Macrojack, thanks for your positive response. Sorry I didn't get back earlier, and I note that other people are obviously not REALLY interested in getting better sound; strange addiction, this hobby, where a lot of people believe they are condemned to be forever on the merry-go-round, and that there is nothing that can be done about it, eh?? Obviously I'm new here, but I've been fooling around with this "madness" for 40+ years, so at least a couple of lessons have been learnt along the way. Also, being curious, I looked at one or two of your other postings and it appears you're coming from a very similar direction as myself. As an example, mentioning the high efficiency Zu speaker -- straightaway you're going to make life easier for yourself using a speaker like that; an early (in years back) foray for me was a DIY effort using Goodmans Axiom 301's, driven by an absolutely miserable nothing of an amplifier!
Anyway, on with the show, so a few more thoughts:
* Pretty obviously, getting digital right is hard, the ferocious arguments STILL continue, but it certainly can be done. With vinyl, you can be sloppy and get away with it, the result will still be very pleasant and musical to listen to. Digital is a hard taskmaster, you might be 99.9% there and the sound will be excrutiatingly unpleasant and fatiguing to listen to, but persevere! If you can just get that last 0.1% to fall into place, then you have magic. Think of it like very high power binoculars, if the focus is not perfectly right the result will be a messy blur; then just one little extra small twist and everything snaps into beautiful view.
* Also with digital, just because you get it right for a while does not mean it will stay right during a listening session. A classic behaviour trait is that the sound may sound reasonable but not special at first, then build up to a peak of quality, and then go off, sound worse and worse the more you listen. What this means is that you still have weaknesses that haven't been sorted out.
* Even nothing DAC chips can sound good but you have to warm them up, condition them thoroughly first -- this is not news for many people. What I find works fast is a test track of maximum level high frequency sine wave, say 18kHz, set on repeat for an hour or so, sort of like belting the living daylights out of the chip! Obviously, don't have the amp on, or have it at very low level; the latter does a nice job of starting to warm up the tweeter and its crossover bits.
* To see where your power amp is at: put on some fairly driving rock where the drummer is having a good time on the cymbals fairly constantly through the song, at a very LOW level. If your system is half reasonable you should be able to hear the shimmer of those cymbals beautifully captured ( if you can't, go directly to Jail, do not pass Go, ...). Then slowly wind up the volume. At some point, for many/most systems, that good cymbal sound will disappear. If you can get to maximum volume with no change of the cymbal sound, congratulations!
Otherwise, you have another (set of) weakness(es). No, this is not the speaker, I repeat, not the speaker that's the problem! I have heard absolutely rubbishy bits of speaker having no trouble at all peforming excellently; no, typically it's the power amp's power supply starting to collapse, behave badly, spray plenty of nasty interference into the rest of the system, etc
Okay, there's a bit more to play with; so is any of this making sense to more than one person?
Season's cheers,
Frank
