It was clear to me when I read Mike's review here and at the Asylum that he has a long-term relationship with the principals of PD. I don't and I'll be adding to his review in a couple of weeks.
Dave |
06-23-08: Mapman said:
"I heard the $20000 dcs Puccini at a dealer recently.
It sounded as good as anything I've heard probably, but can you explain to me what exactly the dcs Puccini does better than say good players in the <$5000 range that justifies the cost? Also, how does it accomplish it?"
The question is, "did you hear anything you'd be willing to pay $15000 more for." If the answer is "yes" then it doesn't matter how or why, it's just that you want that and are willing to pay. If the answer is "no" then buy the $5000 unit."
Whenever you spend $10000, $15000, $20000 or more on digital equipment, all you know for certain is that someone will replicate it's performance within the next 18-months for half the price. You'll always be waiting for the 18-months for the latest performance advance to get cheap, or, at some point you'll jump in because you're happy with the price/performance ratio. That point will vary with each person. I'm guessing that you're not there yet.
Dave |
Mapman, it doesn't sound to me like you're going to buy a $20,000 player no matter how good it sounds.
Still, parts are only part of the equation. Most of the top players today basically use off-the-shelf parts and a designer develops the boards, chassis and software to combine it all together. Seldom, lately, is there a proprietery part that only one make has. Often a billet aircraft aluminum chassis is the single most expensive part in a player and that only adds hundreds to the cost.
Anyway, you'll either hear a difference or not. If you hear a difference then you'll ask yourself, "Is it worth it to me or is there a better option for me for less money?" Buying audio equipment based on the parts is folly, when one poorly selected part can negate all the "best" components.
Dave |
I hope you don't if I don't respond point by point, but I will respond to two or three.
A billet aluminum chassis is one of the very best shields of RFI and EMI radiation. In digital components or analog components placed near digital components RFI and EMI can degrade performance seriously. A great billet chassis cost the maker several hundred dollars each, excluding development time.
In optical readers, just like in analog, damping and stability of the transport is important. The fact is optical readers do NOT capture all the bits. Because of that, error correction is needed and the quality of the error correction can vary greatly. (Thus, hard drive based musical servers actually sound better than many optical systems). I won't go into jitter and clocking errors, but those are critcal to the ultimate sound. Anyway, just focusing on the transport, a generic piece as you'd find in an Oppo is under $50, while the very best is several hundred dollars. Just like in analog, the op amps, transformers and circuitboard quality all have a clear impact on sound.
Thoughout digital, each part has a generic, functional part that's $10 to $50 and a high end part that does the same thing, better, for several hundred dollars. It's easy to do a cost comparison and get up to a few thousand dollars.
Getting to $10,000 or $20,000 is all about the designer's implementation of all the pieces in such a way that it's better than the competition, as judged by sound. It's kind of like a Linn turntable. You can't justify the price by it's relatively inexpensive parts that have only slightly changed over the last 30-years. I'm sure you can think of a $10 piece that Linn improved their TT with and charged $500 for it, at least so long as it took for someone to come out with an alternative part for less.
There are at least a half dozen approaches to TT design. You can see the differences and they're relatively obvious. With a digital device there are just as many options to solving the problem of good sound, but they're way less obvious to us non-designers; therefore, we listen and make our decisions based on sound.
I don't think there is an absolute limit of sound quality possible with CD, but we're fast approaching the level of where it matches analog in the qualities that we analog lovers hold dear. We're just now reaching that limit with the expensive machines. I predict that Moore's law will make sub-$5000 machines available within 2-years that match and/or surpass today's $10,000 and over machines.
I didn't want to wait two years, so I went ahead and spent the bucks.
Dave |
Mapman asked Dcstep:
"Are you running a new CD player in your system other than the Pioneer listed in your published system here on Agon??"
In fact I am. I was going to take some pictures and update my Virtual System this weekend to reflect the addition of a Playback Designs MPS-5. The Pioneer stays in to act as transport for the discs that the MPS-5 can't handle, DVD-A in particular.
Dave |
Yet some are already working with 32-bit DACs for new upsampling schemes. Those 32-bit DACs are under $50. What's better, a new 32-bit generic DAC or a ten-year old 16 DAC built like a brick sh*t house?? I don't know and I think that a lot depends on the designer's skills.
Just like a Wall Street hedge fund manager, Charles is good at "talking his own book." There's more than one way to skin a cat, particularly in digital technology.
Dave |
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Fbhifi said:
"...this digital is that good. I'm starting to question the superiority of vinyl playback. Is it possible that dragging a needle through a groove is, in fact, primitive after all?"
I've been having the very same thoughts lately.
Dave |
About that getting older thing, it's true, but not entirely relevent, depending on the listener. You must consider the training and experience that the ears have received. Mario Andretti is over 60 and seldom drives competitively anymore, but he can still outdrive 99.9% of the male population of the western world. His nervous system is probably firing 30% slower than when he was 20, but his experience still leaves him in a different league than the rest of us humans.
Some of us have been playing musical instruments daily since we were ten or so and listening to "high end" stereos since we were in our late teens (decades ago) and we easily hear differences that others don't notice or can't isolate. So, like athletics, I think that listening is a skill that can be refined and honed with practice. Also, like certain skills, it helps to have started early in life and continued to develop over a period of decades.
Dave |
Yeah, no DarTZ here, just a "lowly" Rowland Continuum 500 and Vienna Acoustic speakers. I think the MPS-5 is going to payoff for anyone with a transparent and revealing system, tube or SS.
The Playback Designs turns out to be my most expensive component by a small margin, BUT that'll probably change in '09 when (if) I get a larger room and move up the line in speakers.
Dave |
I think that the old DACs have a place, particularly for a company like Naim that's not staking their whole reputation on the performance of their CDP. They want to be considered top echelon in everything that they do, but not necessarily the very best. They might sacrifice the last bit of performance to be able to be "in the running" and reliable, consistant with their brand.
Contrast that with a designer that can build a custom DAC that may do one or two things much better than any off-the-shelf DAC, current or past. That's a much riskier strategy, particularly for a big company, but for a designer with the particular experience needed, that could be a huge advantage.
On the risk side, lots of these custom DACs in the past might have issues with playing all formats of CDs, or the transport drawer would do odd things at the worst times. So, it takes an experienced designer that really thinks of all the possible failure issues and addresses them. Add with a really solid transport in a solid chassis and you get into high potential. That gets expensive and high expense most often converts to low volumes, etc., etc.
Naim, Cambridge, PS and others make good digital products at their various price points, but none of those are purely digital companies. I'm not saying that a full-line manufacturer can't make a top-of-the-heap CDP, but the odds that a single designer or small group of like minded designers can do something better is high, particularly now that the digital technology has started to mature.
Dave |
Measureable objective evidence can be tough to come by when we're talking about the nth degree. Playback Designs reports absolute zero jitter, but until a third party like Stereophile validates it, that's just a report. Owners of Emm report that upgrading the transport improves the overall sound by bringing the mids and bass more forward, but no one can measure anything different, at least so far as I can find.
Why do certain components improve a lot with burn-in? Jeff Rowland told some of us on a tour of his place that he hears the improvement with burn-in but has been unable to measure it. He theorizes that it's due to the dielectrics settling into a a charge, but he can't "prove" it.
I think that the very top players that I've heard are very close in sound and the differences come down to small degrees of transparency and small differences in the emphasis of various aspects of the spectral presentation with more details available in different regions of the EQ that are unmeasureable. All of these top players have eliminated digital glaze from the equation; therefore, they're all pleasant to live with and have you roaring through your CD collection to re-hear everything that you missed before, but there are still very slight differences in other areas that distinguish one from the other and provide us with all this entertaining discussion.
Dave |
Yes, being a musician and/or hearing a lot of live acoustic music is a big plus. You get very good at hearing timbre and dynamics, particularly as a musician, since you're responsible for making it happen.
I have know several non-musicians that developed very good ears, so it's not exclusive to musicians, but they do tend to listen to live music also. In all my years as an audiophile I only met one person with really great ears that I trusted that claimed that she'd never been to a live concert. She'd been in audio as a dealer for over a decade when I met her. I think someone helped her build a very good first system (it included big electrostatics -- Beverage, anyone remember those) and by using that as a reference she then got to where she could pick between various lesser products. I consider her the exception, but I'm certain, based on her experience, that it can be done.
Dave |
