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A call to greatness!

Posted by Ric Schultz on August 5, 2003 at 00:05:48

In Reply to: It must be Ric Shultz posted by jeromelang on August 4, 2003 at 20:02:25:

Tis not I. Not yet! heh heh. It is understandable that a distributor/dealer or manufacturer would not want to have mods done on equipment he sells/makes. You know, the calls asking whether it should be done and questions about warrantee, etc. Then there is the problem of people finding out that the stock units may not be as good as can be and therefore the questions about why the manufacturer did not do these mods in the first place, etc. Very sticky thing here.

However, I personally feel this is not the time to be conservative. We now have high resolution formats that are capable of really great sound. So, now is the time that all manufacturers of gear associated with these formats should pull out all stops and create equipment that will really let us hear all the music in all its glory. We have really only two main companies that are making the A to D converters that almost all SACDs and many DVD-As are recorded with. The two companies are DCS and Meitner. So, however good their A to D converters and to some extent their D to A converters (to hear the recording played back in order to determine mikes, cables, placement, etc.)are, is how good of sound gets recorded and we get to listen to. It is not like there are tons of companies making these types of machines and we can all find out which company is really the most tweaky (how many tweaky phono stages are there...must be a zillion!).

In my experience the digital manufacturing companies are far less tweaky than the analog based companies. Look at Lloyd Walkers stuff. Look at the tweaky turntables, phono stages, tweaked out single ended amps with Blackgates, nude Vishays, etc. etc. Now look inside most professional and lots of "audiophile" digital components and you will see op amps, ordinary power supplies, ordinary resistors, caps, no damping, shielding, etc. There are many exceptions but my sense is that digital gear is way behind in the tweaking department. Anotherwords, I don't believe the Meitner modified Philips 1000 is as good a transport as a Rockford is a turntable, nor do I believe the stock Meitner DAC is as good a DAC as the Aesthetix is a phono stage. Not even close!

It is inevitable that we find out how good SACD and 24/192 can sound. So, us tweakers will tweak and some manufacturers will freak. heh heh.

After Chesky got their first 24/96 converter from DCS there was an article saying that they were going to put a tube input stage in the DCS A to D converter. About 6 months later I was talking to Bob Katz, who used to do all their recording, and he told me that instead Chesky had removed some op amps in the input of the DCS converter for better sound. You see, it cannot be stopped. As long as someone knows that something can be improved, it will be. It is our human nature to improve things. This is what being an audiophile is about, trying to reach for that ever illusive perfection in sound reproduction.

So, I hereby call on all professional SACD and DVD-A gear manufacturers to commence super programs on tweaking their gear to the highest audible standards possible. All the tweak info is online! Hire some tweak gurus to help. Just do it. We will all be ever grateful if you would only let go of your ego and find out what is possible. The ego always trys to keep it in a box. The truth is every expanding. The truth never says "I know what I am doing, I have arrived and this is the answer and it will never be improved upon".

I have been an audiophile since the mid 70s and the things we have learned since then are amazing. Back then we thought all cables sounded the same, we knew nothing about line conditioning, resonance control, tweaking the room, etc. Cables off the floor? Blacking the edges of a CD? We would have thought these things utter nonsense then (some still think it is nonsense).

My experience has shown that the digital signal path is much longer and therefore corruptible in many places. You can do very, very simple things to a CD, player and effect the sound in dramatic ways. It is not enough to have a low jitter clock next to the DAC chip. Every little thing you do changes the sound. Lately I have played with some gel that goes on the ends of glass digital cables. Using this gel makes the sound more palpable and real sounding (much less dry). These kind of cables are used with the Meitner pair. So, here is another thing to do to get the best sound possible. Or do we care about the best sound possible? Do we care about having musicians so live sounding that it gives you a spiritual experience?....this is what I want...

I am sure that we would all want the results of really tweaked out digital gear. It is up to the manufactures to get us that gear or we will have to either modify that gear of make it ourselves. I am sure you know that many many companies were started because someone was dissatisfied with what was available and decided they could do better themselves. My friend, Mark Hampton at Zcable started making his own cables because he could not find anything he totally liked. There are hundreds of such expamples. I hope some of you out there with digital designing skills will take the call and start making super gear....we need it.

I am not saying that the DCS or Meitner stuff is not great, just that it probably could be made to sound much better and that other brands will come along and possibly be better and even cheaper (a lot of the heart of the digital components is computer related and we know how much cheaper digital gear has gotten.....for instance: have you seen the new 24/96 capable 31 band equalizer/RTA/DAC from Behringer for $300?!?!?).

OK, I'm off my soapbox. Hope you enjoyed todays sermon. Hee hee.

Enjoy,

Ric Schultz

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