio system, so perhaps I should address that before everything else?

In the midst of this I came across a rather appealing deal on the Lyngdorf TDAI 2200 RoomPerfect amplifier. I won’t get into deeper technical details here, but it’s a digital amplifier, and hence has digital inputs. It also comes with a microphone and a DSP circuit that lets the amp adjust the sound based on room acoustics, speaker placement and listening position. As this solved the issue of DAC, amplifier and room acoustics (sort of) in a single unit that I could actually pay for, I bought it.

Without the RoomPerfect stuff, there was a small but noticable improvement in sound. The highs got a bit more texture and the sense of overall control improved. Calibrating the thing for the DSP correction gave some difference in the bass, but not by much and it was more different than it was better. If the units display is to be believed, my room and equipment needed only very minor adjustments, so as it turned out this feature wasn’t all that necessary. It was certainly no DarTZeel, but the overall sound was very nice, and honestly one I wouldn’t really be in any rush to throw more money at.

There is however a small problem with having only digital inputs, namely this:

I could no longer play vinyl, as the amplifier lacks analogue inputs. As you can see, that is quite a large amount of music now quarantined indefinitely. Running analogue signal to a digital amplifier is technically unappealing since it means an unnecessary A/D–D/A conversion, but right from the start I regarded the Lyngdorf as a temporary solution anyway. Upgrading the amp with analogue inputs is about €500, which isn’t cheap but at least somewhat agreeable. What is absolutely prepostrous however is that you can’t install the card yourself, and it has to be done at the Lyngdorf factory in Denmark. Better yet, it takes 5 weeks. There’s no fucking way I’d be out of music for a whole month, and the stupidity of this policy means I will absolutely refuse to take this route.

This is where I’m at now. I have a device that needs to be replaced with an amplifier (integrated or separates), DAC, and acoustic treatment for the room, and then I also need to improve the vinyl rig. Where to begin, how and for what cost is what I need to figure out.

Digital audio has been around for a very long time – the CD format is over 30 years old now – yet enormous leaps in progress are still being made, and the latest development is undeniably server-based playback. The days of swapping CD’s seem to be over for me, and I’m not looking back. I still buy all my music as physical releases though! As of writing this, I still have not purchased a single electronically distributed piece of music. But that’s another story.

I normally just write stuff here for my own enjoyment, as a way to flush my system of thoughts on a certain topic. But with digital audio I’ll see if I can fire up my inner philanthropist and start at the very beginning, going through things I’ve already known for 15 years. I think it will be an interesting challenge and it would make this series a lot more complete if I do. I will attempt to put everything in laymans terms, so even fundamentalist vinyl cavemen can follow my reasoning.

The first thing I need to define is what digital actually is, especially in terms of audio. To do that, you need to know how sound works, but I won’t regress into the basic physics here. So assuming that you’re familiar with the fundamental principles of waveforms (like the sine wave in the oscilloscope above), let’s look at how they are stored as data rather than as a groove in a vinyl or magnetism on a reel tape.

Imagine a chess board. It has 64 squares arranged in an 8×8 grid, denominated A-H along its X axis and 1-8 along the Y. In chess you cannot place your pieces on E4-and-a-half or anything like that; they have to obey the grid, so you’re either E4 or E5. This same type of rule exists with digital audio, in that a sine wave cannot be drawn as a smooth curve like in our analogue oscilloscope screen above. In fact, the image above has a faint square pattern on the screen, so imagine trying to approximate the sine wave by tracing the dark lines of this grid. This is how sound is stored as data; a series of coordinates with time along the X axis and amplitude along Y. The horizontal distance, or time, between these coordinates is constant. So that value is just a frequency rather than coordinate data for each point. This frequency is kept by a clock, and we’ll back to that later.

As you may guess, the finer grid you have, the closer you get to analogue sound. Inversely, a coarser resolution will reveal more of the unnatural sounding sideeffects of digital sound. There is no information of how the waveform is supposed to look between the points of data. There is simply no information there, so after each sample point the waveform is drawn straight ahead along the X axis until the frequency clock says it’s time for a new data point. Once there, the waveform is drawn straight up or down to get to the new coordinates. Because of this, the waveform isn’t drawn as a connect-the-dots chart, but with orthogonal angles:

The vertical axis, which denotes amplitude, is stored as a 16 bit value in CD audio. Now what the hell does that mean, you might ask. A bit in digital terms is a single one or zero, so at 1 bit you would have full amplitude or silence – 1 or 0, respectively. At two bits, you can have four combinations: 00, 01, 10, 11, essentially meaning you could have four different amplitudes in your waveform. So moving all the way up to 16 bits, there are 65384 possible combinations of amplitude. While it might be difficult to hear the difference in loudness between 47361 and 47362 in amplitude, there are other reasons to desire even higher bit depth.

So that’s the basics of CD audio, really – a clock-timed series of amplitudes stored as a 16-bit values. When converting something to digital, the strength of the electric signal in the microphone is measured at the rate of this clock, and stored as amplitude values. When playing it back from digital, the amplitude values are read at the pace of a new clock (hopefully indistinguishable from the recording one!) and a new electric signal is throttled according to these amplitudes. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but I’m sure you get the point.

Now that the basics are laid down, my next post will go through the ways in which these conversions, mainly focusing on digital to analogue, can get messed up and how to avoid these pitfalls.

A slight disclaimer: The above explanation of digital audio is for pulse-code modulation, or PCM for short. There is another, perhaps slightly less intuitive way of storing sound as data that is called Pulse-Width Modulation which is used on Super Audio CD’s under the name DSD. Since it’s trickier and far less common I won’t describe it further here.

Now that the Focal Diablo Utopia speakers #19 and #20 are mine (Focal are numbering every speaker in their Utopia line, and I appear to have gotten my filthy mitts on an early pair), I stand before the daunting task of trying to find a way to afford source and amplification electronics that do them justice.

First of all, I need to figure out where to aim my priorities next.

My current amplifier, while immensely powerful, is not the poster child of resolution and finesse. When I heard the darTZeel pre/power combo drive the Diablo’s big brother Scala Utopia it became very evident that these speakers can convey a lot more than what amplification a tenth of the darTZeel price is able to summon. In fact, my amplifier cost one fiftieth of the darTZeel combo…

Another step back in the signal chain, and we get to my Squeezebox Duet. The user friendliness of this system is of such a magnitude that I honestly don’t know how I put up with shifting CD’s before. A server-based music system is an absolute necessity for me now, and I can’t even imagine going back. However, it’s a rather cheap device. Considering the price of the Receiver, which is the bit that actually plays music, it’s amazing that it sounds as good as it does. The thing includes a wireless receiver & transmitter, wired network card, DAC and unbalanced RCA output stage, all for the price of a parking ticket or around 6-8 CD’s.

While I’m not an adherent of the Source First philosophy, I think my Return On Invest would be greatest if I gave my digital source attention before I move on to amplification. Thus, from here on my hi-fi posts will be about DAC research and other aspects of server-based music systems.

I do have a shitload of vinyl, but I’m ignoring that for now. An upgrade there might come before the digital source though, and when/if the day comes I’ll make sure to give it its due attention.

I played a DJ set in Belgium this weekend, where Psykovsky and Cosmosis played live. So it was kind of big, but my morning set (I got on at 8am) got a slightly smaller crowd than last year. Nevertheless, the Belgians know how to stir up a dancefloor riot, and here’s a short glimpse of when I played my favourite track off of Filteria’s “Heliopolis” album:

I arrived just 40 minutes before I started playing, since I had to get up at 6am on Saturday to catch the flight to Brussels and hence needed to get some sleep before playing. Then I also had to jump into a cab to go straight to the airport after my gig, so I didn’t get to socialize much. Thanks however go out to Arne for booking me, Joske and Sammy for their neverending hospitality and friendliness, Philip for the record (nice to finally meet!), Matthias for buying some vinyl from me and Billy (Cosmosis) for the nice handover and for being such a nice bloke.

So, the time had come to decide. MBL? Focal? Neither?

What impressed me the most with the MBL 121 speakers was their stunning ability to illustrate the space of a recording. This makes them nearly unbeatable for classical, jazz, singer-songwriter and live recordings. Since I don’t listen to those types of music much, instead often drawn to “produced” sounds, this argument loses some of its weight in my case. Instead, their ability to provide an accurate and deeply satisfying soundstage from virtually anywhere in the room, including standing up, becomes their most compelling advantage. For social listening, this is tremendously valuable.

While the sweet spot of the MBL’s is essentially everywhere, the Focal Diablo’s laser precision are less forgiving. But once in that spot, are they ever rewarding. Sounds are given such body and texture that the tastebuds are triggered — I can literally sense the taste of vanilla and cream when Mari Boine sings “Goaskinviellja“, so smooth is her voice. Likewise, fizzing, distorted, black metal guitar resonance noise can trigger a taste sensation similar to that dry, astringent tongue sensation provided by an extremely hoppy beer. While I am mildly synaesthetic, i have never ever felt it this clearly with sound before. This almost supernatural effect aside, they still sound mindbogglingly controlled and tight, yet wide open and completely unstrained regardless of what madness is forced through them.

So in the end, love at first sight did prevail. The choice I had feared having to make blossomed into certainty. I made a pact with the devil and couldn’t be happier.

I am well aware that my purchase means I will have to run them with my existing electronics for some time to come, which means even though the sound is already fantastic, they will not be close to their full potential until the other components have been upgraded. I will do my best to scrape together enough money to upgrade one of my DJ turntables, get some acoustic room treatment in place and most of all put a proper DAC between Squeezebox and amp. In case I somehow manage to keep up my blogging pace, I intend to start a new series on Digital to Analogue Converter technology. It will serve both to help me learn more about the technology and also to sift through the market and try to find the holy grail of DAC’s. I might get a couple of more detailed listening impressions posted too…

Blogger is utter shit, so I’m changing to wordpress. Please be patient as I try to get everything sorted out and a proper design put in place.

Before I reveal to you, my imaginary horde of loyal readers, what the final outcome of my quest to replace my old speakers is, I will briefly summarize the previous posts in this series:

Part I briefly touched on my approach to music and attitude towards high-end, or audiophile, sound, before telling the story of how my eyes (or rather, ears) were opened by what may well be the most impressive speaker I have encountered.

Part II explains in greater depth how I think with regards to assembling a stereo system, and then tells the tale of my first auditions of the Focal Diablo Utopia speakers, where I tried very hard to find something cheaper to redirect my lust towards.

High-end audio is full of bullshit snake-oil superstition, and in Part III some aspects of this gets a going over, summed up with some basic advice on how to steer clear of the nonense.

In Part IV the drama becomes palpable as a real monkey wrench is thrown into the mix with the MBL 121 speakers. I describe my listening experiences in some detail and try to shed light on the difference between them and the Focal’s.

As I’ve become more or less obsessed with this process, I have rambled about speakers to everyone I meet. This is often met with what almost amounts to ridicule once I mention the price range these things are in. So for Part V I put this type of investment into some perspective, hopefully showing that it’s not as insane as some would make it out to be.

Finally in Part VI I have reluctantly accepted that this is the price range required to make me happy. I talk about my axiety over having to make a choice, somewhat pessimistic about the goal of every being satisfied.

Later today I will sit down and compare the Focal Diablo Utopia with the MBL 121 speakers side by side. I won’t purchase the winner today, and if I didn’t have such a rich history of financial recklessness I’d say I may never buy them. But having bought into my own justification pitch, I realize I might pull the trigger eventually. Age has at least taught me to take a few deep breaths before I take the plunge. This will probably be the final comparison between the two, as I doubt there are more insights to be had with additional listening beyond this point. It’s decision time.

I’m both excited and worried about the outcome, however.

I’m excited because according to my google-fu there is no documentation of any comparison between these two, which is somewhat surprising considering that these are two of the finest standmounted speakers on the planet. Surely this shoot-out should have happened by now? I’m also excited because they both have very unique and distinguishing treble elements; Focal has their beryllium tweeter, now larger and with greater spectral range than ever, and MBL have their proprietary Radialstrahler thingamajig. I’m also excited because while their trebles might steal the show, they have both proven to have extremely tight and well controlled bass (see my notes on playing Autechre’s “Surripere” in part IV of this series). A clear winner in that category had made the race uneven and thus removed any reason for excitement.

My worries, on the other hand, are more about the long-term relationship with the speaker I end up choosing. If I go with Focal, will I miss the stereo precision and eerie stage depth of the MBL’s? After all, I listen to Steve Roach more than any other artist and his Immersion : One lived up to its name more over ze Germans than with the Diablo’s. But then on the other hand, Focal has a very slight but not insignificant advantage in terms of resolution and they give the sounds a little extra meat on the sonic bones (both speakers totally outclass my current ones in this regard, though). But is that fleshy Focal sound true? And what about the overwhelmingly impressive 3D scenery from the MBL’s – is it a gimmicky effect that is superfluous when applied to my main diet of electronic music? I guess what I’m really afraid of is to not have a clear winner, to desire the best of both worlds. If I buy speakers in this price range I shouldn’t have to long for greener pastures.

I’m bracing myself for what may well be a rather depressing part VII of this series.

I stole this image somewhere in an attempt to illustrate what is generally an accepted costly hobby. This really is over the top though.

While it’s easy to point out when audiophile excess has entered the land of absurdity, it’s a bit more interesting to look at the conditions where purchasing high-end components makes sense. Since all of my recent hifi posts are basically just flow-of-consciousness ramblings, here’s a list off the top of my head:

If you can hear the difference, it’s there. Anyone can hear the difference between a €5.000 and a €10.000 speaker, and even between two of the same price class. This goes for CD players and amps too, and even, albeit to a lesser extent, interconnects and speaker cables. While increased budgets give diminishing returns (the last percent of any audio parameter is infinitely expensive to attain), you do generally get better sound for more money. Some people are just not as focused on Return On Investment and thus are willing to pay a lot more money for a little more hifi.

Different sound is not necessarily better sound, but if you prefer hearing what comes out of one speaker over another, then it’s better to you. If the sound is grating, lifeless, muffled, unpleasantly coloured or whatever, then you might want something else. If that something else happens to be more expensive, then that’s just the way it is.

Finer equipment should ideally let you hear more of your music (in terms of detail, texture, and so on) with less sound volume, less distortion and less unwanted side effects. This in turn means that a good system will save you from ear fatigue and let you listen for longer sessions. Hence the cost broken time per hour of use might not be so much worse with a pricey system.

Some argue that the recording equipment is much cheaper than what the record is played back on, indicating that this invalidates the whole point of a high-end system. But this is a retarded argument; Even with a poor recording there is no point in making the signal even shittier.

An hour a day for 10 years on a €15.000 system means over €4 per day. That’s not a super cheap habit, but smoking a pack a day probably qualifies as a worse investment. Spending €30 in a bar each weekend, which is not exactly unheard of, would amount to around the same thing. It would also be roughly equivalent of buying one or two new console games each month. And really, if you hardly ever watch TV (honestly!), don’t have a car, boat, summer home or cocaine & prostitute habit, then what’s so bad about spending that sports bike money (or equivalent) on what you’re really passionate about?

If you work 12-hour days and then hit the gym and after that watch TV for three hours every day, there’s just no time to listen to music. And an expensive system can’t really be justified unless you actually listen to it. Unfortunately I find that personally I seldom sit down and just listen any more. It’s like I have to do something else at the same time, which in effect relegates music to play the role of background noise. Now the million dollar question is whether this is because listening through my system doesn’t excite me enough these days, or because I have some sort of ADD. It’s probably a little of both, but I tell myself that if I buy the Focal or MBL speakers I’ll change – I’ll sit peacefully on the couch for hours on end, right in the sweet spot of course, reading fancy intellectual books while every now and then skippity-hopping around our vast music library using the Squeezebox remote, all while immersed in the highest of audio fidelity. This, of course, is the most delusional and self-betraying form of purchase justification. Damn it.

Having exhausted the options of speakers cheaper than Focal Diablo Utopia that has my preferred dry, tight and precise sound, I was beginning to think that I might have to either buy the damned things, buy something cheaper I wasn’t fully happy with, or just keep what I have and take up knitting instead. But in a last attempt to make sure there were no options, I asked what else there was in the same price class as the Diablo’s. After all, if I’m going to spend that amount on speakers I’m pretty much obliged to ensure I’ve scourged the market to exhaust all options.

Somewhat hesitantly the sales guy started talking about speaker technology, indicating that a regular loudspeaker with the membrane, coil and magnet is actually a fundamentally flawed principle of generating sound, but that it’s prevalent mainly because it’s relatively cheap and it gets you “close enough”. He then explained how cones of sound projected towards your ears can never be fully like the real thing as for example the strings of a violin or whatever emits sound in all directions. And so with that introduction he pointed me towards these:

They’re the smallest speakers from German manufacturer MBL, Who like Focal invent, develop and produce their own speaker elements. But where Focal have Beryllium, MBL have the Radialstrahler. It’s essentially a set of lamellas that flex with the audio signal, generating a fully omnidirectional sound (at least for the treble and mids). I was cautioned that these speakers would demand a new way of listening, with a tone that almost assumed that I would not prefer them over the Focal’s. But I gave them a listen anyway.

On my first go with the MBL 121’s, they were in the setup pictured above, in a room as acoustically perfect as a box can be. They also had support of additional subs, something I was informed that they could not bypass for my session. So while I could not do a very fair comparison to the Focal’s due to the radically different setup, I liked the very silky quality that especially voices had, but more than anything else I was extremely impressed by how the sound was just not in any way seeming to come from the speakers. Instead it was as though I could pinpoint in X, Y and not least Z axis where each sound was emitting from. I played some Björk off of Medúlla and I swear I could hear exactly where here head was as she was singing. Not only side to side, mind you, but in depth, about a meter in behind the speakers, and even the goddamn height. Yes, I could hear how tall (or rather, short) she is. Fucking amazing.

But the sound was in no way as insanely detailed as with the Focal speakers, as not only the treble but also the mids were a bit blurred in texture and resolution. I wasn’t sure whether to blame the speakers, the room or the electronics but despite the absolutely mindboggling 3D imaging I would prefer the Focal’s. I can’t buy speakers knowing how much detail I’d still be missing. But I realised I needed to investigate these suckers further.

In my next visit to the store, I asked to compare the two. I started with the Focal’s in the old spot, now with the Bel Canto e.One s300iD amplifier, passing up the on-board D/A for a Weiss Minerva DAC. Now the Diablo’s too had that amazing silky quality I first heard in the MBL’s – clearly the amp and/or DAC was the key here, so one less advantage for MBL. After this warming up session I moved into the acoustically trated room again to have a go with the MBL’s, now playing on über expensive Spectral Audio amplification and an older GamuT CD. Again the subs were in, and again there was a muddiness to the sound. I’m sure the frequency response in the room is absurdly flat, but it felt boomy and muddy. The 3D imaging was there again, the silkiness too, but somehow, maybe, a very slight hardness of the treble compared to the beryllium-equipped Diablo’s. Normally monodirectional speakers should be tougher on the ears, but the sick resolution of the Focal Utopia elements might get the edge anyway. But this is in a room with zero dampening, so perhaps it’s acoustics?

Next up was to get the Diablo’s into the treated room, also with the subs. The 3D depth was better here than outside, but still can’t really match MBL. Detail-wise they fared better than MBL and the bass felt much more integrated with the rest of the sound. But I might still prefer how they performed without the subs and, perhaps surprisingly, without the diffusion-ripe room.

So the last test was to take the MBL’s out to the open, slightly dry sounding area and play them on Bel Canto / Weiss. Here they sounded much better, even more so than I had hoped. Aside from the Diablo’s they’re the only speaker that has yet passed the test that is Autechre’s “Surripere”, including the growling bass weirdness starting at around 4:40, that most speakers just don’t play at all. The 3D magic was somewhat subdued, but still clearly superior. Even here, sound wasn’t coming from the speakers, it was just there, in the air.

The sub matching was clearly bad with the MBL’s, as on their own they were much, much better, albeit not as deep. I could no longer sense the slightest trace of treble harshness either, but the Diablo’s might still have the edge in resolution. I did not have time (after 4 hous of listening) to do an A/B test, but that will come soon and will the the final elimination round. For the longest time I was sure Focal were going to win, but the comeback that the MBL’s did without the subs was astonishing, and over the last few days I’ve been going back and forth. I could really go either way; Do I stick with the Focal sound I love and possibly the best non-floorstanding traditional speaker ever, or with what is probably the speaker concept of the future with it’s amazing immersion?

Whatever I end up buying now will probably be with me for ten years, or more. But it’s not only I that will be affected long-term by this decision; These will probably be the speakers that my eventual children will grow up listening too, the speakers whose sound characteristics through which they will feel all those emotions that music can bring.

I don’t know how much of a drop in quality it will be to go with the built-in DAC of the Bel Canto amp, but if it’s within an acceptable range of the clearly superior Weiss Minerva, I´’m starting to think that I might actually be prepared to take the plunge now and buy a new system. I’ll have downpayments for 3 years at least, but should still be able to buy a golden horn diffusor every now and then to try and tame the concrete ceiling of our apartment. And I’ll have absolutely spectacular sound, so what else would I need money for? =)

Audiophiles are often ridiculed for spending time and substantial amounts of money on snake-oil products. These can vary from little wooden blocks to place speaker cables on like a monorail so that it never touches the ground (presumably to prevent static electricity, or something) to all manners of vibration dampening hocus pocus. The criticism spans from entirely valid, as I would say is the case for the examples I just gave, to dubious, which is the case for things like analogue cables or Digital to Analogue Converters (DAC’s).

The problem for the aspiring audiophile is that the boundary between sane science and sonic homeopathy is by no means a straight line; It is more akin to the outline of a fractal pattern, endlessly slithering through all aspects of sound reproduction. Take a speaker cable, for example: It makes sense on a physical level that an unshielded cable is more prone to pick up audible interference than a shielded one, and there are nearly endless measurable qualities of a cables conductive properties that have potentially hearable effects. But at some point it just gets retarded, because how can there be audible deterioration of the signal through a €5.000 cable? What signal transmitting problems are there in that cable that only another €5.000 can fix? I don’t doubt that there may be audible differences between those two hypothetical products (though the prices are from real products), but at some point it just gets ridiculous. And that’s when generously assuming that the full cost of the cable is due to engineering efforts to rid it of electric flaws.

In reality, there is no shortage of utterly retarded cables. How about audiophile grade USB cables, complete with wooden connectors? Can someone explain to me how a digital transfer protocol with signed packets benefits from fucking wooden connectors, and how the cable can affect the sound quality in any other way than “it works” or “it doesn’t work”?

I have a strong skepticism towards small, enthusiast companies producing very technical and complex products. I just don’t see how some guy in a basement or garage can match the research horsepower of larger corporations. For €10.000 I expect speakers with custom built, state-of-the-art elements developed from many years of experience and research, not some pricey off-the-shelf components but into a fancy box by some dude with a logo.

So ignore voodoo accessories, companies whos websites “technology” page reads like a physics students DMT trip report and any type of retarded claim of “revolutionary breakthrough”. I once saw a japanese amplifier manufacturer that had rounded courners in the paths on the circuit boards, claiming that it made the sound smoother. Such people should be punched in the testicles immediately.

Instead, just listen to good components from companies that either have a good track record based on quality alone, or up & comers that seem to be driven by actual innovation rather than some wannabee me-too clinging to the hifi bandwagon.

Some time back, before I bought my Logitech Squeezebox Duet, I was touring the hifi stores auditioning CD players. Not only is my CD player the oldest component in my system, but I had also heard some mantra about “source first” in composing a stereo system, not giving it any thought beyond the initial “sure, OK”. I ended up with the Squeezebox instead, and have since made a complete 180 in terms of system design philosophy.

The speakers are affecting the sound more than anything else in your system, assuming that everything is reasonably normal products. So to effectively select a main course to go with the sauce is just dumb. But since you’re listening to the speakers, it makes sense to select ones that, when performing backed by a very neutral system, sounds the way you want.

But what is it then that one wants to hear, what is the desired sound? Personally I have always gravitated towards immersion, resolution and precision rather than flow, rhythm and smoothness. If the music is harsh, it should sound that way! As stupid as this may make me sound, it was only very recently that I received and understood the advice that one should not listen for any specific detail or parameter, but what is “enjoyable”. I must admit that when it comes to auditioning stereo equipment, I have never once just listened for what is the most enjoyable, instead hunting for resolution, transients and extreme frequencies.

The risk with this approach is of course that what is instantly enjoyable may prove to be sugarcoated, and too much of that and the sonic diabetes becomes inevitable. An overly discerning listening on the other hand might put undue emphasis on things like treble resolution and transient speed, as such parameters may sound impressive even though they’re not always true to the original recording or presented in a pleasurable way.

Thus, auditioning hifi gear is an undertaking where the right decision is based in emotion rather than measurements and facts, albeit a sprinkling of analysis is inevitable. My current attempt at finding new speakers has been the first time I’ve actively tried to listen this way, and I’ve found it very rewarding. Not only does it help me listen the way the speakers will be used over the next ten years or more, but it has also helped me get rid of a lot of doubt and uncertainty in terms of what sounds “best”.

One of my fears in the world of audiophilia is to end up a “parameter listener”, someone who listens to sounds rather than to music. I don’t want to think about upgrading some cable or buying custom feet for my amplifier when listening to music. If you do that, you’ve lost the plot. So I want to get this upgrade over with as soon as possible, so that I can forget about high-end nerdery and just go back to playing records. But at the same time, I realize that to avoid those traps, I must make sure I’m getting exactly what I want. Settling for second best is not the way to sonic nirvana.

So, back to my preferences. In listening to the Focal Diablo Utopia speakers I have realized how much more detail they reveal in each and every CD, while being many times smoother and easier on my ears than my current Focal/JMLab Cobalt 806’s. In fact, I have always attributed listening fatigue to the room acoustics, blaming hard reflections and orthogonal angles. I was even contemplating doing acoustic room treatment before buying the speakers, so that I could audition them at home in an enviropnment that did them justice. I was eventually talked out of this both by hifi salesmen and on web forums, with everyone basically saying that you’ll need a good speaker to assess the result of any dampening or diffusion.

The realization that it’s actually my speakers that have a bit of tweeter harshness, in combination with the newfound love for auditioning with my emotions, let me immediately dismiss the most detailed monitor speaker I’ve ever heard, the Marten Design Duke. While it showed me musical details that even the beryllium tweeter from Focal couldn’t dig out, my ears felt sore after ten minutes. So while immensly impressive, they are essentially useless for someone who wants to listen for hours on end. (Slight disclaimer: They probably sound a bit less harsh with a warmer sounding amp, but if I have to tame my speakers to stand them, something’s not right.)

I was also able to dismiss the T+A Criteron TS 200 – they are an absolutely astonishing speaker for the price, and if I had never listened to the Focal’s I would probably have stopped looking after these, bought them (at just over a third of the Focal price) and gone home very happy. But I have heard the light, and know too well how much smoother the treble can be, and how insane an amount of bass control is actually possible.

So far in all my research and auditioning, I have pretty much accepted that with my preferences, even if I now listen with my heart much more, nothing below the price of the Diablo’s will outdo them. Unless I accidentally stumble across a substantial fortune, this is very bad news, because all my quest for better sound has bought me so far is discontent.

And it gets worse…

As a music aficionado I am concerned about sound quality, in the sense that I want to experience the music at its fullest potential, be it ultra minimalist ambient, goa trance, black metal or wall noise. Spending a fortune on hi-fi equipment will leave nothing for records, and to me it’s clearly better to listen to a huge selection of great music on mediocre equipment than to listen to just a handful of records on great equipment. But there is a balance, of course – if the sound is too shitty you’ll miss half of what’s on the record no matter how many times you listen.

I willingly admit that a lot of my music may not be up to audiophile standards, and while my current setup has served me amazingly well over the past 8 or so years, I have reached a point where the experience of listening to music is burdened by thoughts of what might be – better bass, smoother high-ends, greater resolution, deeper soundstage and so on – in such a way that I find myself making exuses for the sound. “This has such beautiful shimmering highs” I tell myself, while well aware that my speakers are telling a different story. Simply put, the focus of my music listening has slowly but surely shifted towards what is not there.

In my many and long walks around the suburbs with my girlfriend, we often point out the most fantastic houses and mansions, jovially fantisizing about owning such a house. This daydreaming mindset is what I also slip into when reading reviews of absurdly esoteric hi-fi equipment, as well as when I visited the Stockholm high-end fair earlier this year. It’s exciting hearing the worlds finest audio equipment, but I have accepted that anything within my budget would just leave me wanting more, so I’m not even envious as there’s no point.

This year I was rather underwhelmed by what I heard. I was happy with this, because it made me feel content about my current equipment. There’s no point in upgrading if there’s no improvement to be had, right? When I reached a rig with a total cost of something like €100.000 that sounded downright bad, my audiophile pity was at an all time high. The very next room, however, shattered all illusions of my systems performance in the most brutal, heartbraking and mindboggling way concievable.

On display was the top-of-the-line CD transport, upsampler, DAC and master clock from British ultra-high-end company dCS. This system is prepostrously expensive, but it was not by any means the star of the room. Nor was the ASR Emitter II amplifier or the laughably expensive cables. What the room was about, and what outshone everything I’ve ever heard, were the Focal Diablo Utopia speakers:

I’m aware that you can’t listen to a single component in a full system, but there is no DAC rig or amplifier in the cosmos that can make an average speaker do this.

I was nowhere near sweet-spot when listening; in fact, I was standing up, and in the back corner of all places. Yet the sound was just mindbogglingly good. Effectively showing how ridiculous the idea of a €20.000 CD transport is, while the dCS representative was still in the room, the demo was made with a Macbook Pro playing over USB to the DAC. The music was, as expected, nothing I care for. Yet I was completely spellbound by what I heard. Without spewing too much audiophile jargon, I can just say that anything they played, sounded like it was live in the room. For example, anything with voices sounded as though the singer(s) were RIGHT THERE, with realism much much greater than what I’ve heard speakers 15 times more expensive be capable of. The bass was impossibly tight and potent for the size of the speakers, but there was no sub-woofer in sight. I could go on, but this is long enough already.

Since that day, I have though about, abnd probably even spoken of, these speakers every single day. They are clearly out of my budget (€8.000 without the dedicated stands, which are €1.500 extra) – Saving up for them or doing a downpayment plan would take two years, at least. And it’s not like they would blossom to their full potential with my old electronics, either. They were apparently in the same league as an €80.000 CD/DAC rig, so even if settling for a tenth of that the full system would be €20.000. So even if I’d bite the bullet and get the speakers, they’d be a bugatti with a moped engine for at least two years.

Suddenly sound better than I could even fantisize about is almost attainable – but just almost. So how the hell do I solve this? At the time of writing this, I don’t know. I will be writing more about my thoughts on hifi and on how I try to find the cheapest possible path to sonic contentment, to hopefully entertain and/or inspire others. It might end with bankrupcy or with me selling all my records to go live in a cave. Or both. Stay tuned!

The new world order for this weekends party is that I play between Battle of the Future Buddhas and Filteria, instead of after them. This makes a whole lot more sense, seeing as I will now be taking over from howling psychosis while it’s pitch black, and leave to über-melodic power-trance in broad daylight. This lets me leave the “normal” goa trance to the other DJ’s while I can dig really deep in my record collection to pick out the sickest mindfuckery I can muster. Seeing as it’s also 02:00 – 04:30, I think this is pretty much the best possible time and setting I could wish for.

The trees will eat the sky this weekend.