Listening Party Invite! Spectron, LampizatOr, Music Vault, CLS 9,s Raven Audio

disco · « **Reply #20 on:** 6 Nov 2011, 01:56 am »

Guy,

Bill and I had a great time at your house today. Both systems sounded excellent and everyone was great to talk to. I also got to see two guys I don't see very often and really enjoy talking to(Frank and Marvin) and see again some great folks I met at Lone Star Audio Fest(Dave and Gabriel). You and your lovely wife were very gracious and I hope to have you guys over to my new listening room soon

Scott

playntheblues · « **Reply #21 on:** 6 Nov 2011, 01:37 pm »

Thanks Scott, we had a great time, Frank was the last one to leave at about 12:30am. My wife took some great pictures of everyone, I will try to figure out how to post them here in a while.
Guy

saisunil · « **Reply #22 on:** 6 Nov 2011, 01:44 pm »

Hi

Would love to hear more about Black Diamond Music Vault and LampizatOr Level 5 DAC

I have always been curious about Black Diamond Music Vault ... what advantages does it have over other digital transports from user interface perspective and sound/musicality ...

Would like to hear about Lamp Level 5 performance - though outside my league ...

Thanks
Sunil.

lightguy · « **Reply #23 on:** 6 Nov 2011, 07:35 pm »

Thanks for the invite.
Nice set-up.

They say you can tell a speakers/systems quality by its reproduction of female vocals.
Black Lung by Kathy Mattae (?) was stellar.

marvda1 · « **Reply #24 on:** 6 Nov 2011, 09:16 pm »

Guy, had a great time. there are two kinds of audio meets, equipment and music and this was great music indeed. i kind of wanted to hear the spectrons vs. the tube amps but the ravens were up to the task. that was more beer than i have had in the last three weeks

playntheblues · « **Reply #25 on:** 7 Nov 2011, 02:06 pm »

Thanks Marv, we had a great time as well. I think the greatest compliment you can give to the equipment is that it was about the music not the equipment. How rare it is when you hear that about a listening party thank you for the high compliment.

My wife and I had a lot of catching up to do after the party and I have not been able to download the pictures yet I will do it this evening and do my best to get them posted.

Guy

eqshadimar · « **Reply #26 on:** 7 Nov 2011, 07:28 pm »

Guy -

It was a great time for sure! Let me know some weekend when you have several hours free and I can help you straighten out your media server.

Laters,
Jeff

playntheblues · « **Reply #27 on:** 7 Nov 2011, 09:50 pm »

playntheblues · « **Reply #28 on:** 7 Nov 2011, 09:52 pm »

playntheblues · « **Reply #29 on:** 7 Nov 2011, 09:52 pm »

playntheblues · « **Reply #30 on:** 7 Nov 2011, 09:54 pm »

playntheblues · « **Reply #31 on:** 7 Nov 2011, 09:55 pm »

playntheblues · « **Reply #32 on:** 7 Nov 2011, 09:55 pm »

playntheblues · « **Reply #33 on:** 7 Nov 2011, 09:56 pm »

playntheblues · « **Reply #34 on:** 7 Nov 2011, 09:57 pm »

Sound Science · « **Reply #35 on:** 8 Nov 2011, 12:35 am »

Hi,

Guy Allert asked me to chime in on about the Music Vault Diamond.

The Music Vaults are PC based Music Servers optimized for digital music playback.
They all operate in Raid 1 which provides a duplicate of the main drive on a second drive.
This protects your time spent ripping your music or downloading from HD Tracks or copying your friends music. It maybe the only server which protects your time and your music.

The new Diamond Plus includes a 60 GB solid state drive for the operating system and has enough extra room on it to store approximately 20 GB of music so you can experience complete solid state play back. I know that people claim this makes a big difference in sound quality but in fact that just indicates a bad design when it does make a big difference.

All Music Vaults play back at the native sample rate of the music stored on it. We have found that upsampling in the server itself reduces resolution, if you do choose to upsample that is best done in the DAC.

The new Music Vaults are all fanless designs. The only mechanical moving device in the Music Vaults are the optical drives and the only mechanical noise comes from playing or ripping a CD.

The Diamonds include a Blue Ray Drive and I think they do a better job ripping than a standard DVD drive.

I include a program called logmein which allows me to logon to a Music Vault remotely to help customers who need some technical support.

The Music Vault Diamond comes with 2 TB of storage and 2 TB of auto duplication. This is enough room to store approximately 3200 uncompressed CDs.

The Music Vaults use standard encoding such as wav or flac. This permits the addition of inexpensive USB hard drives to increase storage capacity.
The Music Vaults also allow you to burn custom CDs from your Music Collection.

The Diamond uses a pro audio Digital output card that can provide up to 8 Stereo AES/EBU balanced digital outputs. It also supports Dual Wire AES/EBU along with Mono Left and Mono Right AES/EBU outputs.

For those of you who have an external digital clock the Diamond also has a clock input.
The ultimate in Digital playback uses a external clock to synchronize the Server with the DAC.

Many of my customers use the Berkley Alpha, DCS, Zodiac Gold and other high end DACs.
I have had great success partnering the Diamond with the Zodiac Gold.

The Diamond continuously wins shoot outs against even the $35K Scarlatti Transport, Qsonix and Sooloos Servers and the Music Vault Emerald will easily out perforrm the Olive products.

Playback is accomplished via Media Monkey or JRiver, media monkey has a better remote app for use with iPads and android devices.

Ripping is done superbly with DB Power amp.

All new products come with a 2 year parts and labor warranty and The music Vaults use standard off the shelf products which makes them future proof.

No Apple based servers even with Pure Music or Amarra installed will equal the sound of the Music Vault Diamond.

My email is neal@soundsciencecat.com or phone at 720 308 4000

Regards,

Neal Van Berg

wisnon · « **Reply #36 on:** 8 Nov 2011, 12:22 pm »

Does the Music Vault work with jplay? That is
www.jplay.eu

Sound Science · « **Reply #37 on:** 8 Nov 2011, 03:31 pm »

Hi,
If JPLAY works as claimed it will run on the Music Vault, I will try it later today and let you know if there claims of superior sound are true for the Music Vault Diamond too.

I am very doubtful that it will sound different.

The Clock on the Diamonds Digital output is better than the Big Ben from Apogee, each of the Diamonds digital outputs go through a unity gain Transformer. Everything is done to provide the lowest jitter best timing already.

The Reviews I read on their web site were from people using standard PCs and who didn't know how their computers were working for music playback.

wisnon · « **Reply #38 on:** 13 Nov 2011, 10:47 am »

How did your test go?

Sound Science · « **Reply #39 on:** 13 Nov 2011, 03:08 pm »

There was no improvement in sound that I could hear.
I will do some more listening as I am not sure it sounded as good as what the Music Vault sounds like with out it. I did try to play some 24 bit 96K material and it didn't work at all for hi res.

The user interface is OK for a computer geek but not for someone who wants to listen to music and have it be a pleasant experience.