SGM in Texas, singing with Magico Q7, Soultion 701 and Kondo's
I spent 3 working days in Texas with Cmarin in his well furnished and laid out by Rives Audio dedicated listen room. The room is extremely well acoustically treated with fabric covered walls with damping material behind. With dimensions 18 x 25 x 10, the ceiling is quite a bit higher than a typical living room, and is also acoustically treated.
Cmarin's strategy for the AC power supply is also a no holds barred, rigorous, best of the best approach. The AC supply to the key pieces of equipment is at 220 volts !
The speakers are Magico Q7's powered by Solution 701 monoblocks, or Kondo tube monoblocks, cmarin is still evaluating the sonic advantages and disadvantages of SOTA solid state vs SOTA tube.
Cmarin's collection of DAC's is a Hall of Fame. Pacific Microsonics Model 2, Phasure NOS1a, Chord DAVE, and Meridian Ultra with MQA. Joining this collection was the little engine that could, a European T+A DAC 8 DSD running at 220 volts, a special order by cmarin from a US dealer that took many many weeks to arrive.
I sent ahead a Euro spec SGM and brought in my luggage a Bespoke transformer volume control preamp, a Sablon power cord and a Sablon USB cable which had been modified by Mark Coles for the T+ A
During the 3 days we got most things working but sadly not the Berkley Alpha USB which was needed by the SGM to pass data to PM2. I was only able to hear the PM2 being fed a bit perfect native stream from the new Alchemy Music Server passing data over AES, a very interesting and easy to use music server in the $ 2k class. The PM2 was a joy to listen to, to my ears there were no sonic faults that deserved criticism. The presentation was musical, nice tonality, good PRAT, it's legendary reputation is well deserved and its sound can put many 10 k and above contemporary DAC's to shame. I was hoping to see if HQ Player doing upsampling of Redbook to 24/96 could bring some sonic advantage to the PM2's performance, but alas it was not to be.
Cmarin has one of the latest spec NOS1a fed by the 10 core CPU Phasure Stealth Server. I was extremely impressed by cmarin's mastery of the Win 10 based OS, and the process by which the OS is loaded into RAM, and then the drive physically removed from the PC. I have to confess that has to be the ultimate way of eliminating RF noise from the SSD. IMHO the sonics of the NOS 1a Stealth combo were fully competitive with the PM2 Audio Alchemy pairing. Just for fun, we tested the Stealth 10 core server delivering data to the T+A DAC 8 DSD, but it could not handle DSD 512 without stuttering. Cmarin also used to have the Trinity DAC which also uses the Burr Brown 1704 chip, but cherry picked for the best samples.
A detailed analysis and comparison of the Solution 701's and the Kondo's is way beyond my competency / knowledge and experience level. It was the first time I have heard Kondo's but FWIW I was extremely impressed by the sound. In the area of resolution, air, and sweet tonality, the engineers at Solution have a rabbit to chase after. The power output of the Kondo's is a fraction of that of the 701's but with the high efficiency of the Q7's, the Kondo's never ran out of breath at the volumes we liked to listen at.
For me it would be very interesting to hear a comparison between the Kondo's and a top of the line Einstein tube power amp.
The Bespoke TVC preamp sitting on Stillpoint ultra SS feet was a revelation in Cmarin's system. I have not heard any preamp even close to the absolute transparency on the one hand, and the rich tonality on the other achieved by the Bespoke. To me TVC technology as implemented by Harry and Lucy at Bespoke is state of the sonic art and clearly the best volume control solution at the present time.
Much has been written about the sound of the DAC 8 DSD doing DSD 512. Well thanks to Cmarin's relentless and rigorous testing / evaluation of different software settings, we were able to bring the musicality and emotional connection to the music that frankly I have not experienced before, but I will let Cmarin chime in with the observation details. Cmarin has amazing hearing, way better than mine, and he has heard a lot more systems than I have. Cmarin's choice of music was extremely enjoyable and made the long hours of testing an absolute joy.
To give you an insight to Cmarin's evaluation rigor, each test track would be played not twice, but repeated three times consecutively to ensure that we had the sonic nuances captured in our audio memories.
Cmarin, many thanks for such a productive visit !
The observations on the DAVE and the Meridian Ultra will be in following posts.
