No smoke without fire?

There is no smoke without fire....

I refer to the pervasive discussion on many forums and in hi fi publications about the importance of the digital transport in achieving musical satisfaction; in particular, since digital audio carries the stigma of being musically (if not technically) inferior to analogue, any solution that claims to improve the basic musicality of a digital audio system despite the old adage ‘bits is bits’ must be worthy of investigation.

A few years ago, I found little worthwhile difference between transports. I owned a dCS Elgar which seemed able to make all CD spinners sound pretty much the same. The insertion of a dCS Purcell upsampler, in the days when upsampling was a new art form, further narrowed any perceived gap between various CD players above, say, the most basic with plastic trays and bargain prices.

In short, using an inexpensive Trichord Genesis (rebadged upside-down Pioneer player) as transport was noticeably inferior to a Pioneer DV717 DVD player I still have tucked away somewhere, but any other device I tried just sounded like the Pioneer, which carried the twin advantages of being cheaper than other tried 'audiophile' spinners, and able to play 24/96 DAD and stream 24-bit 96KHz output down the SPDIF cable. I concluded that pretty much ‘good enough’ is all you need for digital data delivery to the DAC.

Since then, I have learned.

For a start I learned to listen with my ears and sold the Purcell/Elgar combination on the basis that it was dull and boring, despite the many plaudits in the hi fi press that had convinced me to buy it.

Subsequently, every time I hear dCS converters in demo, I hear the same traits; fine resolution, space and overall capability, but something slightly flat and unmusical overall. On the positive side, dCS being as good at digital engineering as they plainly were, and first to market with technologies such as Ring DAC and upsampling, they knew how to compensate for and make the SPDIF input work well provided the quality of provided data was above some electronic threshold of capability to be able to lock on. Thus a ‘good enough’ transport seemed OK at the time and spending more mere profilgacy.

Now, it has been proven to me that the digital transport can make a significant difference. The subtle point being that the difference may not be obvious, but, once noticed, never forgotten. A bit like the irritating drum machine on Chris Rea’s “Road to Hell” album, unlistenable once I realised every track starts the same ticking after five seconds of silence.

Back in the days before I was educated, I probably wasn’t as sensitive then as I am now to the sense of musical timing and cohesion that a good transport can provide, over the pure hi fi attributes of spaciousness, bass depth and so on and so forth. My reticence was twofold:

1. A reluctance to admit I didn’t know what I was talking about and listening to, combined with equipment angst (having spent so much without achieving my goals)
2. Cynicism when the proffered solutions are, in most cases it seems to me, massively over engineered and overpriced, combining an analogue engineering approach (weight, metalwork, belt drive, even valves) to delivering an electrical and entirely digital signal down an SPDIF cable to your DAC. As a previous victim of marketing excess, I am now very, very reluctant to believe spending upwards of £10k extracting bits from spinning disc is worthwhile when a similar, but lighter and uglier, disc-spinner with SPDIF output can be had for £30 at Tesco and it has been proven by many that the data extracted by both is bit perfect.

And yet… I have heard a difference, albeit not with the CEC or Audio Note or Esoteric or Levinson or other high end devices punted at the stupidly wealthy or audiophile obsessive. I would like to hear them but will never make a serious attempt to buy one because it would grate.

Plainly, there is more going on that just getting data from a disc in a reliable form. I have yet to mention the j-word, but that combined with some other electrical attributes must be the cause.

Further, I am convinced at the validity of computer audio and how this can only be of benefit to the Gentleman Audiophile. For a disc to provide bits, or a hard drive, or a stream of data from memory, can only be the same outcome of data delivered to the DAC; but the computer provides a richer experience

Let me sideline for a while, Ronnie Corbett-like, into another scene-setting tale.

Five years ago I bought a small sporty car, the Renaultsport Clio Trophy, and invested in an iPod-connection-capable Pioneer head unit that zoomed out of the dash and became a Europe-wide Sat Nav. Enacting my Corbett-like segue even further, let me state that I was once again suckered by the press with this car, the plaudits heaped on it being many and mighty and the expectations therefore high; the ultimate Hot Hatch. It was a limited edition, buy-one and not test-drive-one option and I was lured into a purchase on the basis of glowing reviews and the urge to buy a practical, but very fast and very interactive, sports car.

Sadly, it was a massive let down, for two reasons; primarily the engine, which felt gutless and entirely unlike a 2 litre 190bhp unit in a lightweight hatchback, and the gearbox, which was rubbery and fairly awful. After about 10k miles I had it chipped and wrought a noticeable improvement in torque, improving drivability significantly, but by then the damage had been done and I sold it feeling hard done by and determined to test drive every potential purchase first and use my own judgement well before those of the odd car reviewer who happened to have a fun day in Wales and wrote about it. Or indeed was presented with a chipped Clio by the manufacturer as a pukka car for serious testing, as if such a thing would every happen…..

Resuming back to digression 1, the Pioneer head unit was a good way to plug in an 80Gb iPod and have music accessible directly from the column stalk which is, I have to admit,  a well designed and appreciated addition to almost all Renaults. However, being an early bit of iPod integration software, it couldn’t understand such things as playlists, artists, genres and so on, and I ended up simply flicking from track to track in sequence and just flicking on if something emerged from the speakers which I didn’t like.

This was the genius moment that defined my approach to listening to music from then on. What I found was that I owned hundreds of CDs I almost never listened to, and many I listened to but only the tracks with which I was most familiar. I had a wealth of music at my fingertips and a lot of it was really, really good; not necessarily well recorded or even great material, but enjoyable, interesting and worth retrieving and listening to again.

At home, with racks and racks of CDs, my chances of finding that music again are slim, and of being able to easily and randomly access music with pleasure and without the effort of maintaining a physical catalogue of CDs is overwhelmingly attractive.

Hence computer audio is Go and I have a Macbook plugged into a DacMagic as a starter for 10 system next to my Lindemann for Serious Listening.

And so my segue back to my point about digital audio. The problem is: computers, for some reason, are demonstrably less good at playing music EVEN THOUGH the digits themselves are perfectly ripped and perfectly transmitted to the DAC.

I will cite two examples. #1 is a fellow Gentleman Audiophile with Tron and Audio Note equipment. We switched from his Macbook and an optical connection and either Decibel in memory play mode (worse on his system) or just iTunes to a dedicated Audio Note CD transport for the same music. Whilst the AN transport is, unfortunately, designed to spit out a rattling drawer and ‘glitches’ the signal to the DAC every time someone flicks a light switch in his listening room, it is clearly superior to the Mac sonically. Shame about the build quality, but hurrah for the sound.

Separately, in another GA’s system with multiple DACs on test, including Weiss DAC2 and Naim DAC+XPS, using iTunes and Pure Music or Amarra in memory play mode via firewire and the Weiss… not as good as a Denon Blu-Ray player with its’ long load times.

So, what are the attributes that make the CD spinners ‘better’ in these cases?

1. Musicality. I will post separately on my feelings about this as an attribute because it can be conceived as a cop out. For me, the word ‘Musicality’ is a bucket used to describe the multiple attributes of reproduction that combine to make a system either sound enjoyable, or just make noise. It’s a bucket for those, like myself, who sometimes lack the skill and vocabulary to identify and describe what’s not there; or, who prefer not to get dragged down into the minutiae of the audiophile’s vocabulary.
2. Hardness and glassiness – an increase in the sense that electronics were involved in the reproduction of the music – worse on optical than coaxial connection
3. Coherence – music is in sync with itself, in phase or in rhythm – I’m using words that may mean something in another context like ‘phase’ to try and capture the sense that a well-rehearsed band is ‘tight’ and music flows from each performer whilst making an overall tune that hangs together beautifully, versus a bunch of unrehearsed amateurs that just bash away with enthusiasm and leave your ears feeling battered.

There is no smoke without fire. It is clearly possible to do better, and clearly that means there is an engineering solution waiting for the computer audio providers to develop, if it hasn’t been done already. It’s my task to separate the hype of the megabucks transports – which may, at some point, have had a place in the hi fi world, though I don’t believe it any longer – from the practical and affordable improvements that companies such as Audiophilleo and M2Tech and Wavelength and DIY-cum-manufacturers like Mr Lampizator may have wrought.

I say 'may' - it’s in the listening of course. I have the Audiophilleo now, and am running it in. Does it improve the Macbook to enable it to match or exceed the AN transport? Does it even improve my Macbook over the optical connection I use at the moment?

I am still testing so watch this space. This is a blog, after all.

What attracted me to the Audiophilleo was the technical description of the way the product works, enabling me to make a punt at having it shipped over from the States before having listened to it. There is a money-back guarantee, so I have to work fast!

That technical description covers the dreaded j-word ‘jitter’ – I say dreaded because it is such a tremendously abused marketing label applied to product after product – which is extremely low compared with other equivalent USB->SPDIF converters according to their analyses. It makes claims that seem to correlate technical performance with sonic impact, which plays to the areas I have been seeking. So it should be good, right? We will see; technical excellence is a good sign but no guarantee it will sound good.

Yet I am encouraged that the time has been taken to identify and address areas which might, possibly, contrive to make the SPDIF transmission ‘twixt Mac and DAC less than optimal. If the circuit that drives the connection is well designed, rejects noise, has a high slew rate or whatever, it ought to ‘just work’.

So it plays to something I have been hoping for; a product that looks at the engineering reasons why a pulse of digital information may sound better coming from (for example) a massive CEC transport designed to look like the underwater lair of the chief baddie in “The Spy Who Loved Me” rather than a simple Pioneer DV717, or indeed any other USB/SPDIF converter transcribing data spewed from a Macbooks hard drive. Since it all boils down to that interface, getting the interface right should really be the important part of the conversion..... shouldn't it? All that massive metalwork and considerable expense should be entirely avoidable.

I remain hopeful. The proof of the pudding is in the listening.