Thanks, MikeL for the great hospitality. I had a lot of fun. I thought that you were all great sports for sitting through nearly 2 hours of Chinese classical music! It must have been taxing.
Hopes for the best and be safe! Have been reading about it and it looks like a dangerous storm!
…………
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.
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.
i'd say that only using one recording to compare formats, and that was a recording of an instrument most of us had never heard live, or rarely in other recordings, makes it a challenge to draw any ultimate truth. and that instrument had a tendency to be a bit strident too.
if we had a demo disc of 10 different recordings of instruments, vocals, and maybe large scale classical I think that would be easier. but that is not what we had.
that said......
for me, of the CD discs, #3 was the overall best for this session, followed closely by #4, on this system, and this recording. it was the most listenable and relaxing to listen to....the least digital sounding. however; I suspect that #1 would be what I would prefer on a broad spectrum of music as it was more vivid and lively but a bit too in your face on this recording. this is just a guess about how this exercise might project for me.
the dsd files from my server were quite a bit better than any of the CD's to my ears. more detail, much better imaging and depth, and more real sounding. also very relaxed.
and then the vinyl, while it had it's issues, was on a whole different level of involvement. everything came alive on a whole different scale. you could pick out areas where the dsd or even the CD's had more of this or that, but you did not care.
it was a fun session with my friends and I appreciate the effort Bruce went to investigate this issue and being DJ. i'm glad we could do it.
The question remains unanswered so far: Are these worth $1600 ? .. ?
Mike
I appreciate your perspective and caveats. It still doesn;t answer the question. are these Crystal thing worth the downright brutal price? Are these better than what you would get from any other sources?
Also the notion of "real" is difficult to pinpoint as you so cleraly stated from an instrument that is unknown to you... It could be that what you find "relaxing" is not the intention fothe music or instrument or recording ... You clearly articulated that in your post but I wanted to undeline it ..
The question remains unanswered so far: Are these worth $1600 ? .. ?
I'm a bit slow this morning. What was the difference between #1 and #3. Number 3 is the original crystal disc but not sure what AQ disk was
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