I’d wager my experience and knowledge of music is deeper than yours. Your experience seems to be more about making phone vids of other people’s systems.
But, your post has already veered the thread off enough.
dCS Varese short review
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But, your post has already veered the thread off enough.
Please make lots of videos of your own system to show depth and get your digital friends to join
Yes. I will take every opportunity to denounce Taiko sectarism.....
We should all find this disappointing. And that's the *only* argument I'm making here: digital is solved in theory, but not in practice. Repeatedly bringing vinyl comparisons into the discussion just muddies the water, whether accidentally or deliberately.
If there's one single box in our systems that should be solvable in a way that all boxes sound the same, regardless of price, it's the DAC: bits in - original analogue waveform out.
As a comparison of the digital and vinyl, I find I have preferred tubes for my amps. Same sort of preference thing. Some better for classical others better for rock and pop. The tubes do allow fine tuning to the music played. Same with digital. If I did not listen to classical, there would be no need for vinyl. Classical is the only place I notice the difference. I can hear the difference between vinyl and digital with other music formats. But I don't know I always prefer the way vinyl presents them. Come on, do I really need to hear Lady Gagas tonsils moving. The music is about something else. Not about audiophile attributes.
As far as DAC in general, I seem to notice people gravitate to certain brands for maybe a similar reason. I have not seen a single DAC brand that someone I have met has heard and said they do not like at all. May if be DCS, Wadax, Lampizator. They all seem to have fans and haters. Accept for Nagara and Playback. They seem to have a following and few bother to say they don't like the sound.
As far as DAC in general, I seem to notice people gravitate to certain brands for maybe a similar reason. I have not seen a single DAC brand that someone I have met has heard and said they do not like at all. May if be DCS, Wadax, Lampizator. They all seem to have fans and haters. Accept for Nagara and Playback. They seem to have a following and few bother to say they don't like the sound.
ok, i'll play.
no one has made any case to me about bigger and heavier and more multi-box is better. in hifi i do find it's more an asset in sound than not, but not always. but you brought up form factor, and design. neither of us were a fly on the wall of the dCS design team setting industrial design/form factor parameters. so we can only guess about just how significant it was that the Varese be dealer and dCS customer friendly. that it just accidently or very intentionally fit into the racks similar to a Vivaldi stack. looked like a dCS.
would a clean sheet of paper approach without those unknown to us considerations result in a different look? did relative miniaturization matter? clearly the Wadax monster had zero form factor restrictions. might that help in the end performance result? logically it probably does not hurt performance. but we really don't know.
i would 100% agree that it would be nice if the Wadax was not such a beast in terms of look and real estate it requires. i do like it and it's look. form and function and all that. but just like my gold and red dart's it's besides the point to me.
F1 is clean sheet of paper type stuff. sure open wheel race cars have evolved to look a certain way. but having an organic flowing look is way down the list of priorities. it's all business.
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I fully acknowledge all the different presentations various vinyl solutions provide, but I think you make a good point about digital and the early claims of “perfect sound forever”. That would have at least implied to me that at the very beginning various digital players would have sounded the same. They did not. And now years later, they still do not.
I think that early marketing pitch or claim or whatever it was, was quickly abandoned. Digital does, however, offer extreme convenience and search capabilities, and based on the products discussed in this thread, lots of opportunity to add many many boxes and cables and different presentations based on filtering choices in some.
There is no single reference that accommodates all listener preferences. That goes for everything in audio and indeed in life. People seek joy in different ways. Don't make the mistake of thinking that your choices apply to anyone other than yourself. Accept and appreciate everyone's differences. Doing so will deepen your understanding of your own
The real world, in whatever technological field, is far more complicated than you seem to understand.
The reason the vinyl comparison comes up should be obvious. That it undermines the entire premise of your argument seems to have you stubbornly dug in repeating the same note over and over.
Yes, but sometimes the design is also due the objective of creating a box with a specific mechanical low resonance. The controlled continues shape of the dCS Vivaldi design creates a dead box - sorry I forgot to tap the Varese!
But surely I am guilty of pride of ownership, as people say - I appreciate a the Vivaldi design even before listening to it.
Peter, well set up digital offers a lot more than “convenience.” But if it makes you feel better about your choices by dismissing other paths (without, in my opinion, the experience to authoritatively do so) I suppose you will continue to use this forum to do so.
Well, I don't think industrial art is "engineers attempting art" ...
In fact, I really appreciate some pieces of industrial art, but I can easily accept WBF members artistic preferences are even more different than their sound preferences!
You are free to have your interpretation of "perfect sound forever" - a great marketing claim of the 80s. But In general, remembering the articles from the 80's , the sentence had a clear meaning:
"Perfect Sound": The idea was that digital audio (specifically 16-bit/44.1kHz PCM) could reproduce music without the distortion, hiss, or wear that plagued analog formats" (we should remember that LP pressings of late 70's and 80's were poor.
"Forever": CDs don't degrade with repeated plays the way vinyl or tapes do—no needle wear, no tape stretching—so they promised a long-lasting, consistent listening experience. (most quality LPs of the 60's and early 70's were ruined by frequent playback and poor equipment at the 80's.)
And again, claiming perfection of an imperfect media - stereo - is ridiculous. Why spending time saying it again and again and trying to use it as an weapon?
Digital playback offers now such high quality that in the opinion of many people is equivalent to top tape. Surely it does not try to emulate vinyl added artifacts. IMO, YMMV.
Anyone with common sense knows or should know that was just typical hyperbolic marketing bs. It was prevalent then. It's still prevalent today. False equivalence is rampant in audio adverts. If that's the basis for your analogue bias, I respectfully suggest you look elsewhere.
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What also should not be forgotten is that the marketing slogan "Perfect Sound Forever" was not necessarily aimed at audiophiles. It was aimed at the mass market of regular music lovers where the real money was to be made by the music industry.
And regular music lovers (including all my non-audiophile friends and acquaintances) could not have been happier to make the switch quickly and forget about their LPs which did not sound that good on their, by audiophile standards, mediocre vinyl playback setups. They all loved the sound quality of CD; on their not so transparent systems the flaws of CD were quite well hidden. For the mass market, the slogan "Perfect Sound Forever" was a smashing success indeed.
I myself did not hear the flaws of CD until I dug into audiophilia in the beginning of the Nineties. And I am extremely happy with how far Redbook CD sound quality has come since those early days and with just how good the format sounds now.
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