[mgalusha]

We had a small listening session today and I want to thank Wayne from Bolder Cable and Mike from Tweekgeek for bringing over some cool gear. It was great to hear the new goodies and today was very enjoyable and much was learned.

Today was primarily to try different sources but Mike also brought along a pair of the new Mark & Daniel speakers. 

We had the following to listen to and enjoy:

Slim Devices Transporter with Black Gate caps on the output stage and silver slipstream Bybees on the single ended outputs.
Altmann Attraction non oversampling DAC with supplied digital cable.
Burson Buffer
Monica II non oversampling DAC
Bolder Cable 12V power supply to try with the Monica and Altmann DACs.
Harmonic Tech cyberlight digital cable
Wayne's personal modded SB2 as mine doesn't have the digital mods.
Mark & Daniel Maximus Monitor speakers

My system normally consists of a very modded SB2 and power supply feeding a Marchand XM-44 active crossover which drives a pair of RE Designs LNPA amplifiers for the mids/tweeters and a Rotel 1080 feeding the woofers. I have an analog rig but it wasn't used today. IC's are homebrew using Neotech silver cable. Speaker cables are Analysis Plus Oval 9 for the mids/tweeters and some 10GA twisted pair for the woofers. Speakers are Meadowlark Blue Heron 2's which have been modified to active amplification.

I have the Altmann DAC courtesy of miklorsmith as part of his Altmann demo tour. Big thanks to Mike and I will be writing up full thoughts on the Altmann after I've listened to it for a week.

We tried various combinations to see what sounded the best to our ears and the biggest surprise of the day was the Burson Buffer. It's the only device I've installed between a modified SB and the amps that has actually resulted in an improvement. If you have a modded Squeezebox and don't have enough gain this is almost a must have. Stunningly good. We also tried the Burson after the Transporter and the Altmann and observed similar results with both of those. Adding the Burson made a significant improvement to both sources.

One of the other interesting opportunities today was to try the Altmann with a high end linear power supply in place of the battery. IMO and I believe the others opinions Wayne's linear supply took the Altmann to a different level with better dynamics, tighter bass and more low level detail and ambiance. We also tried the Altmann with a couple of different digital cables and with the JISCO jitter reduction circuit engaged the differences between the supplied cable and one of Wayne's cables (no idea which model) was minimal, with the JISCO turned off the was a very noticeable difference between the two cables, so it's certainly doing it's job. We swapped in the Harmonic Tech cyberlight digital and that offered a surprising improvement and actually sounded best with the JISCO circuit disabled. One other thing we did with the Altmann was to add a small capacitor bank in parallel to the battery, which will reduce the power supply impedance and improve the response time as the caps can discharge quicker than a battery. This made a nice improvement, while not quite a nice as the linear supply it was quite a bit better than the battery alone and would be a low cost improvement to the Altmann users using a battery supply.

We then put the Mark & Daniel speakers in. These are small stand mount monitors with what looks like a 6" woofer and a Heil air motion transformer for a tweeter. It took a bit of adjustment to get them positioned correctly but all of a sudden they snapped into focus I have to say these are some very nice speakers. The cabinets are made of some type of synthetic marble or something similar and were very dead. I'm sure the lack of cabinet resonance contributed to the fine sound from these speakers. Only when playing a large orchestral piece at high volume did they show any strain and it may have been my amps running out of steam, we were pushing them as hard as possible. A little more power may have let them perform even better but a 75/150 watt amp drove them very nicely.

Again, thanks to Mike and Wayne for bringing over some cool toys. If you have a chance to audition the Mark & Daniel speakers you should take advantage of it, very nice. If you have a modded Squeezebox and need more gain (and you can easily add a phase switch) the Burson Buffer is a very nice option.

Mike

[miklorsmith]

Nice writeup - glad the weather cooperated!

Very interesting about the power supply.  It makes me wonder how much I'm cheating the experience by not shipping the Red Top car battery with the DAC.  Charles says that's the only battery he's used, so he can't comment on the differences between his recommendation and other SLAs.  I haven't used it with a car battery either.

[lonewolfny42]

Thanks for the comments.....sounds like an enjoyable session !
As for the Mark & Daniel Maximus.....here's a 6moons review......
Seems they do crave power...but some cool looking speakers....as is their Ruby model.....
And photo's ? Thanks again.....

                                  Chris

[brj]

Great writeup, Mike, and kudos to miklorsmith for shipping his Altmann around the country!

It looks like you went through some interesting comparisons, both in terms of battery vs. clean AC and some jitter related experiments.  (That, and your comments remind me how much I'm looking forward to the day that I can take my system fully active.)

Nice work!

By the way, was the Neotech silver cable you mention using for ICs of the the 6 nines pure Ohno continuous cast variety?

[mgalusha]

By the way, was the Neotech silver cable you mention using for ICs of the the 6 nines pure Ohno continuous cast variety?

Yes it is. A while back I was made a gift of a partial spool of this and it's very nice wire. The wire is a shielded twisted pair and as an experiment I decided to not connect the shield to either plug and instead ran a pigtail from it to a small box containing an inductor, on end going to ground and the other to the pigtails. My thought was that the inductor might remove some of the noise present in my household ground. The certainly work well in my system and it's very quiet. I have a well treated listening room and the only noise from the system is a very faint hiss if you press your ear against the tweeter and it will make that even if nothing is connected to the amps.

I know you're moving to Denver so hopefully you can make one of our small sessions. Mike mentioned he wants to have some folks over in the not too distant future. I know he's hoping to get a pair of the floor standing Mark & Daniel speakers in as well.

mike

[mgalusha]

Nice writeup - glad the weather cooperated!

Very interesting about the power supply.  It makes me wonder how much I'm cheating the experience by not shipping the Red Top car battery with the DAC.  Charles says that's the only battery he's used, so he can't comment on the differences between his recommendation and other SLAs.  I haven't used it with a car battery either.

Thanks Mike.

I tried two different batteries, the SLA that Wayne brought along and the battery from my garden tractor, which is a standard lead/acid battery like a car battery. They sounded very similar and I didn't really get a sense that one was better than the other but I wasn't really trying to either.

Mike

[Wayne1]

A great deal of thanks go out to Mike Galusha and his wife Mary for hosting this small get together. More thanks go to Mike Smith for sending out the Altmann for audition. Thanks to a third Mike, Mike Garner of TweekGeek for bringing over the Mark & Daniels speakers. These are VERY special!!. I highly suggest that anyone who can audition these speakers.

mgalusha covered all the broad topics of the listening sessions in his first post. I will get into some details. First, I do want to state that I am a dealer and the manufacturer of some of some of the products under discussion. My thoughts and viewpoints are therefore biased.
I will try to keep my comments factual and report on what we heard, however my personal bias about certain things will certainly come into play and may irritate some parties.

I was the first to arrive. mgalusha moved out onto the eastern plains some time ago. His new house has lots of room, open space between him and his neighbors and he can see the stars at night without having them washed out by the city lights. He is also close to fifty miles east of where I live. I think it took Mike Garner close to an hour and a half to get there.

mgalusha has changed his system a bit since the last time I was over. He is now actively bi-amping his $14,000.00 a pair Meadowlark Blue Heron 2s. He has a Rotel power amp running direct to his woofers voice coils. No passive crossover parts in the way. He is using a much modified Marchand XM-44 active electronic crossover before it. The amps driving the mids and tweeters are REI Designs LNPA.

The room is very well treated with products from GIK Acoustics. When I first arrived, mgalusha was running the output of the Altmann DAC into a tube buffer/preamp he recently built. He was contemplating using that, as it had an analog volume control built into it, to match levels to even the playing field between the different products. Unfortunately, it also made it's presence felt in terms of the sonic signature. It simply wasn't as clean as the Altmann or SB direct into the crossover. The Marchand does have level controls on the front panel, so it was fairly easy to adjust the controls for the 6db difference in gain between the DAC and the modded SB for comparisons. The tube buffers was removed from the system and all the rest of the afternoon the outputs of the components were run into the crossover or direct to the amps.

mgalusha pulled the 12VDC battery from his lawn tractor to first listen to the Altmann DAC. When he invited me over, I mentioned I had a couple of 12 VDC 5Ah SLA batteries. I offered to bring them over for ease of comparisons. I charged both batteries overnight, tested then with a Monica 2 DAC I had and then topped them up before heading out east.

I also put together some cables that I thought would help in making comparisons of power supplies to the DAC. I assembled a cable with push on connectors that would fit on the SLA battery's terminals, this went to a male XLR connector. This is the same connector I used for DC output when I built my prototype 12 VDC power supply. I put together another cable with a female XLR that could be used to connect to the SLA battery or the AC powered supply. The end of that cable was made with alligator clips. This was what mgalusha suggested as the cable to the Altmann was terminated with ring terminals. After think about this, and some rooting about in my parts bins, I came up with a pair of Vampire binding posts. These do not keep the nut captive on the posts, so the ring terminals can be tightly fastened down to the posts. I installed a pair of banana plugs on the ends of the DC wires to the Monica 2 board. I also found some slip on connectors and ring terminal that would fit on the binding posts to allow me to add a capacitor bank to the DC input to the DACs.

(Digression #1: Some time ago I was working with battery powered Tripath amps. To my ears, the sound improved quite a bit when some capacitance was added after the battery, before the line reached the board. As magusha points out in the first post this reduces the impedance of the power supply and improved the power delivery speed. The cap bank was made of various values and types of caps. The overall value came to something around 13,000 mfd with some film caps added as final bypass.)

I also brought over a prototype 12 volt supply I made some time ago. (Digression 1.5 :This was an experiment to see if a very good AC based supply would sound better than battery supply when used with the Harmonic Technology CyberLight interconnect cables http://www.harmonictech.com/products/cyberlight_p2a.html . TweekGeek brought a pair of the analog interconnects over to a previous listening session and I was quite amazed at how good they sounded. After looking the cables and power supply over, I though I might be able to make them sound even better if I used the same design of a power supply as I used in the Ultimate PS for the SB. I finally built one and tried it out. It was quite a startling improvement. Anyway, the prototype was what I brought over to compare with battery power for the Altmann and Monica 2.) I also brought over my personal CyberLight 1.5 meter digital DataLink and an XLR "Y" cable so I could power both the CyberLink and the DAC from a single supply, either battery or AC.

mgalusha and I listened to the Altmann for an hour or so off of the tractor battery and compared it to his highly modded SB2 powered off of his version of the Ultimate PS MKII. We played around with firmware and polarity of speaker cables for a bit until we could easily switch between the sources without having to swap speaker cables about. We had a bit to eat for a light lunch and then TweekGeek finally arrived.

The three of us sat down to try to compare all the variations of power supplies, cables, sources etc. First up was the Altmann. It was listened to running off the SLA battery with the digital cable that came with it. The cable appeared to be an Alphacore RG-59/U 75 ohm coax with an RCA connector on one end and a BNC on the other with a BNC to RCA adapter in place. The sound was very smooth with a slightly recessed high end. We compared this to mgalusha's modded SB2 and preferred the SB. It was more extended on both highs and lows. More dynamic and provided a deeper and wider soundstage. It was easier to hear the "air and space" around the performer.

We then switched the power supply to the Altmann to the AC. We also changed out the digital cable to one offered by BOLDER Cable. It had the Silver WBT RCA connectors on it. For comparison sake, it retails for around $200.00. There was quite a change in the sound of the Altmann running off the AC supply. The highs came clear and the soundstage and depth improved. To determine what had the bigger effect, we changed back to the stock digital cable. With the JISCO circuit off, it was very easy to tell the difference between the two digital cables. The BOLDER sounded clearer with more detail and dynaimcs. With the JISCO on, the difference was VERY subtle. I could tel the cable was different but it was not really THAT different. The JISCO circuit does reduce the difference between digital cables at this level.

(End of Part One)

[Wayne1]

(Part Two)

When we install the CyberLight Digital cable, things were quite different. With the JISCO on, the sound became very steely and hard. With the JISCO off, the sound was clear and clean. I have no idea why this happened, but using the $1000.00 CyberLink powered by an $800.00 AC power supply, the Jisco was not needed. The sound was very dynamic and extended. We switched back to the SLA battery at this point to power both the digital cable and DAC and the soundstage collapsed to just coming from the speakers and the highs were sounding "rolled off". Dynamics were also reduced. I then added the cap bank to this. Dynamics were somewhat restored, Highs were coming back as were lows. The extra speed of the discharge cycle improved the sound across the board.

We then hooked up the Monica 2 DAC. We tried this first from battery and then onto AC. We kept the CyberLink as the digital cable. The differences we heard with the Altmann were the same with the Monica. We all preferred the sound of the DAC running off the prototype 12 volt Ultimate PS rather than battery. The Monica 2 DAC had a very similar sound to the Altmann when powered by AC. It does not have the JISCO or the variable inputs or sample rates. All in all a good, nice sounding DAC for the money.

At this time TweekGeek brought out a new pair of speakers he had just received. These are a relatively small pair of two ways called the Mark and Daniels Maximus Monitor. They are quite unique looking. The cabinet is roughly 14" H x 8.5" W x 11" D and made from white compound marble. TweekGeek told us that the material is synthetic, similar to Corian. The cabinet does have an interior box made of MDF. The tweeter is based on the old Heil AMT ribbon driver, but goes down to 800 Hz. TweekGeek brought over some stands and mgalusha rearranged his system a bit to drive the M&D speakers fullrange from his LNPA amps. The M&D speakers are rated 85 db efficient. mgalusha's Meadowlarks are 91db. The LNPA is rated at 75 wPC into 8 ohm and 150 into 4. The M&D are 4 ohm.

The sound when we first hooked up the M&Ds was very impresive. I do not believe I have heard such deep bass played so cleanly from a speaker of this size before. It does use a ribbon driver so placement is fairly important. We made a few minor adjustments of toe-in and then
the image snapped into place. VERY extended highs and natural mids. Voices were wonderful. The Fairfield Four were spread out on stage in perfect position. This is a very neutral speaker that does extremely well for all but the last octave. When playing Grandma's Hands there is a low frequency sound of foot tapping that was just not present through the small speakers. It could also use a bit more power. As mgalusha mentioned, on large scale symphonic material the amp kinda ran out of steam.

I do look forward to another chance to hear these speakers again. With the M&Ds powered by a pair of Stratos Extreme Monos or a VanAlstine FetValve 550, I think they would be fantastic. As it is, I highly suggest that anyone who might be interested in a "smaller" speaker arrange for an audition of these.

Back to source components. Prior to hooking up the M&D speakers, we put the Burson Buffer into the system. (Digression 2: I had purchased this buffer a couple of months ago to try it out. I paid full retail and shipping charges for it. When I received it, I was a bit disappointed in the casework. The back around the IEC looked like it had been taped over. There was also some lettering on it that seemed to indicate that part of the case work was originally from another project. This didn't matter too much to me if it sounded really good. I put it in my office system to try it out. To me, it seemed to improve the low end and dynamics but with a bit of a loss of high end detail. I sent it off to Canada for the Torornto Amp Comparo. Denny reported that it worked for a bit then died. I received it back, hooked it up, and it sounded the same. I lent it to mgalusha to try out and he reported the same problem as Denny. As mgalusa is serious into the building and DIY aspect of our hobby, he asked if it was okay if he took a close look at things. I said sure. He found out that one of the modules had a bit of a problem. It was sucking most of the current of the power supply into something resembling a short. He removed the module and the power supply came up to the correct amount. I happened to have another pair of modules on hand for another project, so I mailed them to him. He tested the new modules, found that they had different gain amounts and finally, out of the four modules, put together a pair that matched and had the correct 6 db of gain.)

The Burson Buffer, when you get it working correctly, does NOT negatively impact the sound of any component it is hooked up to. It is a direct coupled circuit. No capacitors in the signal path and it is all discrete transistors. No op-amps. The power supply is also discrete. No three terminal regulators. It is transparent to the highs, when all it right with it. Up to this point in our listening, mgalusha's modded SB2 run off the Ultimate PS was the unit we preferred to listen to. When we installed the Burson Buffer between the SB and the amp, THE SOUND GOT BETTER!!. The Burson Buffer adds 6 db of gain and it also helps to eliminate impedance and capacitive mismatches. mgaslusha's amp and SB interface is fine as far as impedance goes,but the capacitance is a bit on the high side. I am not sure if that was what the Burson Buffer "solved" but with the Buffer in place, the sound was even more dynamic, quieter, and deeper. In short, it improved just about everything. I have never heard ANY product that made this sort of difference across the board.

We also tried it on the output of the Altmann. Same result. This was pretty amazing.

Quite awhile ago, TweekGeek bought a Transporter. He did not care for the sound of it in stock form so he started modding it himself. He replaced all the caps in the analog output circuit with "N" series BlackGates. He added a pair of Silver Bybee Purifiers to the output section and replace the connectors with WBT NextGen. He started on some of the power supply and then there was a "pop" and unit was dead. He gave the Transporter to me to take a look at, but at the time I wa very busy trying to catch up on mods and other projects. I asked mgalusha if he had time to look it over. Being the very kind person he is, he agreed. After quite a bit of trouble shooting, he traced it down to a broken switching power supply. This powers the display and won't allow the unit to power on if it is not working. I was ordering form digi-key last week so I ordered a new one for TweekGeeks unit. It arrived, mgalusha installed it. The transporter was revived. mgalusha ran it for quite some time into a load to help break in all the caps. We put this heavily modded Transporter into the system and were very disappointed with the sound. It still have "lifeless" quality to it. It did not have to dynamics or lower midrange or upper bass "tone" of fullness that the modded SB or the NOS DACs had that we had been listening to. TweekGeek suggested that we try the analog out of his Transporter into the Buffer. It SOUNDED BETTER. The low end dynamics came back. It had a "boogie factor" to it!

The final listening was hooking up my personal modded SB2, which has a modded digital section in it with a Silver Bybee in the digital signal path and a Silver WBT NextGen connector. We ran that into the Altmann with all the other goodies. There was additional improvement of the sound over that of the non-modded digital output from mgalusha's unit.

The bottom line(s) of this long, rambling post is that, to me, a very highly BOLDER modded, analog output SB sounds better than the same unit feeding a very high quality outboard DAC.

A very well designed (expensive) AC to DC power supply sounds better, to me, than a SLA battery supplying power to an outboard DAC.

The Burson Buffer improves to sound of everything we tried it with!

The Mark & Daniels speakers are quite special. I really do suggest you try to get the chance to listen to them if you use an amp with over 200 WPC into 4 ohms.

In the interest of additional disclosure. I AM trying to become a distributer for the Burson products for the US. I was impressed enough with the sound of the product in my system when it was not working at it's full capability to start these discussions. After yesterday's session, I intend to pursue this with greater passion. I will post more information when I have it in the BOLDER Forum.

[denjo]

Thanks guys for some very interesting insights!

"A very well designed (expensive) AC to DC power supply sounds better, to me, than a SLA battery supplying power to an outboard DAC."

This confirms my earlier belief that a good PSU should sound as good if not better than a SLA.

Best regards
Dennis

[miklorsmith]

It doesn't *prove* anything, actually.

However, nice job too Wayne.  You guys really went above and beyond any expectations I had - super job.   

[denjo]

There is a difference between prove and confirm! I used the word "confirm" and not "prove". The operative part is "my belief"!

[Russell Dawkins]

(Digression #1: Some time ago I was working with battery powered Tripath amps. To my ears, the sound improved quite a bit when some capacitance was added after the battery, before the line reached the board. As magusha points out in the first post this reduces the impedance of the power supply and improved the power delivery speed. The cap bank was made of various values and types of caps. The overall value came to something around 13,000 mfd with some film caps added as final bypass.)

I find this quite interesting. Some years ago I read about putting caps across the output of a NiCad to short out the HF noise that NiCads produce along with the power. In fact I did this when I converted a mic preamp to battery power with 4-9V rechargeables. Looking a little deeper into this revealed that all batteries, rechargeable and otherwise, have a noise signature that rides on top of the DC. Of course up to that point I had always assumed that one of the advantages of battery power was the pristine, perfectly flat DC.

I wonder to what extent the advantage you are hearing with the cap bypass is due to the reduced impedence vs the presumed elimination of this HF hash.

[Double Ugly]

It doesn't *prove* anything, actually.

I'm a convert, because experience has "prove(n)" to me that a good PSU does sound better than a battery.  I paid the price (equipment) to learn the lesson, and will remain convinced until someone or something proves otherwise in my system. 

A prospect I'm not averse to, BTW ...

[miklorsmith]

DU, correct me if I'm wrong - your experience was between A battery powered device and a similar device powered by quality AC, correct?  The recent comparison was also extremely limited in scope.  Drawing a sweeping conclusion related to one power source's superiority over the other is far beyond the reach of these experiences.  Add in human variability, and . . .

Lessloss produces a DAC which uses battery power AND AC.  Why?  They say filtered AC is better at digital processing and that batteries are better with analog output functions.  They choose this approach for pure sonics, and I doubt anyone would claim this would be done to cut costs.

Without disputing the results of the listening session (I can't, as I wasn't there), it is possible that other types of devices or simply other devices of the same type could benefit of one power source over the other.  It is similarly possible that 5 people in the same room could disagree over the results of this or any comparison.

I'm not trying to dictate answers here, for all I know AC is universally better all the time for everybody.  I just want to clarify "for the record" that the opinions expressed here should not be interpreted beyond their originating context.

[zybar]

  I just want to clarify "for the record" that the opinions expressed here should not be interpreted beyond their originating context.

Couldn't this phrase be applied to almost everything posted here at AC?   aa aa

George

[brj]

Just out of curiosity, could the Burson Buffer be converted for use as a headphone amp?

[miklorsmith]

Couldn't this phrase be applied to almost everything posted here at AC?

Dammit, yes.  Ironic isn't it, that we've chosen a hobby where the concept of absolute truth is obsessively pursued yet maddeningly impossible to obtain.

[mgalusha]

Just out of curiosity, could the Burson Buffer be converted for use as a headphone amp?

Hmmm.. maybe. It has a very low output impedance, I measured 48 ohms @ 1KHz, so it might drive headphones fairly well. It certainly can swing enough voltage but I don't know about the current. Maybe we can convince Wayne to give it a try. We know he's got loads of spare time...  aa

[Wayne1]

The Burson Buffer I own will be going out "on tour" to selected modded SB owners.

"When" I get it back, I may experiment with it. Hopefully I will be getting parts from Burson to build some here in the US.

Here are a few pictures I took over at mgalusha's.

Quite honestly, after the Buffer was put in the system and TweekGeeks little speakers were playing, I kinda lost interest in picture taking. It was far more enjoyable to just listen to music.

This is the SB2 playing direct into the Marchand x-over. The Altmann is hooked up to mgalusha's lawn tractor battery and the "stock digital cable is in place.



Here is the Altmann with the CyberLink digital cable.



Here is my "prototype" 12 VDC PS feeding voltage to the Altmann and the CyberLink. You can see the Rotel amp used for mgalusha's woofers and the LNPAs used for the mids and tweets.



This is the "nude" Monica 2 DAC sitting on top of an Ebony puck



Here is the cable  and connectors I put together for the DC power to the Altmann and Monica 2 The mess covered in heatshrink on the right side is the "Energy Storage Device" or cap bank 

[TomS]

Thank you all for taking the time to share your impressions in such great detail.

...so is the water bottle in the picture to put the fire out??  Lot's of opportunities to mix your AC's and your DC's there with batteries and all