Conference hips::uk_audioo

Do have a listen to outboard D/A converters like the Musical Fidelity Digilog
or Arcam Black Box II.  You can try these with any player that has a digital
output, optical or coax, or with the transport-only decks.  The Arcam Delta 170
is a good'un but expensive at about �600.  There's a cheaper Kenwood transport
that gets good reviews but I haven't heard it myself; my old Trio was so
unreliable that I wouldn't consider Kenwood.

Nick (a happy Delta 170/Digilog owner)

    
    Rathole warning!
    
    Re .-1 Could you post the price for the Digilog and the Arcam? I talked
    to the importer of the MF here in the US and they have no plans to sell
    the Digilog.
    
    Peter

    The Black Box is about �200, the Digilog about �300. 
    
    I'm surprised MF's (BF's?) importers say they have no plans for the
    Digilog; both it and the Black Box have been reviewed in Stereophile in
    the last month or two.
    
    Dave

Re .-1:
>>    The Black Box is about �200, the Digilog about �300. 

Hmmm, maybe I don't get the best deals but I'd have added �100 to both those
prices!  But I don't begrudge my dealer the money because in the considerable
time I've spent in their listening rooms they have saved me many hundreds of
pounds.  Mistakes are mighty expensive and they help me avoid them.

Nick

    
    Back to the rathole. I just talked to the importer again and they told
    me there is another company in the Philadelphia area that imports the 
    digilog and the speakers. He (the one who's importing the amps) told me
    that the digilog is about $1000. Now this is strange since the amps are
    actually cheaper over here than in the UK but they may have a different 
    margin.
    
    Thanks for the info anyway.
    
    Peter happy owner of two MA50:s..

    
    I would rather wait for the 1 bit converter.
    
    Chak.

    I've stood back from CD as it seems to move forward each week. However
    there's so many tasty re-issues available now on CD I've decided to
    have another listen, with a view to adding one to my system before even
    the re-issues get deleted...... Also the wife's been nattering me to get 
    up to date, so I've decided to call her bluff ;-)
    
    Although I plan to choose (if I choose at all) on the basis of an
    audition, I'd appreciate some inputs from all you CD-ophiles on my 
    short-list as follows (not necessarily in order of importance)....
    
    1. Bottom-of-the-range NAD multi-bit - don't know the model number.
    2. New Rotel Bitstream - again I don't know the model number.
    3. Cambridge CD3 multi-bit.
    
    These are the models my dealer (a confirmed Linnie like me) suggests I
    should listen to; I assume they're in ascending price order. Any other 
    ideas or opinions on the above would be welcome.
    
    Dave

    Dave,
    
    I've heard the Rotel 865 (bitstream) and the CD3.  From your comments
    in the past, I doubt you'll like their CD "stereotype" sound.  The CD3
    is more reliable than the CD2, but the sound quality appears to be
    variable!  The one I heard sounded terrible.
    
    I would suggest you listen to the Arcam Alpha, Arcam 70.2 and the
    Meridian 206 and 208.  These are the only CDs I have found that I can
    live with for more than one album.  Also don't forget (I'm sure you
    won't) the interconnects.  In my system the CD interconnect makes a far
    greater difference than the speaker cable.  Van den Hul 102 type III is
    good and Deltec Black Slink is great if you want really good bass
    "slam" as well as the open sound the 102 gives.  The only problem is
    that the Deltec cable costs 152 quid for a stereo metre (60 of that is
    for 4 WBT phonos).
    
    Hope this helps, as ever it's all opinion and my ears.
    
    ps another player could be the one made by Radford.

The CD lineup in my demo changed. The Rotel was replaced in the dem by a 
Mission PCM7000, a 16-bit 4x oversampling design. Also I was wrong about 
the NAD being a conventional 16-bit design - it was the 5320 which uses
MASH technology.

The rest of the system was a Linn LK1/LK280 combo, plus bi-wired Linn Kans.
This the same as my home system, except I use the old un-biwirable Kans,
which can sound less forgiving/more uncouth than the KanII, depending on your
outlook! To those who suggest that this system is predisposed to make CD
sound bad, I can only point them to John Atkinson's excellent Stereophile
review of the Linn combo in which he praises it's neutrality of sound
regardless of whether the source was LP, CD, tuner, master tapes, etc., as
an independent arbiter. The Kan is generally neutral when driven by the
Linn amps; bass response is surprisingly good for this small box, tight
and tuneful, but ultimately lacking extension - this isn't an issue for me,
though.

Test CDs were mainly: Clouds (Joni Mitchell), and Journeyman (Eric Clapton).
Other test CDS were available, both classical and contemporary, should these
prove inadequate in showing differences.

First on was the �650 Cambridge CD3. This was clearly extracting lots of
information from the CDs, sounding very "busy". Ultimately it sounded very
harsh - I don't mean extended CD treble versus the rolled-off analogue
version, I mean distortion. On top of the tonal aberrations it seemed 
incapable of portraying a sense of musicians playing together; it was all
but impossible to single out a single contribution from a player and follow
it all through a track. Hi-hats sounded like the stick struck the cymbal
just after the cymbal sound, which was only an approximation anyway; bass
was powerful, but tuneless like a one-note lf "grunt". At no time was there any
sense of a 3-dimensional sound, and the spaces between sounds within the sound-
stage were difficult to sense. 

As this was the most expensive player in the dem, I was ready to give up and 
go, but the promise of some coffee during the next part persuaded me to hang 
around.

Next on was the Mission. Again this sounded busy, but was easier on the ear
with a smoother sound. Ultimately, it had all the other flaws of the Cambridge,
so I won't waste space re-iterating them.

Finally we tried the NAD. Now things were happening; musicians were playing
in time, and were more identifiable within the soundstage with a slight sense
of depth - something I hadn't heard so far. It sounded a little more harsh 
than the Mission, but not as much as the Cambridge. Up to now we hadn't gone
any further than the opening track of Journeyman; it has some complex inter-
linking rhythms which can be difficult to sort out, and clean extended treble
that only good modern digital recording can deliver which sound horrible when
distorted. 

Unfortunately it was a simple analogue 1974 recording like Clouds that blew 
the NAD away. A major part of Joni Mitchell's style is that she often sings
and plays off key; it lends even her joyful songs a sense of melancholy -
"enjoy it now because it won't last", if you follow. Although off-key, her 
guitar and voice are always in the *same* key, and this is where the NAD 
fell down; on Chelsea Morning her voice and guitar were in slightly different
tune which irritated the hell out of me. Solo recordings often show up a
device's poor timing, as rhythmic information is implicit in the way the
instrument is played, rather than explicitly stated via a rhythm section;
again the NAD was caught out, in spite of its advantage over the other 
players in this respect. The Joni Mitchell CD was tried on the others but 
to no avail; they simply had the same problems as the NAD in spades.

In spite of this, I very nearly bought the NAD, the least expensive of the
three. Bearing in mind the sort of things I wanted to listen to on it, like 
compilations and re-issues, it could just have delivered. I decided to wait, 
though, as in the end I felt it would probably languish unused.

To be honest I was disappointed. I wanted to hear something that I liked
and I was prepared to pay for it. I guess I'll have to wait until I can
consider something like a CAL Tempest or a Meridian 208, i.e. around the
cost of my record player. Sigh.

Just to console myself, I called in at a used-record shop just up the
road. There, for the price of a takeaway pizza, I bought a mint copy of
Leonard Cohen's "New Skins For The Old Ceremony", and Chuck Mangione's 
"Love Notes". Oh, and a copy of "Clouds". 

Dave