Not so in my experience with the 2.5 cm thick untreated copper platforms I am using. The first batch of these platforms have been in my system for more than half a year now and they still look as gorgeous as when I first installed them. But some time in the future they will indeed need some polishing so I can understand that audio manufacturers are not willing to sell copper products without a coating. However, a coating does influence the sound quality and therefore I opted for (99.95%) pure copper platforms without any coating.
Lampizator announcement: launch of our all new TOTL HORIZON DAC
- Thread starter Lukasz "Lampizator" Fikus
- Start date
Interesting. I wouldn't have thought that a copper plate, which is one inch thick, would tarnish more slowly than a thinner plate (e.g. 3mm) because the surface exposed to atmosphere should be the principle consideration in oxidization. I wonder if the other .05% in your platforms is zinc carbonate. The resulting alloy would be more resistant to tarnishing at the surface, but it's part way to becoming a battery.
As I am a Lampi owner since 2014 or 15, and have compared Big 7 with Trinity at Elberoth (who owned both then and one of my first trips that opened my eyes to the benefit of trips, and price vs truth), and subsequently the Big 7 and GG with Estoteric K01 and 01x, Aries Cerat second model from top, MSB Select II, Vivaldi Dac, and then with Jazzead who moved to GG after we did a compare of Aqua Formula, Trinity, Stahltek and Neodio Origine at his place (he now has Pacific), I really am not seeking any answers in the dac area.
My trips are mainly to find out what I think I do not understand from my preference point of view, and therefore I do not do any trips for digital anymore. Therefore I am normally quiet on the Lampi threads. Unlike some new users here of Horizon and Pac, I was convinced of Lukasz's genius with all those compares, and in retrospect it was evident with the Big 7, and I have had my say on forums earlier.
So, my trips these days are to answer my questions on analog, and SET amps, and horn drivers. Which is a vast field. Yet, on these trips, sometimes I run into a Lampi user, start listening to the Lampi, and all the Lampi love comes gushing back in. Like over the weekend.
I have seldom been as excited about a piece of gear as I was with Lampi on the weekend at audioquattr's, with both Pacific and the Horizon. I had gone there to understand the difference between my favorite analog combination, the Vyger Red Sparrow, and one of my favorite cartridges, the vdh master signature and grand cru. He had the Thomas Mayer and the top Thrax phonos as well, so all in all as good as it gets with analog and excellent recordings.
Yet, when we played the Pacific with KR and RK 242 through the Taiko extreme and through the Aurender w20, both of us could not stop listening. We moved to Horizon, and did some tube rolls, and ended up on what I think is Marty's mullard preference. The Lampi completely sucks you into the music, and you find yourself moving across any track on the ipad picking any performance. And this is Tidal and roon, not the hard drive.
Audioquattr has tried both MSB and total dac and takes them off the shelf within the hour.
Despite having high quality analog
Pics of his analog here https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/zero-distortion-vyger.35529/post-841804
Videos with analog here https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/zero-distortion-cessaro-mono-or-stereo.35996/
Audioquattr spends most of his time listening to the Lampi.
No wonder astrotoy who owned 15000 original Deccas and EMIs and owns tapes, listens easily through the Lampi. Or when I visit gregdee, the UK distributor who also is the distro for J. Sikora, I can easily switch to the Lampi. Or when Ron and I visited Jim in LA with the Tannoy Westminster, we listened on the Acoustical Signature with the DS cartirdge (model below the master) then switched easily to the Baltic.
Below are videos with Pacific 242
My trips are mainly to find out what I think I do not understand from my preference point of view, and therefore I do not do any trips for digital anymore. Therefore I am normally quiet on the Lampi threads. Unlike some new users here of Horizon and Pac, I was convinced of Lukasz's genius with all those compares, and in retrospect it was evident with the Big 7, and I have had my say on forums earlier.
So, my trips these days are to answer my questions on analog, and SET amps, and horn drivers. Which is a vast field. Yet, on these trips, sometimes I run into a Lampi user, start listening to the Lampi, and all the Lampi love comes gushing back in. Like over the weekend.
I have seldom been as excited about a piece of gear as I was with Lampi on the weekend at audioquattr's, with both Pacific and the Horizon. I had gone there to understand the difference between my favorite analog combination, the Vyger Red Sparrow, and one of my favorite cartridges, the vdh master signature and grand cru. He had the Thomas Mayer and the top Thrax phonos as well, so all in all as good as it gets with analog and excellent recordings.
Yet, when we played the Pacific with KR and RK 242 through the Taiko extreme and through the Aurender w20, both of us could not stop listening. We moved to Horizon, and did some tube rolls, and ended up on what I think is Marty's mullard preference. The Lampi completely sucks you into the music, and you find yourself moving across any track on the ipad picking any performance. And this is Tidal and roon, not the hard drive.
Audioquattr has tried both MSB and total dac and takes them off the shelf within the hour.
Despite having high quality analog
Pics of his analog here https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/zero-distortion-vyger.35529/post-841804
Videos with analog here https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/zero-distortion-cessaro-mono-or-stereo.35996/
Audioquattr spends most of his time listening to the Lampi.
No wonder astrotoy who owned 15000 original Deccas and EMIs and owns tapes, listens easily through the Lampi. Or when I visit gregdee, the UK distributor who also is the distro for J. Sikora, I can easily switch to the Lampi. Or when Ron and I visited Jim in LA with the Tannoy Westminster, we listened on the Acoustical Signature with the DS cartirdge (model below the master) then switched easily to the Baltic.
Below are videos with Pacific 242
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Have you looked into museum/renaissance wax? It is a microcrystalline wax that will effectively prevent tarnishing and oxidation while being effectively invisible. You can polish it also. The micron thick layer you'd apply should not hold any bearing in the performance of the piece.
Steve Williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
For me analog is always the reality check in my system as compared to digital. Having said that I can say that over the past 10 months since owning the Horizon, I am truly of the feeling that with proper tube choices (which BTW are system and personal preference dependent) that the Horizon paired with the Taiko Extreme and all of its current and pending upgrades has taken my system so close to the realm of analog that my paradigm has shifted such that over the past few months I have been listening almost entirely to digital. Guests to my house have made the same comments as to comparing the two formats. I even had several guests ask if we are listening to analog or digital as it feels that close. To my mind tube rolling is identical to changing cartridges on a tonearm where one searches for that ideal tube set which suspends disbelief. Same thing with finding the perfect tube set for one's ears and one's system. When that happens the Horizon becomes almost impossible to turn off. Having said all of this the reality check is to indeed play the same tracks on vinyl. The gap is narrowing and to listen to this happen has for my ears proved wonderful
Interesting read, Ked, thanks for this. If I understand you correctly the Lampi digital provided so much fun that you not missed the analog rig(s) anymore. I furthermore read your report on Mike’s system when you last visited him. I get the impression that his digital set up (Wadax reference server/dac combination) did not provide so much music pleasure that you forgot about his analog rig(s). But maybe I misunderstand you or was maybe the reason for that visit different?
Might it be, Steve, that state of the art digital has become equally as ‘good’ - albeit in different parameters in comparison to vinyl (for example less distortion and a better (controlled) low end than analog) - or is currently able to provide as much musical pleasure as state of the art analog ?
Steve Williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
I would say the answer is "both"
The Horizon is truly difficult to turn off when you have the tube set that brings everything together.. You use the tubes to tune the system. No different than changing cartridges IMHO
I think what @bonzo75 said in regards to being drawn in, is a accurate description or way to explain the allure. You don't want to stop listening! I was a vinyl/tape guy for a very long time. The Taiko/Horizon pushes all the right buttons. I never would have thought digital could sound this good...
Rudolf, Jeroen is in Holland and his system is sounding very good now so you can visit him to listen to the his three tables and the Taiko Lampi and see what you think. And if you two decide to do a Kondo Vs trafomatic Elysium/Alieno compare please book me in
Your are a clever ‘cookie’, Ked: avoiding the question I asked you and suggesting another scenario.
But let’s see, maybe it would indeed be interesting for both Jeroen and me to listen to each other’s system because they are so different (as regards components; of course no idea how they will compare sonically).Thank you very much. I am not familiar with this museum/renaissance wax but I will definately look into it! Thanks again.
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I have worked with a variety of metals for sculpture. I also built several copper stills. It is very difficult to control oxidation. Atmospheric conditions are also difficult to control. I have never seen copper that doesn't eventually tarnish. Polishing copper is a PITA, on a piece of audio gear, bigger PITA...
Understand what you are saying and I fully agree: copper will (eventually) tarnish but in my situation by far not as fast as was suggested in one of the previous posts. And cleaning a platform is of course (much) easier than cleaning an audio component. I used a copper polish when the platforms arrived at my place. This copper polish works fine cq effectively and it did not take me hours to polish/clean them, far from it. Ideally one cleaning would be enough for many years to come but that is probably too optimistic. So I suppose a (copper) cleaning/polishing now and then is ‘the price’ I have to pay for the sonic attributes that come with those (to my ears anyway) beautiful sounding platforms. (no experience yet with the special wax that RCanelas suggested)
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Fred Ainsley aka LampiMan at the Capital AudioFest.
Happy holidays, Fred and Rob. It's been fun hanging with you this year!
Happy holidays, Fred and Rob. It's been fun hanging with you this year!
Good to hear. I have a Lampi Pacific. As good as it is, analog vinyl is in my experience better in delivering that sublime sense of ease, warmth, and natural realism. The Pacific closes the gap, but vinyl is still better, except of course in convenience and for noise issues like pops and ticks. The noise in PCM is far more insidious. As volume reduces, there’s a huge loss in resolution. It’s not like analog where a tube or solid state preamplifier or amplifier has a constant thermal noise floor. When you scale down volume on your preamp, the noise doesn’t go up. In digital, it does. Every bit decimation you lose 6 dB in resolution. It’s built into PCM. The Horizon can’t fix that, unfortunately.
I find digital unsatisfactory for music with a huge dynamic range. In recording a large Mahler symphony, to make sure digital doesn’t overload, engineers choose very conservative recording levels. If you use 16 bits (as 99% of digital music is still only available at that resolution), you’ve already lost 1-2 bits of resolution. An oboe playing 40-50 dB down from peak volume has to be encoded with 8 bits or so of resolution. There are no “free” bits floating around. 16-bit is 96 dB S/N ratio. 8 bits is 48 dB S/N ratio. It’s built into PCM. You hear the quantization effects in the complete loss of ambience of the hall sound in many digital recordings. Play back a great analog classical recording — say one of HP’s super disc list albums such as Lorin Maazel’s magnificent Decca recording of Respighi’s Feste Romane — as the opening brass chords play fortissimo, you hear the sound echoing through the hall. On digital, this sense of realism is greatly diminished. Zubin Mehta‘s incandescent recording on Decca of Puccini’s great opera Turandot begins with a solo voice singing in Italian “People of Peking”. On vinyl, you hear distinctively the hall ambience. In the remastered 24-bit version, all hall ambience is vacuumed away. It’s dead sounding. Even studio rock and roll suffers. Jethro Tulll’s great classic, Songs from the Wood, has the title track at the beginning with Ian Anderson’s vocals echoing through the studio. You hear the back wave slapping back with a top quality moving coil cartridge. On digital, even the 24-bit remastering, the same track sounds muted. The dynamics is gone. There is no hall echo.
I was hoping DSD and 24-bit would fix the problems, but in my experience, it does not. I do listen a lot to Roon and modern classical music is of course only digitally recorded. So, you have no choice. There are of course many good digital recordings. But for the great analog masters — for example, any of the famed Lyrita releases that HP used to rave about — Lyrita’s digital remastering is simply trounced by its vinyl originals. There’s just no comparison. Ditto for the great analog recordings by RCA Living Stereo, Mercury Living Presence, EMI, Decca SXL etc. To my ears, all these sound vastly better on vinyl. But these were recorded 50-60 years or more ago. Even then, Wilma Cozart and Lewis Layton and Kenneth Wilkinson knew more about how to record an orchestra in the 1950s-1960s than any modern recording engineer seems to these days. It may be that the glory days of classical recordings is behind us.
Steve Williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
No, I have sadly not heard the Horizon! But I have owned many DACs from 1990 onwards, beginning with Theta Digital onwards through Mark Levinson and dCS and Esoteric and Chord. I have a very good sense of what’s achievable with digital technology over 30+ years of listening. What Lampi DACs bring, I think, is a more analog rendition and overcome some (many?) of the undesirable traits of early digital playback. But it’s a fine balance. When I compare the Lampi Pacific to my Chord Blu Mk2/M-Scaler/Dave, I see the benefits and the drawbacks of tube DAC technology. The Pacific excels in a fullness of rendition that resembles vinyl playback. The Chord system strives for maximum clarity. Rob Watts’ million tap filter M-Scaler tried to extract as much resolution as possible from the encoded bits. It digs deeper than the Pacific but it’s more clinical and solid state sounding (like all Chord designs, it uses their proprietary switch-mode power supply). Where the Horizon lies in this picture, I cannot say as I have not heard it. But I would guess it veers towards higher resolution while keeping the analog like rendition of tube DACs.
So much of digital is volume dependent. For example, I’ve never been happy with the volume control on any DAC, including my Chord Dave, preferring to use a high quality solid state or tube preamplifier for volume control. It’s weird. You’d think eliminating a component in the signal chain would be a good thing. I recall dCS Elgar Plus being possibly the first DAC I owned 25 years ago that came with a nice volume control. My first thought was, great, I can get rid of my ARC Ref 1, my tube preamp then. I was shocked how much better things sounded with the ARC handling volume control. I expect dCS‘ Elgar Plus DAC was using a digital volume control. That again throws bits away when volume is reduced, as does my Chord Dave. To me, that approach doesn’t really work well. I gather Horizon has a more full function analog preamp built in. I’d still want Lampi to give me a no-holds barred Horizon type DAC with no volume control built in. All said and done, a standalone top-notch preamp is going to be better than one built into a DAC.
So, I’m waiting to see what Lampi will do beyond the Horizon. I’m guessing Lukasz will have something he’s thinking about doing. Also, at the price point of the Horizon, I’m going to expect a more fully tricked out power supply, like an external LPS like a Naim 555PS or an MSB Select. To me, the Horizon is a Pacific like design with one chassis, much better components and a better digital engine. Lampi is very secretive on what digital technology it uses, so I don’t really know what’s under the hood. But it’s using off the shelf components, not a custom bespoke DSP design like Rob Watts million tap M-scaler for Chord.
As with everything else, there’s no free lunch. Tube DACs give you certain nice things, but they take away other things (e.g., dCS’ ring DAC is probably the highest resolution DAC I’ve heard, and I suspect MSB‘s Select goes even further in terms of resolution, as probably does the latest dCS designs). At this price level, it’s more like the flavor of sound you want, and it’s system dependent.
So much of digital is volume dependent. For example, I’ve never been happy with the volume control on any DAC, including my Chord Dave, preferring to use a high quality solid state or tube preamplifier for volume control. It’s weird. You’d think eliminating a component in the signal chain would be a good thing. I recall dCS Elgar Plus being possibly the first DAC I owned 25 years ago that came with a nice volume control. My first thought was, great, I can get rid of my ARC Ref 1, my tube preamp then. I was shocked how much better things sounded with the ARC handling volume control. I expect dCS‘ Elgar Plus DAC was using a digital volume control. That again throws bits away when volume is reduced, as does my Chord Dave. To me, that approach doesn’t really work well. I gather Horizon has a more full function analog preamp built in. I’d still want Lampi to give me a no-holds barred Horizon type DAC with no volume control built in. All said and done, a standalone top-notch preamp is going to be better than one built into a DAC.
So, I’m waiting to see what Lampi will do beyond the Horizon. I’m guessing Lukasz will have something he’s thinking about doing. Also, at the price point of the Horizon, I’m going to expect a more fully tricked out power supply, like an external LPS like a Naim 555PS or an MSB Select. To me, the Horizon is a Pacific like design with one chassis, much better components and a better digital engine. Lampi is very secretive on what digital technology it uses, so I don’t really know what’s under the hood. But it’s using off the shelf components, not a custom bespoke DSP design like Rob Watts million tap M-scaler for Chord.
As with everything else, there’s no free lunch. Tube DACs give you certain nice things, but they take away other things (e.g., dCS’ ring DAC is probably the highest resolution DAC I’ve heard, and I suspect MSB‘s Select goes even further in terms of resolution, as probably does the latest dCS designs). At this price level, it’s more like the flavor of sound you want, and it’s system dependent.
Steve Williams
Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
It was the Pacific that brought me back to digital and the Horizon that has made a true change in my listening habits Find a tube set that works in your system and is pleasing to your ears and I challenge you after you’ve heard the Horizon to come back and make the same statements.as you did above. I enjoyed reading your post but bottom line is you’ve never heard the Horizon but find yourself able to say so much about it. Prior to my Pacific I was 95% analog. I have an entire tube system so for me the sound I am hearing is certainly not analog but the best digital I’ve ever heard in my system. The gap is narrowing.
I’m sure the Horizon narrows the gap with analog. The Horizon was developed after the Pacific and extensively compared with it, so I’m sure Lukasz’ team wouldn’t have released the Horizon unless they were confident it raised the bar. Judging from your experience and others on this forum, clearly it has. I’m currently running my Pacific with KR 242 tubes with a Western Electric 274B. Quite happy with its sound! Plus I live near the Pacific .
The biggest change in my system was for me, as a 35+ year veteran of using Quad electrostatics, moving to a horns and SET amplifier based system (Klipsch La Scalas with a Triode Labs tube monoblocks with Emission Labs 45 tubes). Didn’t think a 2 watt amplifier could ever sound so good. Owning a 105 dB efficient loudspeaker changes the way you think about amplifiers.
I will have to think more about where to go from here, DAC wise. Certainly the Horizon is a logical upgrade path, although after much thought, I decided against taking up Lampi’s very generous trade up policy. The DAC/streaming market is changing rapidly. Unlike speakers! My La Scalas are a 60 year old design, as are my Quads! Things are much simpler with speakers. The technology hasn’t changed much.
The biggest change in my system was for me, as a 35+ year veteran of using Quad electrostatics, moving to a horns and SET amplifier based system (Klipsch La Scalas with a Triode Labs tube monoblocks with Emission Labs 45 tubes). Didn’t think a 2 watt amplifier could ever sound so good. Owning a 105 dB efficient loudspeaker changes the way you think about amplifiers.
I will have to think more about where to go from here, DAC wise. Certainly the Horizon is a logical upgrade path, although after much thought, I decided against taking up Lampi’s very generous trade up policy. The DAC/streaming market is changing rapidly. Unlike speakers! My La Scalas are a 60 year old design, as are my Quads! Things are much simpler with speakers. The technology hasn’t changed much.
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