Here's a couple of pics of Marc, Ed and me on Monday night....it was a great time, we caught up a bit from last year's RMAF and did some listening. Marc's system was perfect since we were able to compare CD, SACD, vinyl, Tidal streaming and even vinyl rips on an Auralic Aries that I brought out to Seattle. It was one of the first times I've ever really been able to compare formats as close as possible in a controlled high end system and not at a hotel audio show or dealer. I guest it's no surprise that the analog rig won by quite a large margin to my ears. With Tidal it was hit and miss, we played some stuff that sounded pretty good, and some things that were not. One interesting comparison we did was a vinyl rip of a song by the Tedeschi Trucks Band compared to the Tidal stream. That was the biggest difference to me of the night, the Tidal version sounded like a low quality MP3 while the vinyl rip was spot on. Some of the classical stuff I brought sounded pretty good on both SACD, CD and Tidal, but there was no getting around it, physical media was the CLEAR winner (and Marc has a first class streaming setup too). One of the other lessons I learned is that I just need to turn my damn volume up when I'm at home.....the guys were almost at the point of making fun of me for how low I usually listen. It's amazing how the dynamics can some to life when you turn it up. No wonder my D'agostino meters don't move. I'll post some more pics of Ed's setup later on! Thanks to Marc for having me over, I'm trying to save him a @#$%load of money on property by convincing him to move to Atlanta.......imagine the audio room that would be!!!!!!
