Listening In A Meadow? Exaktly.

I quite like pizza.  And red wine.  Generally, these are consumed indoors – either at home, or in a restaurant.  Occasionally (it would be summertime), it might be on a terrace overlooking the Med, or perched on a stool outside a tent.  It’s not normal to be consuming these treats in a field, but that might’ve been what was happening the other night, accompanied by Dire Straits playing in the background on a pair of Linn Exakt 350s. Maybe I just have an over-fertile imagination.  It’s strange though, as in reality, we seemed to be sat in a large top-floor room which was as real as the pizzas, and the red wine.

What is this opening ramble?  What does it mean? Was the wine too strong?  Were there too many glasses consumed?  Let’s start back at the beginning and work through to what that opening paragraph is all about.  Maybe.

Cards on the table.  I’ve heard lots of Linn 350 speakers.  And Linn Exakt systems.  Some were combined together.  I tend to like Exakt systems, when they’ve been set up properly (not a given), but tend not to like 350s.  When I’ve heard them both together, they’ve been in inappropriate locations, like a massive double storey hard surfaced furniture shop (not a great approach to showing off your systems Linn), or in the factory in a ballroom with 200 people, etc.  So Exakt and 350s have not been a great experience so far, but then they’ve not had much of a chance either, with the best I've heard them being in the main dem room at HoL - my preference still being for the Akubariks or Komris.

One of the more enjoyable systems featuring 350s belong to Linn Forum member (let’s call him “A”) and uses a Renew DS/0, Akurate Kontrol/0 and a non-Dynamik Twin.  That system still features their special feature – a slightly “disconnected” bass.  A and I meet up from time to time with music and hifi always the excuse – be it at shows, dealer demos or in the listening room.  A lives down South, I don’t.  So we get together when it makes sense.  Through A, I met P, also a forum member and living down South, and we tend to meet up at either of their houses when there’s a good excuse to listen to some music, or compare the effects of software changes and other bits n pieces of new kit.

The 2 guys down South have recently added another member into this happily sceptical band of middle aged music listening blokes.  For simplicity, this new bloke, also a forum contributor, will be called N.  This week was the first time I’ve had a chance to join in, with another trip to London being necessary for work purposes.  Logistics sorted, pizza orders confirmed for the 3^rd time (sorry P) and all was set for a bit of Exakt 350 listening.  It even all went to plan.  Decent pizzas, great red wine and we settled into the listening room to munch over the background Dire Straits.

And what a listening room.  Perched on the top (2^nd floor) of a substantial place, approx. 6m by 4m and with a sloping wall / ceiling down one long side as it tucks under the roofline.  A pair of rather tasty looking Linn Exakt integrated 350s in piano black stand guard either side of powered grey screen on one of the shorter walls, with a TAG MacLaren centre speaker stood on a pedestal stand.  A venerable Linn Melodik and associated Exaktbox sub are in one front corner. That’s all you see from the listening seat – side / rear speakers are multi-driver MK units flush fitted into the side walls.  There’s a large L-shaped sofa for 5 or 6 and a vast footstool big enough for all.  This is a very comfortable place to settle into for tunes and movies.  Across the back wall there are 2 built-in cupboards.  One houses the very large SIM2 projector (watching movies with all the lights on is no problem), the other the equipment rack.

Piano Black Linn 350 Exakt.  Tasty. And old skool Linn Melodik sub

And what a rack this is.  Much of what’s in there will be on the wish list of many an audiophile / music lover.  Perched on traditional Quadraspire are (from top to bottom): an SME 30 turntable equipped with series V arm and Koetsu Red; Linn Klimax Exakt DSM; Tom Evans Audio Design phono stage, Anthem processor and multi-channel TAG MacLaren power amp (for centre and rears).  Music is normally held on a 4 bay QNAP NAS, but with some currently stored on a Melco N1A and some on a Melco N1Z whilst the resident A is being compared to a demo Z.  All connectivity to the main stereo system is with standard Cat 5 ethernet cables.  Exakt links included, with one cable from the KEDSM to each speaker and the sub daisy-chained from the right hand 350.

Main Quadraspire Rack,  Untidy Cables Due to Experimenting with NAS Storage (see later pic below)

SME 30 / Series V / Koetsu Red

It’s gonna be good, right?  

The 350s are stood very close to the front wall, to enable them to be positioned either side of the off-centre screen (off-centre due to the sloping ceiling).  This is possible due to Linn’s SPACE Optimisation+ feature.  During set up, the room is measured, the speakers are manoeuvred until they’re at the point they sound best in the room (the ‘ideal’ position measurement), then their position is also measured.  The speakers are then moved to their practical position and measured in this position, relative to nearby walls.  All this data is then entered into Linn’s Konfig software, algorithms are crunched and the signals sent to each speaker allow for their compromised position in the room.  I’ve heard this demo’d a few times and its very impressive.  It doesn’t perfectly recreate the sound generated in the “ideal” position, but its very close, considering what it allows in terms of much more physically discrete speaker locations.

What about the sub?  Well Linn have just added subwoofers to their Exakt system with the Exaktbox Sub which is designed to take the Exakt signal to a sub with built-in power amps.  N had just hefted the sub into the room a couple of days before (his and his mate’s back are probably still recovering – its not exactly lightweight), and it hadn’t been set up.  We had it powered up to start with, but then chose to shut it down and come back to it later.

Pizzas done, music was loaded up into a playlist on the iPad Mini (or the iPad, or the Macbook!) and we got on with some listening.  It was very quickly clear that there’s only one sweet spot in the room – the intended listening seat.  Being elsewhere in the room was a real compromise – even just one seat to the right of the hotspot.  Not to worry, that’s not at all unusual.  We listened to some classical organ music (vague, sorry about that, it’s not something I know much about), some Clapton on video and some Seal.  We settle into focused listening with something we’re all very familiar with – Daft Punk’s Georgio Moroder from the Random Access Memories album.  It has an interesting opening with a narrative by Georgio, underpinned by background chatter and some bass meanderings.  Then of course it kicks in with some driving bass lines and electronic tuneage.  It’s very good for understanding system resolution and tunefulness.  Tune dem anyone?  We don’t discuss that, as everyone has their own way of listening for what they like, but we all do try to figure out if we’re just enjoying the flow of the music and if it’s causing foot tapping or not.

It was difficult to establish what’s going on away from the hot seat, so we take turns to try it out.  For me the sound was OK, but not overwhelming.  I suppose I was expecting something special, and to hear that from the off.  We mess about a bit more with some more material – including a great scene in the film Fifth Element.  I’d forgotten just how quirky and amusing that film is – must get around to watching it again sometime very soon.  Having got used to the sound, we start thinking about tweaking a few things and start with the QNAP and Melco options.  Various combinations were tried – each Melco on its own, then with the QNAP fed through one of them.  I think I heard some small differences, with a very slight preference for the N1A Melco, but there was nothing there that was making the system sing, nor were any changes (real or imagined) very significant.  Another aspect was a serious lack of imaging – there was no single point for the singer’s voice and London Grammar’s album just didn’t shimmer and fill the space in the room.

To the left, QNAP NAS main storage and a couple of Melco NAS boxes, the N1A being resident, the N1Z being a demo unit

I think it was P who finally bit the bullet and we cranked up Konfig on the Macbook.  We switched SPACE Optimisation on and off a few times, but I really couldn’t hear it making any real difference.  Strange, it’s normally very obvious.  We checked the SPACE filter graph and found a straight line.  Those familiar with looking at what SPACE does, will know that this is unusual.  Essentially, the software calculates where the room is likely to give bass humps (due to the dimensions of the room) and then feeds a signal to the system that has very narrow, often quite deep, notched attenuation filters – the idea being that the deep notches in the signal cancel out the humps created by the room.  Most rooms have 2 to 4 nodes.  Yet here we have a completely flat profile.  And a room map with no speakers or furniture identified.  Now, there have been some recent software updates that have had odd effects in Konfig, such as completely shutting down one speaker, forgetting which speaker models are in use etc., all fixable by restarting the software and the system, although forgetting the speaker model did actually need the model to be re-input.  So maybe a software bug has caused the problem, but it’s not really possible to track down what’s happened here.  The cause of the lack of filtering was soon obvious and I hope it’s been down to an error somewhere along the line as N clarified that there had been notches on the graph previously.  Perhaps a software or hardware change had caused the problem.  One for owners to check back on from time to time (rather like I discovered that my speaker model had been dropped from the standard SPACE config in my own system – noticed one day after a software upgrade seemed to have degraded the sound a bit).

Anyway, thinking back to some stuff I’ve read on the Linn forum, the problem was soon identified.  The room dimensions are supposed to be entered into Konfig in metres.  Here they had been entered in cms.  So a 6.3m long room becomes a 630m long room, as far as the calculations are concerned.  And when that room is also recorded as being 410m wide and 255m high, the speakers imagine they are living in a field.  And when a set of speakers live in a field, they don’t create any bass humps as their field is too big to have bass humps.  So SPACE sets a correctly flat profile.  Except we weren’t in a field, we were definitely in a room.  The measurements were quickly corrected to metres, and we entered a rough position for the subwoofer.  But when we did this by roughly guessing its distance from the room boundaries, the Konfig diagram showed the subwoofer was half outside the room. Hmmm.  Something not right there.  A quick run of the optimisation software delivered 4 notches and we were clearly starting to head in the right direction.

N quickly dug out the laser measure and we got to work stepping through Konfig’s measurement requirements.  Even when converted from cms to metres, some of the dimensions were out – the room width was recorded as 4.1m, but turned out to be 3.66m – an error of 0.5m is quite significant.  About 15 minutes of measuring, checking and entering the data and we had a new optimisation ready, with 3 notched filters – the lowest frequency notched to about -29dB with the other 2 much further up the frequency range and much shallower.  Due to time restrictions, we just converted the speaker’s “ideal” location from the cms already in the system.  With much more time it would be worth revisiting the ideal position data too, but that involves removing speaker spikes and shuffling the speakers about in the room – there wasn’t time this evening.

Daft Punk went back on, Leonard Cohen, Seal and some London Grammar.  Some listening, some small tweaks on the depth of the optimisation notches.  We dial in a +1.5dB treble shelf to compensate for the heavy soft furnishings between speakers and listening position.  I think we ended up with the notches back to the SPACE recommended settings in the end – quite unusual.  This was quite some improvement.  Bass lines are now tuneful, and there’s real imaging going on – still a little shallow front to back (possibly an effect of being so close to the front wall of the room), but very wide left to right and instruments and voices easily pinpointed as individual parts of the whole.  The opening to the Georgio track had a stable, central voice, the background noise was recognisable as chatter and the quiet underlying bass line is playing a clearly distinguishable tune. Excellent.  What a difference a few measurements can make (although, to be fair, changing from cms to metres isn’t exactly a subtle tweak).  Next we mess about with some cables and the system really starts to sing.  Now, we’re listening to the best pair of 350s I’ve heard.  The bass lines are even in time with the rest of the music, which is not a 350 forte – Exakt must be doing its stuff, and perhaps the latest 4^th order bass roll-off changes have been really fundamental to getting the best from the 350s.  This system is now really enjoyable – something quite special, given my previous challenge with enjoying 350s.  Sitting position in the room is now much less critical, although still best from the hot seat of course.

N then played Porgy and Bess Summertime, Procol Harum performing A Whiter Shade of Pale with the Danish National Concert Orchestra, Eva Cassidy Fields of Gold and some of his other favourites (he has a very extensive and eclectic music collection) which all sounded very engaging.

There’s probably more to come.  Given that we have relied here upon the “ideal” speaker positions that were existing in Konfig (but converted to metres), there’s probably scope to go right back to the beginning and determine the “ideal” speaker position again.  If that’s not right then the SPACE Optimization+ facility for positioning the speaker into the practical position will be based on some incorrect calculations.  If that is the case, then this system really could move on from excellent to truly stunning.  That’s the work of at least half a day.

Now I’m hoping to get back again soon (probably in early 2016) to spend the evening listening to music, to give that SME a good listen and to put that fantastic screen and projector to good use. Hopefully, over the next few days and weeks, N can enjoy settling into some serious music listening too.  Thanks for your hospitality N, a very enjoyable evening.

(with thanks to P for a contribution on the tracks played and correction of some of the details).

What’s In A Room? In This Case, Lots Of Attention To Detail. Sir David Brailsford Would Be Proud.

Quite a busy room containing this system, and much attention to detail. But so what? Does it matter?

Tucked away upstairs in a substantial brick built house in the South East of the UK is this particular music den which features one of the most complex and unusual room configurations I’ve seen. If you have a loft conversion and you think it has some interesting sloping ceilings, think again – you’ve probably got it easy. How about sloping ceilings of different lengths on each side, a door on each side wall, a ceiling that has steps / supporting beams, a half-width room divider / book shelf behind which is a desk, book shelves etc? The system and speakers are across the shorter wall, firing down the length with the listening position just after the side doors and before the partial room divider. Just to add to the fun, there’s a big flat screen TV between the speakers, possibly because the room itself isn’t enough to be getting on with?

So what? Well, all of that is a bit of a challenge, acoustically. If you try to select components based on how it performs for the standing waves at one height of the room, it won’t work for the other heights. What about side reflections that are not consistent side to side? And who’s up for that challenge? Well let’s call him Peter, for now, a member of a number of on-line forums, a retired IT techie and seemingly a man who likes to not only face a challenge, but successfully overcome that challenge, in between an extensive and frequent range of holidays. You might sense a slight note of jealously in these ramblings… Peter is retired. I’m not. Enough said.

Peter was invited on the same evening at another forum member’s home about 18 months ago – that’s the first time we met. He brought along his Linn Klimax DSM streamer / pre-amp which we compared with Andrew’s Klimax DS/0 Renew – an evening that lead to me saving and saving the saving a bit more so my then streamer (an Akurate DS/0/1) would eventually be replaced by the then current Klimax DS/1. At the time, Peter invited Andrew and I to another evening - time to be determined - when we would get together to listen to Peter’s complete system in his own place. And, as is the way, with work commitments, family commitments and the very limited windows between Peter’s holidays, it took us all of that 18 months to make the follow up session happen. Inevitably, Peter’s system moved on in that time too.

So after a tasty meal (we’ll not go into the pitfalls of surprising vegetarian visitors who thought they were going to contribute a take away to the evening’s proceedings with a spicy chicken dish…) which Peter had generously put together, glasses were appropriately charged and we headed off to the listening room, described above.
Nestled under the (cloth covered, to reduce acoustic reflections – watch out for more on the attention to detail as we go through these notes) flat screen TV are the following:

• Linn Klimax DSM/1 streamer and pre-amp running Davaar 25 software
• Linn Klimax Solo Dynamik mono power amps
• Wilson Benesch Discovery with add-on super tweeters by Townshend Audio
• Melco NAS (the HDD version) with and without Minim Server / QNAP with Minim Server
• IsoTek EVO3 Sigmas mains conditioner
• Ethernet cables and mains cables from Supra and Acoustic Revive
• Multiple cables connecting amps to speakers (that’s multiple cable types attached to the same terminals at each end, not bi-wired as such)
• A glass rack with oak pillars
• Some isolation cones under the electronics and bamboo plinths
• Tucked in the corner is the Wilson Benesch Torus Infrasonic Generator – don’t call it a subwoofer, or the WB boys will be round to sort you out!

Control is from an iPad using the Lumin control point app, the NAS is loaded with the lossless FLAC tracks. The Lumin interface is pretty much the best I’ve seen – intuitive, fast, easy to navigate, great hi-res album art etc. Its certainly on a par with BubbleDS, but unfortunately not available for Android at the moment. A joy to use.


What about the music? Is that a joy too? Well this system presents the music in a very different way to my own system, and other Linn systems I’ve had the chance to listen to. And it takes some time to “tune-in” to what’s going on. Let’s be very clear though – this is not a NAIM system at one extreme, but neither is it of the polite to the point of boredom of some systems that often feature turntables, or valves, or horns, or some combination. So that puts it somewhere between forthright and overly dull. Doesn’t narrow it down much does it? Something that I thought might be a feature was a lack of integration. Sub-woofer (whoops, sorry WB!), isobaric loading in the standmounts, and super tweeters would suggest that there might be peaks and troughs associated with each of these components and any gaps between them. Nope. Not here. Lets listen to some more tracks. In hifi terms, there’s good imaging and stability, the full frequency range seems present and even, vocals are clear and instrument separation is fine.

Emotionally, is the music connecting? Well my foot is tapping voluntarily, so timing is working – I’m getting the feeling of passion from the vocals at appropriate times when the times are good, there is the sense of shock when its due on sudden dynamic peaks and relaxing tunes are, well, relaxing. Do the angry tunes make me feel angry? Not so much. When a song is about bad times, do I feel for the singer – again, not so much. Cranking the system up for Stanley Clarke’s “School Days” from the “Live At The Greek” album shows that the sub can both kick hard on the kick drums whilst not suffering from any notable hangover (more on this later, when discussing the room acoustics). We mess with switching the sub in and out a few times. This is one very impressive piece of kit – for me its just slightly too dominant, but it is by a tiny margin, in terms of the frequency spectrum, but there’s no doubt it adds much in terms of building a picture of the recorded acoustics. On top of this, it adds slam to the system – a neat trick, subs often adding wallow and uncertainty. A fine product when used with these WB standmounts.

So, back to the room. What to do with such a challenge? Well, lets dive right into all those details. There are acoustic panels strategically placed on various aspects of the ceiling(s) – we didn’t mess about with them, but Peter will undoubtedly put time and effort into getting them into the best place, within the physical constraints. The Klimax EDSM is equipped with Linn’s room optimisation software – SPACE. This only deals with frequencies in the lower regions that are affected by room dimensions – those below 200Hz, so it doesn’t mess with the important vocal range, for example. It uses a set of dimensions such as room height, length, ceiling height, speaker position in the room (ideal and actual), position and size of windows etc. Which, in my experience, is a good tool to get good results, as long as you don’t accept the defaults it calculates, but follow the instructions on how to get the best settings once the defaults give you a starting point. But my room is rectangular so the measurements are easy to input. But what of Peter’s complex room? Where to start? Well Peter had put the major parameters into the system (Linn recommend using the largest dimension in the room. If there are irregularities (e.g. a bay window) in a wall, then the advice is to use the largest dimension, if the irregularity is more than 1/3 of that wall). Helpful, but still no use for Peter’s room. He’s solved this by using response measuring equipment (microphone, software) and then used the SPACE filters to tailor his own implementation of room optimisation. Again, through experimentation and careful research and thought, much attention to the details. Peter’s SPACE “picture” of the filters has many overlapping filters with gentle slopes, leading to an overall curve that looks very much like a flattened version of Gartner’s hype cycle curve – from left (lower frequencies) to right (higher frequencies), it climbs quite quickly, reaches a peak, then drops significantly before rounding out back to flat with a gentle slope.

Does such a curve work? Well, switching SPACE off gives a flabby, boomy sound. Not really very pleasant. Cut it back in and everything snaps back into a tight groove, making music enjoyable. So yes, it works, and works extremely well. Could it have been done better? I don’t know, we didn’t have time to step through options, but I suspect that Peter’s got it as good as it can be with the current tech, system and room. Impressive.

So what else? Well, Peter made a few tweaks over the course of the evening – I’m not sure if this was to demo differences or to test me to see if I was able to observe and comment on differences heard.  These amounted to changing from QNAP to Melco, from Twonky software to Minim Server, inserting and removing the Audio Revive Ethernet filter, leaving the Melco connected to the network and using as a standalone server etc. So what? Well, some of these were noticeable tweaks (I like what Minim server does), some were in the category of possibly just being debatable or imagined (disconnecting the Melco from the network) and in between (Audio Revive filter). Were these worthwhile? Well, compared to the room optimisation they were, at best, marginal. But here’s the point of the post title. Marginal benefits are cumulative. That’s what Sir Dave Brailsford did with the Sky procycling team. He drove through intensive examination of every aspect of team and individual performance that the team found for consideration. Then they took that aspect and found a better way to deal with it, to improve the performance of that one parameter. But if you do that with enough small parameters, and add them together then at worst they are cumulative, but at best they are compounded - the effects stack up and the whole improvement can be more than just adding up the little tiny improvements.

And that’s how I felt after the evening at Peter’s. So much time to look into and experiment with all the little bits and pieces, try them, compare them, choose them. Is this the best system I’ve heard? No, but its nowhere near the most expensive I’ve heard either and its seriously impressive compared to some very expensive systems out there. Would it be something I could live with? Absolutely. Would I choose this particular combination of components? Probably not – there’s just a touch of excitement missing, for me - perhaps its the system, maybe the software in the DS, maybe SPACE processing, maybe something else - there is much to consider when considering a system - its and end to end thing, not just a pair of speakers. Is it an achievement? Yep – consider it as a system, it does a lot of great things. Put it into that room, and it becomes more than an achievement – it becomes something unexpectedly good.

Thanks Peter – a very enjoyable evening!

Sorry - no pictures this time - they might've helped explain the room somewhat.

P.S.  Peter later went back from Davaar version 25 software to version 17.797 (see, detail!) which he reports added a bit of life back into the system, but prevented the use of SPACE.  Now, with the latest Davaar 32, Peter is back on track as he reports that this sounds like 17.797 but with the benefit of SPACE.

HDD Down (And Up)

I have a QNAP TS-209 II running 2 x Seagate Baracuda 1.5TB in RAID 1 (mirrored).

One of the drives failed a few weeks back. As they are about 3 years old I thought I would not be able to find a matching drive. However, found a factory refurbished drive on ebay for a reasonable £100.

It is supposed to be possible to hot-swap a drive in the QNAP and for the RAID 1 to fully rebuild itsself. However, due to where my NAS is located I needed to power the NAS down in order to unplug it from the mains and the network before I could lift it out onto a bench to get good access to the front panel to allow drives to be swapped over.

Now I work in IT, and know that there are many factors that mean things don't always go to plan... or to feature set!

So it was with much trepidation that I opened up the NAS, removed the faulty drive and then slotted in the refurbed drive. Even more trepidation when I plugged it all back in and powered up the NAS. Within the usual couple of minutes the drive was visible again on the network, with file explorer much snappier than it had been in the past few weeks and all files present and correct.

All the indicator lights on the front of the NAS were matching with the sequence in the instruction book that says a RAID 1 config is being rebuilt. We wrote no further files, nor did I use the DS or the Squeezeboxes during this process. In fact, it was allowed to run overnight. I don't know when the RAID rebuild finished, or how long it took, but it was completed sometime in the 7 hour overnight window and that's with 800GB of data (single copy of data = 800GB).

All is now well again, and I can breathe once more.

As its inevitable that hard drives will fail, I went for the dual bay NAS approach, but I still had my doubts about what would happen in the event of a failure. On this occasion it was all good news. This has also cemented my faith in the QNAP NAS - I know many think they are a little on the expensive side, but with this experience I think that is inconsequential compared to the hassle I could've gone through due to hard drive failure.

So a good news IT story. Music was saved!

DAC. Magic?

For those of you paying attention, the streaming set up currently looks like this:
QNAP NAS (including SqueezeServer software) - Etnernet over mains - Logitech Squeezebox Touch - QED Performance Digital Coax cable - Cambridge Audio DACMagic - Audioquest Emerald analogue interconnect - Meridian 541 pre-amp and then off into the active amps and Linn Keilidhs.

And very satisfying it is too - as I've said earlier, about 90% up there with the CD player, and definitely better with 24 bit tracks.  But there's always that nagging doubt eh?

Now some sites (e.g. Stereophile, Digital Audio Blog) have been making some seriously big claims for the capability of the Logitech Squeezebox Touch - such as "the best transport I've ever heard (Digital Audio Blog on the Touch with a Teddy PSU)".  This means they've been running the humble Touch with some multi $k DACs and stratospherically expensive amps and speakers.

I am, by nature, somewhat sceptical of such claims and what sometime seems to by hyperbole.  Now I'm not singling out Stereophile nor Digital Audio Blog or questioning their integrity, it just that I like to see lots of evidence and corroboration, or better still, find out for myself.

Another thing that's a worthwhile background to this post is my continuing good natured sibling "rivalry" with my brother when it comes to hifi and the route to getting the most enjoyable sound in the home.  Brother J has gone down a different route to myself, (although we initially shared an enjoyment of Meridian CD players, with J running a 206 for many years.  After a few years with Meridian CD / Cyrus 2 / PSX and Mission 770 Freedoms (the last of the 770 line) he's recently upgraded to a Cyrus 4 box CD player (I can't remember the transport model, but the other three boxes are DAC X and 2 PSX-Rs) plus a reasonably high end Cyrus integrated.  This has substantially improved his whole system and it suits his taste - its fast, has pin-point imaging and real clarity and separation.  But for me, it doesn't go deep enough, the music lacks somewhat in emotion and doesn't "envelope" the listener.  Its all silver too, which just isn't right ;-) Each to his own of course, and it delivers what he wants to hear.  This means he finds my system to be somewhat vague in its imaging (can't argue with that) and a little less analytical than he would enjoy.  Fair enough.  Will do a feature on the "other systems I have known" page sometime soon.

Why is this relevant?  Well, in amongst J's kit list you might have spotted a somewhat fine DAC combination of Cyrus DAC X and PSX-R.  This half term (this is a very late post, apologies!), J came to visit with family and had kindly agreed to bring along said DAC and power supply.  It's good to unplug and re-connect cables every now and then, make sure the connections are clean!  And so began a "quick trial" session - we reckoned an hour would be enough...

For purposes of this session, we used exclusively 16 bit 44.1 kHz FLAC files ripped from my CD collection - so we could make direct comparison with my Meridian 508.20 CD player.
Music used:

Thea Gilmore - Loft Music - Tracks "Ever Fallen In Love" and "The Old Laughing Lady" (A great covers album - with Thea its all about her extraordinary voice - its range and ability to convey emotions, plus the acoustic instruments and backing vocals)
Brendan Perry - Eye of the Hunter - Track "Death Will Be My Bride" (Don't listen if you're feeling a bit down!  Very well recorded and spacious track with some really tricky and complex cymbals to deal with)
Eagle Eye Cherry - Desireless - Track "Shooting Up In Vain" (Another one to cheer you up! Mutilayered instruments that need a good system to allow each instrument to survive in the complexity of the mix)
Chris Rea - The Road to Hell - Track "Looking for a Rainbow" (needs a system that has good drive and pace as the song builds the underlying rythmn throughout)
Eddi Reader - Eddi Reader - Track "Dear John" (lovely voice, needs to convey the emotions)
FAC 15 - On Fierce Angel's Angels Fall 3 CD Set "Stay With Me Till Dawn" (a superb re-work of the Judie Tzuke classic with a bass line that slides into the depths of the unknown!)

To get a reference and to demo the DACMagic to J we started off using the Thea Gilmore album to play the Touch with its internal DAC and then stepped up to the DACMagic.  J's view largely aligned with mine - a massive improvement somewhat out of kilter with this modestly priced most looking little black box.  Comparing to the CD player there are aspects of the music that are different but we couldn't really choose between Touch / DAC and the CD player.  CD being warmer, Touch being a bit more up-front.  Tried Eagle Eye and Chris Rea on this too, with similar indecision.

So the Cyrus DAC X is unpacked and plugged in to the system.  It sits on an Isoplat and takes the place of the DACMagic in support of the Touch for the streaming side of the system.  What follows is somewhat of a revelation.  Usually, when you get to this stage with hifi, the improvements in the system deminish, the more you spend on the system.  One day I'll post in depth on the benefits of going from passive amplification to active amplification with the Linn Keilidhs which was the biggest single improvement I've made in my system.  Until now.  For those of you who've had the benefit of listening to a Linn or Naim system that has been moved from passive to active, you'll know just how fundamental a change this Cyrus shoebox has brought to the system.

Cyrus DAC-X in brushed black

Some examples of what we heard:
- The music appears to be playing slower (but it takes the same length of time to play the track) this would seem to be because the instruments and/or notes aren't slurring into each other, they've got time and room to be notes in their own right
- One of the tracks (can't remember which one) has a riff played on an acoustic guitar.  As the track progresses and more joins the mix, the guitar continues in the background.  But we were both astonished to hear (and we both spotted this at exactly the same moment, without discussion) that part way through the track the guitar changes from acoustic to steel.
- The Brendan Perry track finishes with a very complex and subtle cymbal sequence.  Now, the difference between the sound of each cymbal is much more obvious, but on top of that, you can hear if the stick is striking the top or the edge of the cymbal and when being brushed, if the brushing is being done by a brush or by a stick.
- The soundstage on all tracks is outside the speakers and with the FAC15 track, fills out into the room.

So we were VERY impressed with this and messed about with a few tracks for another hour or so.  Then outcame the Cyrus PSX-R to sit alongside the DAC-X.  You need to keep both the DAC and the PSX-R plugged into the mains then there's an umbilical chord from the PSX-R to the DAC.  I understand that the internal power supply of the DAC is then dedicated to digital duties and the PSX-R takes over the analogue output circuits.

So what now?  Well this is another non-subtle improvement.  Darkness behind and around instruments, bass is deeper and more controlled (check the sliding synth bass line on the FAC15 track) and those Brendan Perry cymbals shimmer out and away from the speakers, seeming to sit in the room.  FAC15 are now enveloping the whole room.  Its lush, detailed and completely captivating.  And so the quick listening session went on for 3.5 hours.  We didn't want to stop trying different tracks.  Later in the evening, the system seemed to have matured again - I know many experience this with their systems and there is much debate about noise on the mains. physcological effects and many other theories. Perhaps this would've happened anyway, but we did suspect that the PSX-R might have warmed through a little?

We, rather indulgently, spent another couple of hours of listening the following day, throwing in some 24bit stuff from Linn and HDTracks, which, of course, was mighty impressive, if, at times, a little dry.  No problems with Ian Shaw's "Barangrill" (on "Drawn To All Things" from Linn Records) nor with Steely Dan's "Hey Nineteen" (on Gaucho from HDTracks).

And then J and his Cyrus kit went away again.  Sad.  But one thing has definitely been proven - the little Squeezebox Touch is certainly capable of supporting some very serious downstream electronics.  Now to eBay...

Squeezebox Touch - Evolution Begins

No changes to the rest of the system (although there is a bit relating to cables...) so this is the first stages of experimentation with streaming audio and how it relates to the Logitech Squeezebox Touch in my system.  For the first part of this story, see the posting First Streaming Times below.

So we are at a Touch on its own into the rest of the system using a pair of Linn Black analogue interconnects.  And it sounds very detailed but flat, lacking space between the instruments, there's little width to the sound and its all lacking somewhat in terms of drive / pace / enthusiasm.  Its fine for background listening, but not so good for listening to music properly.  The CD player is still in a different league.  These comparisons are done between the same CD and the ripped version in FLAC, not against high res files which would be an unfair comparison.

 

Some research revealled that quite a few folks have been running external DACs on their Squeezebox Duets and Touches with some success, and there are various references to different (e.g. Fidelity Audio, Teddy PS) external power supplies making a difference.

There's then a whole separate story about a chance opportunity to go to a Naim dealer when Naim themselves were there demoing loads of kit.  I might write that one up sometime.  But the key relevant point here is that Naim have come out with a streaming device that sounds distinctly unimpressive to me when using its internal DAC, but plug it into the Naim stand alone DAC and it sounds astonishingly good.  Add the external power supply to the external DAC and you have something quite remarkable, but also rather expensive (approx £6.5k at this point).  So this, coupled with the internet chattosphere spurred me on to further experimenting.

I took the plunge and bought a Cambridge Audio DACMagic (for those with an eye for absolute detail, its a black one) along with the CA basic optical digital interconnect.  This is a major step forward and unleashes all sorts of extra information, deeper bass and the soundstage leaps out from between the speakers and pretty much doubles in width.  Hmm, very interesting.  If I then move the interconnect from the CD player (its an AudioQuest Topaz) there are further improvements in control and bass extension.  I purchased a What HiFi recommended Chord Chameleon Silver Plus interconnect (£125) which is an improvement on the Linn, but isn't as good as the Topaz (£180 for 0.5m over 10 years ago, but thrown in when I bought the CD player).

Now if I use the DACMagic and CD player as a transport then the CD player inbuilt DAC still wins out, and that's using an optical digital interconnect (not tried with a coax interconnect yet), so the DACMagic doesn't appear to be as good as the DAC inside the CD player.  Or is it?

The reason for this doubt is because of the next step I took.  I picked up an old coax digital lead that's actually designed for Meridian components to talk to each other, but only for control purposes, so its not exactly designed with sound quality in mind.  However, the improvement of this over the optical digital lead was astonishing.  Optical appears to be rubbish - that could be the Touch output, the DACMagic input, or the cable, or some kind of combination of all or some of these. The biggest difference here is difficult to describe, but if you imagine the "space" around, between and behind instruments is blackness, then the blackness was much blacker - I guess it means there's some kind of digital error correction or hash (jitter?) disappearing from the signal? The music is now going along with some proper drive and pace.  Foot is tapping at last. So if a rubbish cable is better than an optical one, what's a decent cable like?

So in comes a fairly basic but recommended digital coax cable - a QED Performance which is only £30.  Another step forward over the basic coax, but more subtle this time - mainly in the treble area, it's lost some of the remaining grittiness and splash.  Must get around to trying the DACMagic with the CD player transport and the coax interconnect soon, just haven't had the time.

So we're now at Touch - QED coax - DACMagic - Chord Chameleon. 

Comparison with CD player is now getting about 85% of the way there.  CD player still giving a bit more in terms of punch / pace etc, but from a pure detail point of view, there's nothing in it.  CD player still using the Topaz interconnect though, which is somewhat better than the Chord Chameleon.

So off to ebay to find a secondhand Topaz (you can't buy them new anymore).  No luck there, but did find 2 pairs of Audioquest Emerald interconnects which were top of their range at around £230 for 0.5m.  Got them for £40 and £42 so one for the CD and one for the DACMagic.  So here we have yet another improvement to both Touch / DAC and the CD player.  Again its subtle but its definitely there.  How can I describe this one?  Well its a kind of smoothness and flow to the music - whilst the instruments are very seperate and obviously so, the actual music seems to flow along much better and its not a bunch of accurately rendered notes, its a better illusion of a piece of music (I almost used the word accurate there, but we know its not about accuracy, because so few of us actually know what the original performance sounded like and we need to remember that much of the processing done during production is deliberately trying to make the recording NOT sound like the original performance).  This description probably isn't making much sense, that's why I'm not Jimmy Michael Hughes!

So we have Touch - QED Coax - DACMagic - Audioquest Emerald and that's now somewhere between 90 and 95% of the way to the CD player's quality. 

But here are the 2 killer points.  It now stands me at £500 and if I was starting from scratch I'd a choice between that and the £1700 CD player, I know which I'd choose!  But as soon as you add in the ability to play 24 / 96 files then its a hands-down win for the streaming tech - its a good 10% better than the CD player and leads to those evenings that are "just one more track" until its suddenly 1am!

So you have to wonder just how much DAC the Touch can support...
And what about power supplies, and do they matter, once you're no longer using the internal DAC?

 

If you're interested in more on the Squeezebox Touch, take a look at this article as there are mods you can do to your Touch without spending any cash:

http://www.stereophile.com/mediaservers/logitech_squeezebox_touch_network_music_player/index.html

First Streaming Times

Having studied the various PC / USB / NAS / Squeezebox / Ethernet / WiFi options for approximately 12 months, I've made the decision to go down the NAS / Ethernet / Streamer route.  I'm interested in this approach as it gives the benefits of no PC nor any spinning hard disks in the listening room, the ability to use mirrored storage in the NAS for back up purposes and only one copy of the music to be accessed from around the house - even across the internet is possible with the QNAP software.

Having been to a few Linn and Naim demos, I knew that it's possible to get very good sound using streaming and accessing NAS over Ethernet.  But I'm not yet ready to spend thousands of pounds on a first try.

More research.  More tests read.  Good reviews of the Logitech Squeezebox Touch and its ridiculously good price whilst being able to deliver FLAC at up to 24 bit / 96kHz looked like a safe way to go. 

This particular story has a bit of background, so if detail is your thing, this should suit you somewhat!

System

CDs ripped using Exact Audio Copy to FLAC, so 16 bit 44.1kHz

FLAC files downloaded from Linn being a mixture of 24 bit 48 kHz and 24 bit 96kHz

QNAP TS 209 II Pro NAS using 2 x 1.5TB mirrored Seagate drives (ARM processor, Linux based firmware)

DELL laptop, Windows 7

Wired Ethernet over Mains

Logitech Squeezebox Touch

Linn black analogue interconnects

Meridian 541 pre-amp

Linn Tunebox Active Crossover

3 x Rotel RB850 power amps

Linn Tri-Active Keilidh speakers

Linn LK600 speaker cable

Comparison against Meridian 508.20 CD player

Software

A mixed bag.  Getting software installed on the NAS is a hit and miss affair, in general, despite them being recommended by Linn - but Linn only required uPnP (e.g. Twonky) and nothing bespoke / proprietary.  The SqueezeCenter server software is, therefore, immediately a compromised situation.  Being reliant on the open source community for QNAP installs means that you need one or more people out there who are enthusiastic about doing what you need to be done. In this case, there only seems to be one person who is producing the required QPKG files (that's the QNAP equivalent to and RPM in the RHEL World or an MSI in the Windows World).  It's therefore a problem if things don't work and that individual hasn't found the time to fix or look at your particular combination of NAS hardware, firmware version, QPKG version and SqueezeCenter version.  I believe the ReadyNAS range has much more support in this area, but having had an earlier Belkin NAS, I didn't want to go there again!  If you are really keen you can go command line and do the Linux install manually and I thought that might be where I might end up.

The QNAP web site is very helpful and has step by step instructions and screenshots on where to find the downloads, where to install them, how to run them etc.  Such a shame then that QNAP have redesigned their website and, of course, our helpful friends in the opensource community have changed some of the help text and instructions since the QNAP instructions were published.  I therefore had to grub around using search terms at the QNAP site (which is a bit hit and miss) to find the right files and to interpret the steps into the current version of the actual steps to take.  So, I downloaded the QPKG file and the QPKG web interface file.  They have to be in a particular directory on the NAS and that was no problem.  I ran the QPKG and it worked OK, but then you have to go off to Squeezebox (Logitech) to get the actual SqueezeCenter software - and even that isn't in a logical place - its actually at mysqueezebox.com which isn't the main Logitech site - for the QNAP box you need the Perl version of this software.  This did install OK through the QPKG software.  However, when running the SqueezeCenter (don't forget to spell it the American way or you'll find nothing!) it failed.  There is a log file which is full of fairly obscure (to me at least) error messages and hints.  However, using the hints in the log and searching for them on the QNAP forum fetched up some answers (one of which included uninstall and reinstall of the NAS firmware - scary!) but it turned out I had a QPKG that was specific to one recent version of SqueezeCenter and needed to download an earlier QPKG that was compatible with early SqueezeCenter versions and the latest version.  So a bit confusing.  It's also a bit disconcerting when running the QPKG files and the NAS tells you that you are now installing a system update...a little unsettling.  Now over 2 hours in!

In the meantime and in parallel...I downloaded the Windows version of SqueezeCenter, installed it on the DELL, pointed it to the correct directory on the NAS and it was all done in about 20 mins, including indexing my music files (but there's only 6 albums of FLAC at the moment).  This allowed me to log into my SqueezeCenter account and make sure all my stuff was ready to go there too (not that there's much to do if you just want vanilla everything), and to plug in the SB Touch and get it up and running.

Touch

This was packed very well and is done in a very restrained but quality way.  The unit itsself is much heavier than I expected and has a solid case and an aluminium stand at the back with soft rubber feet and the whole thing feels very sturdy - there are no nasty plastic moulding edges / flashing etc.  Its very thoroughly wrapped in thin cellophane which is a bit of a challenge to remove.

So, using an Ethernet cable directly to the router and sat alongside the laptop, I plugged in the Touch and switched on.  It immediately identified that later software was available, asked me if I wanted to update and off it went and the software was downloaded automatically and installed in about 5 minutes.  From there it found the (Windows!) SqueezeCentre automatically and there was my (very limited) collection of HQ rips available via album, artist, search etc.  I haven't used the touch screen as navigating via the remote is very easy to use, if a bit cheap feeling in the hand.

Once all up and running the SB Touch was moved down to the listening room and plugged into the Ethernet over mains and the main hifi system using a Linn interconnect.

In my room I'll have to think about where the SB is going to sit - the only currently available position in my rack is a bit restrictive and the screen faces 90 deg to the listening position.  Even so, although the screen is very clear and easy to read, I doubt it will be readable from the listening position.  The interface is easy to follow and very intuitive and I have no problems with it at all.  Very impressive.  I like the info available on each track - you can delve into sample rates, bit rates etc. which helps in comparing sound quality.

Listening

I used exclusively FLAC files as listed above, ripped from my CDs using EAC or, with higher quality files, downloaded from Linn.  Tracks from Jon Strong (Folk Rock), Charles Webster (electronica) from CD and Ian Shaw (Jazz / Rock?) and some piano stuff and female vocal jazz from the Linn sampler downloads.  An Ian Shaw track (A Case of You) I have from Linn in both 24 bit 48kHz and 24 bit 96 kHz formats.  Everything streams fine over the Ethernet over Mains with no dropouts and no obvious artefacts.

So, bearing in mind that its now nearly midnight, listening was not extended and these are very much initial thoughts.  At least I could use a decent volume as the kids were fast asleep and it takes a lot to wake them!  I didn't make direct comparisons with the CD player due to time limitations so observations are from memory of how the CD player sounds and I will report back when I can make actual comparisons - I'll be able to compare CDs against rips of those CDs and CD against downloaded higher res files.  But for now, it seems to me that the SB Touch has very good resolution of detail and has reasonable timing.  However, whilst pretty much all the info is there, it all feels a bit "polite" or "restrained" with tracks lacking some attack and Jon Strong's aggressive acoustic guitar playing (he's from Leeds and is singing about what Thatcher did to the North East so, as you can imagine, this track shouldn't be polite, and isn't on my CD player and definitely isn't when he's playing live with a couple of pints inside!) isn't as meaningful as it should be.  On the female vocal jazz this isn't really an issue as its politely presenting very polite music.  The electronica dance tracks were also restrained and less likely to get your foot tapping, but again the detail is there.

I guess you might remember the "inky blackness" of silence between instruments when moving from vinyl to CD?  Well this device takes that one step further - the lack of noise is stunning and is something I noticed on the Linn DS devices.  I think some might call this dryness or sterility, but I would disagree - it just makes the actual music stand out more.  Also, I noticed that the SB Touch is actually capable of demonstrating the difference between the 24/48 file and 24/96 file of the same Ian Shaw track - very impressive.

Internet radio works - I guess it'll be very sample rate dependent as DAB is.  Favourites are going to be essential here as the choice is a bit overwhelming and could be a few evenings work in itsself - hopefully its possible to manage this through the SqueezeCenter software rather than just through the Touch as the interface isn't good enough to be able to work through the full gamut (sorry Alan) of choice.  There are apps to install too, one of which allows podcast listening so that'll be the first one I give a try.

So a pretty good start.  A more direct comparison will need to be done against the CD player.  However, here's the killer point - the SB Touch was £208 including P&P and the CD player cost £1700 about 10 years ago.  Even at this early stage, I don't think I'd want to swap the CD player for the Touch, but if you were starting from scratch...

If this is the basic level, then the likes of the Cambridge NP30 and stuff coming soon from Cyrus, Arcam et al looks very promising indeed.  Perhaps I don't have to save up for that Linn Akurate DS after all?

Back to the Software

And so the above was all done listening through the Windows SqueezeCenter on the laptop.  However, the NAS version did get up and running, pointed it to the correct folder on the NAS, closed down the Windows SqueezeCenter and started up the NAS version.  SB Touch did find it, but I had to use the "change folder" option on the Touch to point to the new SqueezeCenter instance.  Everything then works well and I did a quick listen to make sure it was working.  Wonder if there's a difference in sound between the NAS and Windows versions???