[zettelsm]

Bumping this thread along, I had a small, self-inflicted hiccup with my Momentum HD that I thought I'd pass along.

Two nights ago the HD stopped responding to remote control signals. Since it was getting late I just wrapped up the listening for the evening and went to bed.

The next morning I replaced the batteries in the remote. I remembered that there was a pairing procedure to be followed to get the preamp and remote to talk to each other again after replacing batteries, but I didn't have the owner's manual at hand, and when I briefly powered up the preamp out of standby to see if the preamp was responding to remote signals again, it sure looked like it was -- volume control ran up and down just fine, so I said, "Hmmm" to myself and went on about my business for the day.

But later in the evening when I sat down to do some listening, despite the volume control and input selector functions working just fine, left channel volume was significantly higher than the right, with the entire soundstage pulled to the left speaker. I took a look at the balance setting by pressing the Balance button and the meter needle was straight up (balanced).

So then the troubleshooting began. By swapping right for left interconnects going in, and then going out of the preamp it certainly looked like the preamp was the problem. And disconnecting the preamp and using my Vivaldi DAC directly into the power amp confirmed that the power amp was just fine. Running out of any further ideas other than turning the preamp on and off several times, which didn't cure the problem, I spent the rest of the evening listening via the Vivaldi direct, and sent an e-mail off to Alex at D'Agostino.

Well, this morning I had a reply from Alex waiting in my in-box. His suggestion, press and hold the Balance button on the remote at least ten seconds. After re-pairing the remote to the preamp like I should have done in the first place, I did just that and voila! problem fixed.

So, kudos to Alex for the super-fast response, a face-palm to myself for not pairing the remote properly and assuming it just started working OK after the battery change without that necessary step.

The unintended consequence though besides the exercise of contorting myself behind the equipment rack several times and cleaning of XLR connectors by removing and inserting them in various sockets, was another comparison DAC-direct vs preamp in my system.

The Vivaldi volume control is very transparent and could hardly be considered bad to listen through. Indeed, many people do just that in digital-only systems and have dispensed with the expense of a preamp completely.

BUT, as clean and transparent as the Vivaldi is driving my Momentum amp directly, with the HD back in the system music is just so much more tonally saturated, vivid and dynamic I wouldn't want live without it. So a nice reminder why I spent that money to begin with.

So, when you replace your Momentum HD remote batteries -- always pair the remote to the preamp, and press Balance for a good ten seconds.

Steve Z