To the left of the InnuOS is the Bricasti DAC. To the right of the AV stand is a subwoofer (connected to a soundbar for the TV).
Nothing special with the electricity. Old outlets, no power conditioning, no fancy power cords.
Hi Floyd,
the problem here is definitely the loudspeaker. It is an exceptionally neutral and transparent design, so you really can’t afford to short change it when it comes to set-up. I hope you don't mind if i point out some of the shortcomings in this particular set-up.
The first thing are the carpet spikes combined with hardwood floor protectors. Essentially what this does is to leave the speakers entirely unanchored with each spike free to vibrate and move. This robs the system of large amounts of bass, in terms of amplitude, extension and resolution.
The next problem is in placing all the electronics on a flimsy AV stand with thin glass shelves which will resonate and ring and will transfer that characteristic to the music, making it glassy , mechanical and thin sounding. The large surface area of the tv will also transfer large amounts of vibrational energy into the stand, making the colouration worse.
Then there’s the fact that the tv is hugely reflective and will reflect sounds already reflected off the wall behind the listener. This will introduce strong late reflections, which will strongly interfere with the direct signals from the loudspeakers, causing smear and obscuring detail, which instead of detail is heard as correlated distortion in high energy, upper frequencies.
Combine the lack of bass from the speaker spikes with high levels of uncorrelated Hf reflections and you start getting the sounds you report, which will sound worse the louder it gets.
Next up is mains. You have the amp, server and DAC of a potentially high resolution system plugged into the basic household mains supply. This means your amp is potentially under supplied with instantaneous current. The supply line is broken and rejoined in every single light switch, so your mains supply may be joined in several places. It uses the cheapest, rather skinny in-wall cable and really cheap wall plugs of very dubious construction. This again will rob the system of bass. Noise on the line from cheap SMPSs used around the house will affect clocks in the server and DAC, again robbing the system of resolution, adding the unresolved air and detail into the signal as noise.
I dont know if you paid any special heed to the network, but if not, again loss of resolution will result, causing the lost detail to be combined with the musical signal as distortion. The vibration through the AV stand will find its way straight into the Innuos and Bricasti clocks, causing considerable jitter and phase noise.
When you listened to the A3 with the Luxman it sounded great, probably because it avoided all the above set-up shortcomings. The bottom line is that a speaker like the Magico A5 will play exactly what it is fed. If that signal is hampered by poor quality mains, poor loudspeaker mounting, poor electronics isolation with a lot of vibration then what you’ll hear is what you heard. Thin, weak bass with over emphasised, distorted HF.
