Originally Posted by
Nightbrace
Best diagnosing tool is the Stereophile test CD. Vinyl, unless PERFECT, can never sound as good as even a regular CD played on a player with a great D/A convertor. But as the Walgreens commercial says, we don't live anywhere near perfect. DAT tapes are neat, and were actually very good, but not as easy to work with.
If you've never heard a modded player with 24-bit/192KHZ DAC's you'll wonder why anyone bothers with LPs. A stand-alone player, like the NAD 5060 I use currently with the $9, yeah thats right, $9 Benchmark DAC-1.3's, to me is more than acceptable and has outperformed the few SACD players I have tried using normal 16-bit 44.1 KHz CD's on the NAD vs. the same recording on an SACD.
The way I fashion speakers (and complete systems) to sound good in a particular room, (as every room is entirely different), is I start off with the least detailed set-up and slowly work my way up. This is a very generalized approach, but for now, for me at least, it seems to get things done fairly well. I get the best speakers I can afford, and tweek things slowly (via the crossover, L-pads, pre-amp adjustments, till they sound the most detailed without being over bearing at around 95 Db.) This is a veryfine line, and once dialed in, its hard to explain, but they just sound "right".
However, bass response can sometimes be a problem when using this method. Thats why once I get them right, as far as detail, I usually recommend using a quality subwoofer like an HSU or Velodyne if you are unhappy with the bass performance. I sometimes, in very LIVE rooms, need to even get very warm sounding speakers like Advents or KLH's as as you guys probably know, JBL is tough to set-up in a live room for critical listening. Home Theater to me is nearly impossible to get right unless the room itself it properly dimensioned and conditioned, but with 2-channel nearly any room can sound good with a little patience.
)
Reply With Quote
CD-VERSUS -SACD
There is no way that a cd with the same recording that is on a sacd sounds better. I think that your nad player sounds very good, im sure that if you played the same cd on your nad and a cheap sacd player that the nad would win hands down. But we are talking about a far superior technology with the sacd versus cd. Similar to the same album on cassette versus cd, the cd sounds better every time. the max information you cas store on a cd is around 740 mb the same single layer sacd is 4.7 gb. The cd is being sampled at 44.1 khz. the sacd at 2.8224 mhz 64 times faster!!! The cutoff is around 22khz for cd. sacd is 110khz. the dynamic range for cd is 96 db. the dynamic range for sacd is 120db. I own A cheap pioneer combi player. I own the exact stevie ray vaughn cd and sacd albums. the sacd album wins hands down. IM not trying to pick a fight with you, But in my humble opinion there is no way that a cd of the same recording is ever going to sound better than the same sacd, no matter how nice the cd player is. REGARDS JIM
