Tír Na HiFi

I think it was the vol 1 edition http://musparade.com/album/VA/The+Dali+ ... n+of+Music

Of course we didn't use MP3 :)

jkeny wrote:I think it was the vol 1 edition http://musparade.com/album/VA/The+Dali+ ... n+of+Music

It was indeed.

EAC doesnt work on a Mac I believe. Are there any recommended alternatives John? Surely any ripping software is good enough and CD-ROMs have built in error correction anyway or is there more to it?

DaveF wrote:EAC doesnt work on a Mac I believe. Are there any recommended alternatives John? Surely any ripping software is good enough and CD-ROMs have built in error correction anyway or is there more to it?

OK, I don't know the MAC software portfolio. Sure, it might work 100% error-free but what EAC does is let you know if there are errors which cannot be corrected - so you are aware of any problems - an ordinary CD rip won't do this AFAIK?

Here's what the EAC site says:

With other audio grabbers you usually need to listen to every grabbed wave because they only do jitter correction. Scratched CDs read on CD-ROM drives often produce distortions. But listening to every extracted audio track is a waste of time. Exact Audio Copy conquer these problems by making use of several technologies like multi-reading with verify and AccurateRip.

John absolutely no offence taken I know the cyrus is much better than the lector. English technology aka british leyland was always superior to any italian product made by fiat(think fiat 128). Ivor probably accepts that as well!. I would concede the italians produce better wine than the brits.

Thanks james re dali.

tony wrote:...... I know the cyrus is much better than the lector. English technology aka british leyland was always superior to any italian product made by fiat(think fiat 128). Ivor probably accepts that as well!. ....

Ahhhhhh

Joking aside my reading of the test on sunday was that the hiface would be more clinical. Cyrus would be in that camp at its product level, I believe it could be a comparision with a similar sounding product and I will be very interested to see if the Johns is a winner.
Even in Ivors case he seems to be astounded(maybe thats too strong) by the performance given the price difference of the products.

Regardless of all that even though I have moved completely away from a TT I would regard putting in the cd and searching for it as kinda similar to lp's( I realise its a very poor second to lp's). I think its the next generation who only listen to downloaded files that will embrace this product completely. I notice on some of the computer forums the hiface gets a lot of mention from punters who listen to music primarily at their PC. I would just use it to supplement the cdp when I am feeling lazy or maybe if you had people over and didnt want to bother changing cd's but maybe use it all the time in the system beside the pc. Of course the squeezebox does exactly the same thing but at a lower level of quality.

tony wrote:Ivor probably accepts that as well!.

tony wrote: Even in Ivors case he seems to be astounded

I do wish you'd stop being so presumptuous about my reactions. You keep getting it horribly wrong.

I wasn't "astounded" at how similar the Lector and Modded Hiface sounded, after all they were both going through the exact same amp and speakers but it certainly wasn't quite what I expected. Talking to John later I realised that what he's trying to achieve with his DAC is, strangely enough, an analogue sound. This is precisely what I've been trying to achieve through my own CD playback. So the similarity then is somewhat more understandable. I have the advantage of valves in the CD player whereas John has achieved this warmth and musicality in a purely digital domain - that is what is remarkable.

John,
Is there any fancy digital filtering going on prior to or in the DAC itself or does this analogue sound that Ivor describes come more from analogue output stage of your device?

DaveF wrote:John,
Is there any fancy digital filtering going on prior to or in the DAC itself or does this analogue sound that Ivor describes come more from analogue output stage of your device?

The DAC is an ESS DAC & all the details of it's operation are not known. In this configuration it is operating in synchronous mode so there is no up-sampling of the signal taking place - the DAC is processing the raw audio stream. The outputs stage is another mystery & is within the DAC chip itself, no tubes, no transformers, etc.