amp upgrade
I have been using CA CXA80 with B&W 604 speakers for about 5 years. I use Sonos streamer hooked up to the amp using optical cable. Also have some CD's and blue rays. overall sound is good but I always feel some punch and dynamic element is missing when I listen to the same titles with other random systems. Also the combo is not that expressive at lower volumes, sound gets a bit lost when volume is low. the other issue is lack of clarity in speech when watching movies. have to crank up the volume to hear the conversations but still a bit mushy.... When I bought the system I also auditioned an Arcam FMJ amp which sounded cleaner than the CXA80, I still remember it. it was not an option back then due to lack of availability.
Wondering if upgrading the amp would solve this issue. I am looking at the newer stuff, preferably a steaming amp as most of my music is sourced from Tidal. Has anyone used the Naim unity atom or the NAD m10 V2 ? are these any good? In particular something that can reproduce clean sound at lower volumes. I will at some point upgrade the speakers too but I feel I should be able to squeeze more out of them with a better amp?
thanks
after fixing above so you are receiving center info in the fl and frL for very low volume, you need to boost the bass just a bit, our ears do not hear bass well at low volumes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour some equipment has night modes, that compresses any peaks so normal dynamics that would produce momentary volume changes are 'dulled', not a good solution if you can find a better way, but, better than nothing. |
The amp forsure can help but imo theQuality of your Starting point is maybe more important for good or bad your digital signal starts their and if not good to start with cannot be bettered upstream . Buy a good quality dac . On a budget I highly recommend the Denafrips Aries 12th anniversary dac, then for onk6 $540 the very good matching Iris DDC oversampler which not only clears incoming data bet with the I2S connection is the. Best type of connection but even more so the temp control clock in theIris is better then even the latest 12th pontus.same clock as in the Venus , and through our audioclub did what other reviewers don’t do put decent power cords ,and upgrade fuses,on the Iris to save cost theHigi tuning Supreme Copper fuse, and the synergistic purple on the dac fori2S cable we used a Wireworld star light ,but even their $60 hdmi thepin out matches ,other brands may not. And after roughly 200 hours ,sounds very good in some areas better then the latest 12th pontus more fleshed out detail and still very natural , the latest Aries 12 is just over $1k , and then you can always add the Iris DDC later which is a big plus ,my wife’s loves it in her system. |
thanks, sorry I was not clear. the movie source is not blue ray, they are mostly streaming 4K from the smart TV which is connected to the amp via optical. The TV converts from DTS5.1 to 2CH PCM stereo. Maybe the issue is the TV DSP and downsampling to 2CH. I can rule this out by trying a blue ray movie and setting the blue ray player to 2CH PCM and see if it makes a difference. the equal loudness reference is very helpful, it seems the low frequencies need quite a bit of boost as the amplitude drops. I am going to try this, I have heard some systems that perform much better at lower volume but maybe they had more bass to start with. |
Unfortunately part of your issue is the speakers. Some don’t really wake up until higher volume. My Dynaudio Contours (original series) are like that. They love the juice. I recently got the Heritage Specials and have been shocked at how great they sound at lower volume. Same amp, different speaker. |
Coincidentally, What Hi-Fi also made a comparison between CXA80 with Arcam (but different model A19), pinpointing these shortcomings you have mentioned. I am not sure if you have seen this article before and influenced by it though ... https://www.whathifi.com/cambridge-audio/cxa80/review
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