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.