My dCS Vivaldi Upsampler arrives tomorrow. I can't waitI'm at v1.2 on the other Vivaldi components
Wow! The complete Vivaldi stack...Congrats...you will not be disappointed.
Time to start ripping your CD library
DCS Vivaldi
- Thread starter MylesBAstor
- Start date
Wow! The complete Vivaldi stack...Congrats...you will not be disappointed.
Time to start ripping your CD library
I'm floored. I've only had the upsampler powered up for about 2.5 hours.
And only listened to redbook up sampled off the trans and DSD files via USB key, so far. Wow.
I have the DAC and Upsampler (Esoteric K-01 for transport). How do you think the difference that the Upsampler makes to the difference that Clock makes? I'm getting close to ordering a Clock and wondering how you would compare its impact?
I had the Vivaldi Dac, Vivaldi Trans and Scarlatti clock. Thinking it had to be pretty darn good. It was. The Vivaldi Clock in no uncertain terms beat the Scarlatti clock in focus, effortlessness, air, space and frankly just enjoyability. It wasn't subtle. You won't be disappointed. Just be sure to save some $'s for better clock cables...they also have a beneficial improvement...
Thanks for the suggestion on cables. I have some custom made Beldens with high quality 75 ohm BNC connectors that I can compare to Nordost and Wireworld Platinum Starlights from local dealers. Are you using Trasparent for your clock cables? Looks like I will need 5 75 ohm BNC cables to connect a 44.1 and 48K clock signal to the other 3 components.
Yes all Transparent Ref XL Clock cables. I've owned Cardas Lightning 15, Purist Proteus Provectus and the current Transparent. They are all improvements over stock. Price does seem to matter here...as the more expense can be noticeably heard. Unfortunate for our wallets...
Wow, I just read Jacob's review of the Vivaldi stack with Transparent Ref XL cables. I definitely need to give them a try. Did you use their interconnects between the Vivaldi components, as well? The 5 clock cables will cost as much as the Vivaldi Clock!
I'm a huge Transparent cable user and fan. Yes I have Opus Gen 5 Interconnects from Vivaldi to Preamp. And the same from Pre to amp.
Transparent also has digital cables at lower price points...I wonder how much of a step down is Reference Digital vs Reference XL Digital.
I will say the Ref XL clock cables are like clock/no clock. It's a big diff...
Been spending a lot of time over the holidays listening to digital. Which is saying a lot for a vinyl fanatic. A few weeks ago I took delivery on a dCS Vivaldi upsampler which is really changing my perception of redbook cd's and really most digital formats. Recording quality still matters-just like vinyl. However I'm very close to saying I no longer prefer a format. Vinyl, SACD, Redbook CD's, Hi Res downloads all have their attributes. It's the music and the recording that take precedence now. Before it was always Vinyl #1 for me.
I have a fellow vinyl addict up in the Boston area that recently listened to a Vivaldi stack on redbook only. I think he now understands my point of view on good digital.
I am slowly moving from redbook & 16/44 downloads from dCS Filter 1 to Filter 5 on the dCS Vivaldi upsampler. Then either outputting to DSD F1/F3 or DXD at F5/F6.
This weekend I've been settling down on dCS Vivaldi upsampler at F5, outputting to DXD then either F5 or F6 and skipping DSD on the Vivaldi DAC. Seems to be more incisive, wring out more textures in the mid bass, render back of hall details more easily.
I am starting to be able to hear what each filter brings. Takes some work...they all sound good...but are subtly different. Not sure I could name what filter was what in a blind test...but I bet I can hear something is different in a blind test.
My vinyl, that I still love, just isn't getting the playing time since the upsampler arrived. That's a huge statement for me..been happily spinning vinyl for 35 years since I was about 15 with my first Denon table and Denon MC cartridge.
I am still shocked by how well a nicely recorded redbook cd can sound off the dCS Vivaldi transport via the upsampler. Really opened up my music library !! Which is what our hobby is all about !
I have a fellow vinyl addict up in the Boston area that recently listened to a Vivaldi stack on redbook only. I think he now understands my point of view on good digital.
I am slowly moving from redbook & 16/44 downloads from dCS Filter 1 to Filter 5 on the dCS Vivaldi upsampler. Then either outputting to DSD F1/F3 or DXD at F5/F6.
This weekend I've been settling down on dCS Vivaldi upsampler at F5, outputting to DXD then either F5 or F6 and skipping DSD on the Vivaldi DAC. Seems to be more incisive, wring out more textures in the mid bass, render back of hall details more easily.
I am starting to be able to hear what each filter brings. Takes some work...they all sound good...but are subtly different. Not sure I could name what filter was what in a blind test...but I bet I can hear something is different in a blind test.
My vinyl, that I still love, just isn't getting the playing time since the upsampler arrived. That's a huge statement for me..been happily spinning vinyl for 35 years since I was about 15 with my first Denon table and Denon MC cartridge.
I am still shocked by how well a nicely recorded redbook cd can sound off the dCS Vivaldi transport via the upsampler. Really opened up my music library !! Which is what our hobby is all about !
Great to know your experience with the Vivaldi system. I could listen to the top DCS's and Metronome's in the same system, unfortunately never in my system.
My perception of digital also changed when I introduced the Metronome Calypso in my system. I already owned the C2A converter, but the transport with the Transparent REF XL digital cable was responsible for the big attitude change.
However IMHO a few weeks is too little time to really know. I also went through a period when it seemed both CD and vinyl were on par, but unfortunately I am not so persuaded anymore. But both are very enjoyable and as you say all have their tributes.
Congratulations, John, on getting so much enjoyment from CDs! I have always listened to CDs only in my audiophile time, since 1990 (which unfortunately included the stone ages of CD playback). Yet I am looking for a more vinyl-like experience as well, and hope that a dCS Rossini Player will give me that some day, even though not on quite such an elevated level, obviously.
That is so interesting. Your comment is one of many by now which suggests that DSD sounds less incisive, or like others say, it gives a softer and more rounded balance. This clearly not for me then, I like my music incisive, lively and dramatic. I want to be excited, not relaxed.
Interestingly, in my experience vinyl also moves up from a more rounded and soft tone on lesser playback to a more incisive one on the best -- just to my liking. Problem is, the best is beyond what I can afford.
I agree with the last comment that DSD is more rounded and not the best choice for PCM. I use DXD as well. Jfrech, try filter 5 on the upsampler and filter 2 on the DAC. That combo has been my go to for CD's for a while. With my new set-up, I'm still experimenting a bit and not sure I have found the best combo just yet.
Good Luck and Happy Listening
Good Luck and Happy Listening
I also spent a fair amount of time with my system over the holidays, as I was breaking in a new Vivaldi clock (Merry Christmas to me) and an upgrade from the Constellation Virgo II to III. I ended up with Nordost Hemdahl II's for clock cables for now. I tried a lot of different combinations of sample rates and filters. My biggest conclusion is that the "best sounding" varies by material, especially with digital files. I had some 24/96 files that sounded better upsampled and some that sounded better played at their native rate on the Upsampler. However, for 176.4 and 192 files, they almost always sounded better upsampled to the appropriate DXD rate on my system.
For the DAC settings, I generally landed on DXD (at the proper multiple) for PCM and only used DSD for dsf files, which I pass through from the Upsampler. For my CDs and CD rips, I generally use 352.8 with F5 on the Upsampler and native rate processing on the DAC with F6, although on a few recordings I liked F5 better.
One thing else I learned was to use AES3+4 as the link between the Upsampler and the DAC. When I originally connected things, I didn't read the manual carefully and used AES1+2.
It's a good thing they make a remote for these things!
Recently Brian Berdan from Audio Element and John Quick from dCS came to my home to assist me with optimizing my system.
There is no substitute for their "hands on" competence at this level in my experience and not so humble opinion.
Mr Quick had some interesting suggestions regarding filters for the Vivaldi Upsampler and DAC with which I have cone to agree after much experimentation:
PCM is best upsampled to proper multiple DXD.
Upsampler F5 DAC F6 is a great "all purpose" combo.
However F5 tends to homogenize the sound sweetly though less incisively.
Try F3 on the Upsampler for your best recorded files.
Then try F1 on the DAC for the best Nyquist image rejection and dynamic range.
You can't go wrong with F5/F6 for many files but try F3/F1 and listen for awhile.
Mr Quick knows where from he speaks.
My considered opinion notwithstanding.
There is no substitute for their "hands on" competence at this level in my experience and not so humble opinion.
Mr Quick had some interesting suggestions regarding filters for the Vivaldi Upsampler and DAC with which I have cone to agree after much experimentation:
PCM is best upsampled to proper multiple DXD.
Upsampler F5 DAC F6 is a great "all purpose" combo.
However F5 tends to homogenize the sound sweetly though less incisively.
Try F3 on the Upsampler for your best recorded files.
Then try F1 on the DAC for the best Nyquist image rejection and dynamic range.
You can't go wrong with F5/F6 for many files but try F3/F1 and listen for awhile.
Mr Quick knows where from he speaks.
My considered opinion notwithstanding.
Both you and bflowers have some interesting combinations. I will try both of them...
F3 on the upsampler and F1 or F5 on the dac are my go to combinations ,thus far. so many options ,so many flavors.
That is the thing with all dCS equipment - almost everyone says the same thing. I'd almost go so far as to say if a hypothetical scenario existed whereby all CDs ever made were produced by engineers who knew what they were doing and were produced and always played back on dCS equipment, then for most people the case against CD either wouldn't exist or wouldn't be a significant one. Although there is quite simply no escaping the compromises inherent in the CD format (not just the sampling rate and bitdepth but also the physical spinning disc format and optical-mechanical playback mechanism), dCS makes a very convincing case that a viable music collection can comprise solely of CD material.
It seems from reading this thread that the only slightly annoying thing with this equipment is to get the very best out of it, different settings are used for different source material. I have a similar problem with my high res transcriptions from my vinyl and the dither and resampling settings I use to create a CD master from those high res files. I spent many months hoping I could find just one setting (well one specific combination of resampling and dither settings) that would work perfectly for everything but failed after spending hundreds of hours on it. Instead, I ended up with three different combinations of those settings and I actually need to maintain a spreadsheet telling me what works best with what file for when I make the final CD master files!
So I can imagine dCS owners coming up with their own optimised combinations for different material too, only in terms of filters and resampling settings. Sounds like dCS and spreadsheets might need to be a possible option to get the very best out of the source material!
I can certainly see your point. Maybe one day we can have a metadata standard that flags what filters to select upon playback...
You are bang on the money the Spaz. Since the latest dCS Rossini is on the mechanical side CD only in terms of disk playback, I might just mention as a sideline on this thread the experiments I carried out between late 2013 and mid 2015, the primary objective being to examine and try to overcome those precise vulnerabilities. In other words, I wanted to see if there was a way to get that whole transport and optical disc sonically out of the way (let alone 16 bits and the low sampling rate). Obviously on my workstation I can listen in whatever resolution I wish. I don't think it really need to be said that I struggled for many months as I outlined above (and failed) to make the transition from 24/96 to 16/44.1 transparent, though some might be surprised to know the biggest problem in sonic terms was getting the bit-depth down. If I were to give subjective scores to how this whole CD master file "packaging" process panned out, I'd say that the down-sampling lost me only about 5% subjective quality but the dithering and subsequent wordlength reduction to 16 bit (professional dither modules let you work in a 64 bit envelope, for example - this is beneficial if some tracks require a different dither than others on the same final disk) lost me about 8%. And it didn't matter what products and settings I tried - the biggest loss was always losing those 8 bits from the master file. Nevertheless, most products I tested were actually a lot worse than that 8%. I now use PSP X-Dither - a product endorsed by no less than Bob Katz. After many months, I found three settings out of the scores of combinations available that did the least amount of damage to classical music, but even so, it is sobering how much you really do lose. But the reality is you still end up with a really great sounding 16/44.1 master file - if you heard it in isolation you'd be really happy with it. It's just that in a side by side you'd be less impressed. Probably like comparing a BMW M135i to the 1M in car terms. I'd happily take the M135i if I never knew any better!
So onto the CD format itself and I was initially incredibly depressed with my experiments and findings. Of course the bits are bits crowd would say you'd lose nothing here, but it was not to be. Nor could I predict my findings. Over that year and a bit, I found that not only were the same bits sounding different on different batches of commercial CDs (perhaps that is accepted by many open-minded people), but that in terms of burned CDs, the variations were even larger again - it depended not only on the type of blanks used, but the burner type and burner speed! You could actually "tune" the sound of your final product by picking different blanks and changing burner speeds, for example.
Mind you, what I discovered myself was precisely echoed by Cookie Marenco at Blue Coast Records. Having all these findings that made no sense, I found that Cookie noticed the exact same thing (and like me, she had many people and even audio pros denigrating her and saying it was all in her head, but to me that says infinitely more about the relative levels of skill, fanaticism and dedication of herself versus her detractors than it does her findings).
What followed for me during the first half of last year was an attempt to mitigate that subjective loss between the CD master file and the played-back disk. After around 6 months of experiments dedicated solely to that, I found the very best burner on the market to be the Japanese-only Pioneer S09J-X (about ten times the cost of your average burner) and the best disks were also Japanese - the Taiyo Yuden SPMPT mastering disks at around 10 times the price of the "standard" premium Taiyo Yuden disks. With that combination, I managed to mitigate the sonic losses to perhaps only around 2% to 3%. Amazing considering how much I lost in previous steps. And mind you, this was not using stuff like a dCS transport or dCS Rossini where I would imagine they would be even lower.
On the commercial disk side, I found the best were those (Japanese again!) specialty disks - the disks themselves and the manufacturing process preserves much more of the sound on playback than the disks from the majors. The Esoteric brand were probably the best of all (and had the best remasterings I have heard on them too). But that was somewhat irrelevant in many cases given you have an SACD layer on those disks!
Still, with all the effort and experiments under my belt, I learned not to "fear" CD as much as I had in the past. And that by far the biggest problem with it isn't either the sampling rate or the issues surrounding reading an optical disk using an electro-mechanical transport mechanism. These do of course remain issues, but they can be largely overcome and don't amount to huge losses, especially on top end equipment such as dCS and if you are prepared to buy the better disks or even go so far as to rip them and burn them on the blanks and burner I suggested (though these days I don't know why you would since much CD equipment these days allows for ripped disks to play back as well). No, it's the 16 bit conversion that does the most damage and there is no way around this (though my recent acquaintance with the Entreq products even claws back some of that during final playback even on modest equipment). It is probably also a key reason why products like dCS garner universal praise - even astonishment - as to what CD is actually capable of. Those losses can largely be overcome with an obsessive and no-holds-bar approach to product design and execution. There is a good reason why dCS products cost as much as a luxury car and come in multiple boxes. You get what you pay for and nothing is better at mitigating all the little cumulative losses inherent to the CD format as delivered in shrink-wrap to the consumer versus what sits on an audio engineers hard drive.
dCS has been doing it right since the very beginning. Some of the very best classical CDs started life with a dCS analogue to digital converter 26 years ago. Interestingly, I have never heard the dCS upsampling. I have never been satisfied with any real-time upsampling I've listened to so I would be very interested to hear the dCS implementation of it.
fair doings fiddle faddle you really did fiddle faddle
Never tried a glass cd. But I do use paint on the outside edge (cd stoplight) religiously and have used various treatments over the years like Optrix and Audience's gel. Of course, I'll admit I'm a freak and I use Kontak even on my USB keys. Which btw, I can hear a diff between a good (fast) usb key and a el cheapo. Go figure...
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