hi ppl
I hope the SB3 will be a top notch source at least for another 2-3 years
I know and i am great believer that all high end sound rice or fall on the quality of its power source.
in fact i belief that line conditioning/pws mods should be the number 1 mods to begin with. Especially low jitter clocks benefits from a good source.
Pat did his S/PDIF output mod on the unit as described here:
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=45330.0and with a Felix before and after the stock
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=50284.0SW PWS it sounded already wonderful after 2 days of continuing playing also with Pats "special" digital inter connect. in fact so wonderful it could be compared with my heavily modded TEAC VRSD transport ( super clock and modded pws) although the transport was a bit more musical/organic but within 1 day i could not experience that difference anymore, only with A B comparing, but still..
But with Pat's mod and the Felixes I heard so much details like for instance the additions of "reverb" to voices, that i heard more than with the TEAC
I could hear in a way not to be missed, the artificiality of echo in a lot of pop music ( Leonard Cohen for instance) even sometimes to a point that it is way too much, but i had not heard that before. The SB3 in this state let you hear more than the original artists/recording engineer heard when making the CD, so they added more echo to make it sound right
I had some emails with Wayne. I wanted his digital mods anyway ( will never use the analogue's out) and because of these emails the mod came into question to bypass the inner voltage switching devices for the spdif chip and buffer and so on. meaning a dedicated out board 3.3V DC supply.
To make it short Wayne succeeded and i got an "try out" analogue Elpac with 2 DC outputs, 5.0V and 3.3V
How does it sound? I cannot tell you
I let it "break in" for 48 hours and when i listened to it i was almost killed.
Literally it sounded soo bad if i had to listen to it for instance in prison for 18 hrs a day and i could not escape that sound, i would be dead in 2 weeks. Aggressive, harsh 2dimensional. I panicked and emailed Wayne
I got a reassuring response:
"Kyrill,
The exaggerated highs is all the new power supply caps needing to break in. Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew
..
Give it a few weeks for all the BlackGates to break in. It sound worse in about a week. You will wonder why the hell you spent the money to send the SB over here.
Give it time. The harshness will mellow. You will get the "magic" back"
It is now 2 weeks later and the unit is on 24/7 ( from 4-6 weaks break in) and the sound is slowly getting better. It will not kill me anymore, but i need to wait more as well. The black Gates are really awful in needing so much time..
Do i miss something with the internet radio as Pat really urged me to remove the "space occupying" clock for 48 khz?
hm not really l i cannot have senders lower than 128 khz at least until now i have not seen them, which i really consider low fi anyway.
still figuring out which freqs are possible or notI will keep you posted
Kyrill