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A few comments:

Posted by Ted Smith (M) on February 6, 2005 at 19:39:09

In Reply to: results....... posted by mikel on February 5, 2005 at 22:59:38:

Howdy

At the beginning the differences weren’t as apparent, but as time went on every time we played the Meitner it felt like going home. I knew this wasn’t fair (I have a Meitner), but as I report below I don’t think this is the whole reason.

Tho the others reported hearing more detail on the Esoteric at times, my fiancé and I perceived it differently. It always seemed to us that there was an unnatural edginess/shrillness to the Esoteric and that there was a lot less reverb and/or room/venue details on it. For example on “Take Five” on the Meitner there was a clear separation of the echo/reverb from the initial note on each sax hit, on the Esoteric that separation wasn’t there.

Initially the Esoteric seemed to have a little stronger bass and one listener described it as having faster bass. As the evening wore on I didn’t hear this difference as much. I don’t know if I was getting used to the sound of the Esoteric in Mike’s system or if something was slowly changing as things warmed up.

More than once I thought that we were playing a CD on the Esoteric instead of a SACD, it just was lacking the DSD naturalness I’ve become accustomed to.

Another difference to me was that the Meitner handled very dynamic material with ease, the Esoteric got glassy or shrill on extremely dynamic music. This was sort of expected for me since that’s one of the reasons I purchased my Meitner. I just handles these things in a natural way (see http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/hirez/messages/125132.html ).

But the disk that made everything clear was, to my surprise, the Shaggy SACD. We played tracks 4, 5 and 7 on the Meitner. We were all spontaneously dancing/moving in our chairs. When we put the disk into the Esoteric it was as flat as a pancake, even tho I started out trying to move with the music the feeling left me quickly. We didn’t listen long to it on the Esoteric.

-Ted

P.S. I’m quite busy these days with my fiancé; we’re getting ready for our June wedding so I’m not reading much here these days. It was great to hear the Esoteric system at Mike’s house and to hear how his system is progressing.

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