Thursday, July 3, 2014

Wow DAC

Wow I got a new DAC, the most expensive piece of equipment I ever bought. It arrived yesterday, I plugged it into the system (with difficulty because the RCA interconnect cable I bought didn't work with it -- the Left and Right outputs were too far apart to fit the Audioquest cable), and away we went.

It's the PSaudio Directstream DAC, which just started shipping in May. It's unbelievable!! I never heard a really really good DAC before, and I was actually quite happy with my Schiit BiFrost DAC, but the DirectStream is amazing. Even with streaming audio, the presence of the music is uncanny. I played the Beethoven piano sonata No. 23 in F-, Op. 57, "Appassionata" piano sonata performed by Andras Schiff, streaming from ClassicalArchives. Hot dog, it's like the piano is in the room!

It's a case of you don't know what you're missing until you try something new. I really loved my BiFrost DAC. It's reasonable in price (cheap, actually) and is small and simple, user upgradeable and nice looking, well built. The sound was a big step up when I got it.

The DirectStream is something else entirely. It's really expensive, big and heavy, with fancy touchscreen controls and even a remote. But to me the sound is everything, and that's where it is undeniably great. My first reaction after hearing it for the first time was that at last I could play orchestral music that didn't get all "flubby" when it got loud. The sound stayed clear and not confused. The problem with reproducing orchestral music on cd and streaming sources, even high def files, is that when everyone plays at once it sounds kind of like a mish mash. You can't pick up the individual instruments, it sounds cluttered, not really like music. This is probably partly why I've always preferred listening to chamber music, piano music and other solo instrumentals. I love the Bach solo violin sonatas and partitas and solo cello suites. These sound very good, even on lesser equipment. 

But orchestral music just doesn't work in recordings, not very well anyway. Until I heard the DirectStream. When the orchestra plays loud it still sounds good, the music remains clear, and it gets more exciting. But that's what the loud part of a piece is supposed to do: wake you up, become the high point of the music. With DirectStream this works.

I've got a lot of listening to do, because I have to listen to everything over again, to enjoy it even more. Hot dog.

I think I've settled on using Pure Music. It sounds the best of the audio software I've tried.

I played one cut of an Anna Netrebko: Opera Arias, high def download, the aria from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, Act 1: Ancor non giunse!...Regnava nel silenzio. When she hits the loud high note at the end of the aria, I thought I was going to faint, it was so beautiful and stunning. That never happened to me before. Thanks DirectStream! And Brava, Ms. Netrebko.

Even the sound coming from my cd's of Glenn Gould playing the Bach English and French Suites was excellent. One of the amazing things this DAC does is "promote" a cd's sound to a higher more defined sense of accuracy. How it does this is very technical; some of the details are on PSaudio's web site. But the point is that all cd's, even streaming sources, sound much much better than before. There's much less of a difference between high definition audio and regular cd's because of this. Wow!


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