My listening impressions have been very short so far, haven't had a ton of time to really dig into the settings. First thing I did was connect my Ayre C5 xe MP CD player with a Wireworld Silver AES/EBU digital cable so I could use it as a transport to see how much I can get out of standard redbook CDs. I didn't really play around with the numerous digital filters yet, my first impressions were using filter 1 upsampled to 1 X DSD.
I began with Holly Cole's Night on standard redbook CD. So far, It's Interesting, it really cleans up a CD, much much smoother, especially on leading edges of vocals etc, transients...sound much more natural, definitely more analog like. Her voice is more clearly defined in the center image....with the Ayre by itself it's a little more diffuse. Image depth is slightly better, you get rid of some of the 2 dimensional sound you get from a redbook CD.....there is definitely more of a front to back soundstage that you hear with the Rossini.
The next CD I played was Dido's Life For Rent....this one was pretty cool, it really tidys up digital recordings, separates images in space better rather than have them all running together. Don't hear too much difference in the bass if anything yet. I don't have the best ears when it comes to deep bass, but so far on these first two recordings I couldn't tell much of a difference.
The third album I played was Jason Isbell's Southeastern, one of the best albums I've heard in recent memory, love his music and songwriting. Now! Huge difference on this disc...this sounds pretty rough on the Ayre. Sounds like he's in the room with Rossini. Much bigger difference on some recordings than others which makes sense I suppose.- first holy crap moment...there's some stuff (some background drums, very soft compared to the vocals) on track one that you cannot hear at all on the Ayre but is clear as day on the Rossini. So far so good, that's about as far as I got last night, I plan to play some more redbook CDs tonight and hook up a temporary ethernet cable and get in to its streaming capabilities. Lotta fun so far!
- Buck
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Library: Speakers: Avalon Acoustics Isis, Subwoofers: (2) REL Acoustics 212SE Amplification: D’agostino Momentum preamplifier, D’agostino S250 stereo amplifier Digital: dCS Rossini CD/SACD transport, dCS Rossini DAC/streamer/master clock. Analog: Brinkmann Taurus table, Lyra Etna Lambda, Audio Research Ref. Phono 3
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