usatran
Responses from usatran
| Recommendations for a jazz record which demonstrates vinyl superiority over digital For starters, I'd suggest most of the Rudy Van Gelder-engineered Blue Note albums. My personal favorite is Herbie Hancock's "Maiden Voyage." The Miles Davis albums on Columbia sound very rich and dynamic. "Sorcerer" is a personal favorite, and Wyn... | |
| Let's Talk DAC's Have you taken a look at the very unique Black Ice (Jolida) Glass FX Tube DAC? I have one when it was still being produced by Jolida, and it has the stage one upgrades (Resistor, diode, capacitor and tube upgrade. Increased definition, tighter ba... | |
| Ruminations On CD Players I’m using a Cambridge Audio CXC CD Transport @$599.00. It requires an external DAC. My DAC of choice is the Jolida Glass FX Tube DAC III @$750.00 and uses twin 12AX7 tubes in the input stage. The sound of this combination is miraculous in that the... | |
| Do you build anything for your high fidelity system? If so, what do you make? Interesting topic. While I didn’t actually sit down with a soldering iron and perform the work myself, I did have a long discussion with the engineers at Jolida Audio (now Black Ice) about modifying a Jolida Glass FX DAC DSD to my exact specificat... | |
| Products you added to your system in 2021 that made most impact to your music enjoyment Lots of great stuff out there but, the winner of the best upgrade to my audio system has been the iFi Zen DAC v2. Period. It solves all my digital audio needs and it makes my HiFiMAN 400i planers sound amazing and “intimate” if you understand what... | |
| Capital Audiofest, save thyself! Very keen observation. It's all very different from the era I came up in during the early to mid-1960s and attended the New York Hi-Fi Show at the hotel across the street from Pennsylvania Station. I remember buying my first set of hi-end speakers... | |
| Best Integrated that you've heard under $5k I’d have to say that for me (I’ve been an audiophile since the mid-1960s) it has been the Yamaha A-S801BL unit that I’m currently using. I especially like the chassis layout, the single subwoofer out jack and the access to the internal DAC feature... | |
| Point of diminishing return for a DAC Get the Mac out of the audio chain. I use a PC to control a 2TB Buffalo Box NAS drive that has all of my DSD, MP3 and FLAC files connected to a router via Ethernet. The PC is on the same network, so it controls the downloads from sites like HD Tra... | |
| Review: Sony CDP-XA20es CD Player I’ve wanted to join almost any discussion about the Sony XA-20ES CD player for some time now. My audiophile experience goes way back to my first TT which was an AR manual turntable (purchase new in 1967) with a Stanton 681EEE and a pair KLH 17 spe... | |
| Review: The Sid Sound Improvement Disc 14 Tweak Just tried this $39 mat for CD, SACD, DVD, Blu-Ray players and WOW!! It works. I tried it on my regular CD player which is a classic Sony ES model (XA20ES with modified power supply with new Japanese-made capacitors and Wolfson DAC chips) and play... |