Finally back at the studio. I too want to thank MikeL for being such a gracious host. All of the attendees were great sports. I know these listening sessions can be very taxing at times and Hell most times.
I conducted my own listening sessions over the past week and made my conclusions before I went over to Mike’s place. I did some preliminary analysis of the discs to make sure they were all the same RMS volume and compared each to see if they were in fact, the same exact file, which they were.
I received what I thought were the original files from Andy. These were the DSD64fs files that Mike had picked up on Thursday. Found out today when reading the liner notes that the recordings had actually been done at DSD128fs, so a conversion had happened somewhere. Maybe later I can get the original DSD128fs files.
I had 2 formulations of blank CD-R’s here at the studio that I used. One was a Gold Archive CD-R by MAM-A that I use for most of my masters. The others were Green Tune blanks that I felt gives the best “sound”.
I ripped the Crystal Disc and did a remaster that I though bettered the disc. I also did a remaster of the DSD files. I took all of these over to Mike’s place to do the session.
There were 5 of us there, MikeL, Audioarcher, Jazzdoc, Gary K. and me. I also brought over my Playback Designs MPS-5, hoping to be able to play 2 discs and switch between the 2 players. We found out early on that there would have been too many variables since we were using different interconnects and Mike’s player was sitting on the Herzan platform.
So I played the DJ and sorted the discs in the following order.
1. River of Sorrow – AQ disc
2. My DSD remaster on Green Tune disc
3. River of Sorrow – Crystal disc
4. My Crystal disc remaster on Green Tune disc
5. River of Sorrow – Regular CD
6. My DSD remaster on MAM-A disc
7. My Crystal disc remaster on MAM-A disc
I also had the LP that Andy had sent as well as the DSD64fs files that Mike had on his server, played back through the PBD MPS-5’s DAC section.
The cuts that were played were tracks 5, 7, 9 and 11. The first thing I did was play track 5 of all the discs in the order above. A consensus was made that Disc 1 would be our baseline and we would compare each to it. Playing through all the discs, we felt Disc 1, 3 and 4 were the best sounding of all the discs.
No one could see which disc I was placing in the player and we kept the playing time short, approx. 2min.
One thing I did notice was that the DSD64fs files were approx. 1-2dB lower than the discs, though 2 people chose that as the best sounding.
Just out of the Redbook CD’s, there was 1 person that thought Disc 3 and 4 were tied for the best. Two people though thought that Disc 4 was more pleasurable to listen to over a long period of time and the other 2 people thought Disc 1 was better over a long period of time, but then chose Disc 4 on another track that was played.
Attendee’s, please correct me if I had any lapse of memory.
When Mike played the LP, we all forgot about digital and just ate cake!! Thank-you Gary!
Thank-you so much Andy for providing all the materials for our afternoon listening session! Be safe my friend.... we'll be thinking of you!
I know Jazzdoc took a few photos and I took some video, so hopefully we can get it up soon.