The Birdland is extraordinarily musical, not laid back. It exhibits none of the traits I listed above, nor have we found a piece of music that will trip it up- to make it lose focus, add grain, stilt the dynamics, harden up. It is one of the very few processors with the resolution (including all the way through its volume control and output stage) to resolve the encoding-process "hiss" around each note, resolved to the point you can hear that as noise and the original signal apart from that. Analog tape does this too- adding a sideband modulation noise. Direct disc vinyl does not.
No matter, the Birdland may not be the best for a given system. But that would be because of something else in the system, imo. The next weakest link, in my experience, is often the first pair of interconnects.
The Birdland does respond to Black Diamond cones. I think Anthony Perrotta Consulting is a dealer (disclaimer- he is a GMA dealer). Takes about 3weeks on repeat to totally burn in- using complicated music like Squirrel Nut Zippers. Takes 3 days to fully warm up.
Gilles at Birdland told me once, that in his experience, much of the sonic difference in CD transports is from the different ways they implement (and how much/how often) their error correction- done before the signal is ever sent out to the DAC.
I too have heard great things about the Bel Canto. Good guys too. I am posting our current reference system below, so that may tell you more about why we dig music through the Birdland. I am sure we would enjoy the Bel Canto. Anyone have experience with the Electrocompaniet? Or the Audio Note (which Audio Note firm?).
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I have to agree. The Bird is an exceptional DAC. At least in the systems I auditioned it in. I am not carrying it at the moment as I want to wait for the newest version to be released. Turnaround times on these has been a bit long for me.
I have compared it to only a few other DACs (I was never much of an external DAC fan) with the Audio Note DAC-ONE being one of them which I still use in one of our test systems with the CDT-ONE transport. I wil not say one is better than the other as this would depend greatly on personal taste. I will say they are exceptionally different than one another.
The Birdland is very precise and can be used as a preamp depending on your system requirements.
The Audio Note DAC is a bit smoother being a tube unit but not as versitile.
Which one do I prefer? I won't even say as it is subjective. I wil say that both are worth auditioning but finding an Audio Note may be difficult shortly as the ZERO line is being discontinued.
