This past weekend I visited a friend in Des Moines, Iowa who has a completely different high end audio system I wanted to hear with very different source material then I normally use.
His system consists of first of all with a huge Otari MX5050 15" per second two track open reel tape machine and Tape Project music tapes. He feeds the heads of the tape machine into a DeHavilland 222 tape head preamp which also has moving coil phono circuits. He also has highly reworked Linn LP12 turntable with external regulated power supplies and a DC motor. The tonearm is an Origin Live with a ZU MC cartridge.
These feed into a DeHavilland UltraVerve vacuum tube preamplifier and on to a Sanders digital electronic crossover which feeds a Sanders amplifier for the bass sections of his Sanders 10C electrostatic speakers. The electrostatic panels are driven by a hybrid power amplifier of his own design.
He had three interesting things I wanted to hear.
First, his system itself, which is VERY transparent and neutral with the limitation that it is set up as a close field configuration and there is room for only one listener in the "sweet spot." Fortunately, I got the sweet spot during the listening time.
Second, I wanted to hear how well our new Vision phono preamplifier would fare in a really revealing system outside of my own. I brought down my moving coil version set with 100 ohm load resistors as his MC cartridge is a Denon derivative.
Third, aside from the VERY expensive and pretty tedious to use near master tape quality of his open reel tape playback, my friend also was starting to invest in DSD playback. He was using the very inexpensive Schitt Loki DSD DAC ($150) and had a wide variety of new DSD source material.
Short story, the tape playback wins. Amazingly transparent and pure and no obvious flaws, other than I was not enthused about the bass transparency and definition of his system. Better than my own home system? I am not so sure about that. It is a completely different setup into a completely different kind of room. It was great if you were in the sweet spot, but its a one person system for sure. Tape playback disadvantage, you just can't change tunes easily. Thread the tape, rewind it, and then play it through to the end and store it in the played condition. Never tightly rewind before storing. Pain in the ass complication in my opinion.
On to my phono preamp installed in his system after listening to his own setup. I was really happy to hear that our inexpensive Vision phono preamp kept up to his very expensive setup just fine. I actually liked mine better, it had more dynamics and energy content. His was milder but a bit whimpy I thought. My friend liked his own setup best but admitted mine was a competitive unit musically.
Finally DSD playback using the Schitt DAC. Well, this sounded very nice indeed, certainly something worth exploring further. My friend helped me set up J River playback software on my Mac, loaded me up with a bunch of source material, and sent me home with his DSD DAC. I am not positive why DSD playback is so nice. I suspect that much of it is because the source material has had less mixing and cadiddling done to it. Simply better production values than with stuff normally stuffed on a CD. I do know that a lot of old great music will soon be available in DSD format at rational prices and terabyte hard drives are cheap now. I am enjoying playing DSD stuff here right now.
It was an interesting trip, great visit, 500 trouble free miles driven below zero, and more music and sources to consider in the future.
A fun and educational day.
Frank Van Alstine
