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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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In Reply to: RE: PS posted by dbphd on August 28, 2017 at 17:02:57:
> > If my C-5xeMP could still play SACDs I'd be interested, but analog from it to my KX-5 Twenty and VX-5 Twenty is magic I wouldn't want to give up. < <
Sorry for not being more clear. Ayre only brings out new models or upgrades when we can figure out how to actually make it sound better. The Twenty series was something of a milestone for Ayre in honor of our 20th anniversary.
When we started Ayre there were two choices - tubes or transistors. I looked at the fundamental limitations of each:
Transistors - Don't sound as good as tubes.
Tubes - Wear out, require replacement and re-biasing, difficult to make power amps without output transformers, generate lots of extra heat, are made almost entirely of steel (magnetic - when comparing otherwise equal passive parts with steel leads versus copper leads, the copper leads always win), reliable suppliers shut down in the early '70s - you never know if the replacement tube will sound as good as the original worn tube.
Of course nobody had ever made a solid-state circuit that sounded as good as the best tubed circuits, but there was no way to overcome the limitations of tubes, and I like a challenge, so chose transistors.
Ayre's first product didn't sound as good as tubes, but it was a good start. Every new model and every upgrade brought us closer, and the C-5xe was (and still is) a great sounding product. And it doesn't sound as good as Ayre's current products. As good as the C-5xe is, the QX-5 Twenty sounds even better. It took 20 year (of hard labor... :-), but the Twenty series actually sounds as good as tubes in the judgment of many, including long-time die-hard tube people.
Tubes will always sound throw a bigger soundstage than transistors, but that is just because they are much more microphonic and the energy from the loudspeakers will vibrate the tubes (after a delayed path through the air of about 1 millisecond per foot), so it is actually an artifact. (It's a pretty harmless artifact, as it doesn't add "edge", "hardness", "glare", or anything bad like that, and can be very "pleasant" - especially if your listening room is over-damped.)
Ayre started the trend to one-box players when we introduced the D-1 DVD player back in 1999, as the only interface available back then were variants on S/PDIF (which *invariably* adds jitter to the digital audio signal). Ayre didn't make a DAC until there was a way to do so without adding jitter - the QB-9 USB DAC, which was the first solid-state DAC using Wavelength Audio's proprietary Streamlength asynchronous code, which puts the DAC's master clock in charge. This eliminates jitter from the interface itself (although RFI and other computer noise can still enter the system, which is why there are all those filters and "re-clocking" gizmos).
Now the trend is back to separate DACs and transports, almost solely because people don't want computers in their listening rooms. As explained in a previous post there is no *legal* way to send unencrypted SACD digital data and certainly no *standardized* way to do so either.
One thing you could do is use the QX-5 Twenty for most sources, and just keep the analog out of the C-5xe for SACDs. Ayre is planning to offer the modular USB and Ethernet inputs as options sometime soon. This would drop the base price of the unit (with 8 S/PDIF variant inputs only) significantly, and then one could just buy the desired inputs as options. In your case, you could just get the Ethernet module for streaming, connect the AES/EBU output of your C-5xe to the QX-5 Twenty for most discs, and then just keep the analog output of the C-5xe connected for playing SACDs.
Does that make more sense for your situation?
Cheers,
Charles Hansen
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