Music At Home

^^^ bump!

No, the analog outputs are still very much available. You can use either type of output depending on how you want to use it. If planning for Exakt in the future, start with the Katalyst'ed DAC analog outputs then switch to the Exaktlink outputs for feeding Exakt integrated loudspeakers or an Exaktbox aktive crossover when ready. Or just use in the conventional steaming analog output way, forever, and forget the Exaktlinks are even there.

Black, excellent condition. Was originally built as a DS/1 and was Katalyst and Exaktlink upgraded at the Linn factory in April last year. Invoice for the upgrade from Linn retailer (Peter Tyson) will be included with the DS and will have the full balance of the transferable 5 year warranty. Original remote, mains lead, box and packaging for safe shipping. £2,900 + postage at cost I'm located in Argyll and Bute, post-code PA29 but make regular trips to Darlington, County Durham (and anywhere along the route)

More Schiit Hits the Fan Currently doing a bit of a three way comparison of headphone amps From the left: Mjolnir 2, with JJ Tesla ECC88 gold-pins Lyr 3, with stock Russian Vali 2, with NOS Philips PCC88 Bullet point summary of findings: Vali 2, sounds lovely: smooth, relaxed and completely non-fatiguing. A little bit veiled and slightly on the warm side. Lyr 3, brand new unit. Level of clarity and detail a bit of a shock coming from Vali 2. Detail, if anything, was too intense and distracting initially. Then towards end of the last nights listening session came a holy-WTF moment as all clicked into place and started sounding coherent and glorious. Great extension and control in the bass. Mjolnir 2. Sounds thick and chunky, but in a good way. Less ethereal than Lyr 3, more meaty and dense. Single ended output doesn't quite have the control and definition in the bass that the Lyr 3 has but balanced goes some way to address this. Overall, sounding a bit coloured in comparison with Lyr 3 but holds a tune well and is just a super engaging listen. All comparisons so far with Linn Akurate DS/3 as source and with Sennheiser HD600 headphones

Thanks @kelly200269. I'm using Roon here as well, running ROCK on a NUC (in fanless case) in place of Nucleus and using the ADS/3 and various Allo Digione's as end-points. I listened to the Hugo 2 on it's SPDIF input using an Allo Digione Signature I'd brought along and it was certainly very impressive.

@kelly200269 I see your digital source is a Chord TT2. Have you tried running that directly into your power-amps? If so, how does that compare to having the Klimax Kontrol in the signal path? Academic question really as I appreciate you need a pre-amp in order to accommodate a turntable, but I'm curious none the less. I had the opportunity last weekend to have an extended listen to a Hugo 2 in a friends system and compared it to some gear I brought along with me. I was quite impressed. There was a certain "rightness" about it, very clean and clear and yet natural and sweet sounding (even on the "incisive" filter setting, which I liked the best). I was sufficiently impressed to think about getting hold of a Qutest to play around with in my system here.

I've never been in a position to compare, so I don't know if that's true or not. I was just speculating in reaction to MagicRats observation that Roon's volume limiting seems transparent compared to the internal DVC in his DSM and prefences stated by others regarding transcoding FLAC to WAV by, for example, minimserver.

I have a hunch, but that's all it is, that having the signal processing taking place in the music server (roon core in this case) is better than doing that processing inside the DS/M. The more processing taking place inside the DS/M, the more noise generated. That's a plausible explanation for why transcoding FLAC in the server sounds better, to some, than decoding FLAC in the DS/M and similarly why reducing the load in the DS/M by expanding the bit depth to 24 bit in the server has been observed to sound better.

That filter is there for adding or taking away a bit of warmth. In roon, you can just click and drag any of the circles representing the filters and hear the results immediately. With the approx 120Hz parametric filter, just drag up or down, or increment / decrement the numbers conventionally until it sounds warm/neutral to suit.

Thanks for trying it and reporting the results. The slider on the right hand side of the plot, immediately below the word "FILTER", is used manually (click and hold on the circle and drag down) to bring the curve down so that no part of the curve exceeds 0dB to prevent clipping. For the settings above, I need to slide the curve down by about 4.8db.

I'm going to have to get back to you on this chaps. I did some more playing around in Konfig but I think I've broken it! I added a bass shelf, to the max allowed, and then to increase the lift in the bass region I added a filter on top of that with positive gain, again, to the max allowed in Konfig. I got red warnings from Konfig about potential damage to speakers with all this gain. I added a treble shelf, with cut, and another filter to extend the shelf lower in frequency. To be honest, the result still looked fairly mild, and not at all like the 2db or so per octave roll-off target curve that I was aiming for. Anyway, I thought I would save it and then go looking for the resulting config file so I could edit it and coax some more out of it. That's when Konfig lost sight of my Akurate DS and refused to play any more. Tried restarting Konfig, rebooting my Mac, rebooting my Akurate DS, nope, Konfig dead, can't see anything, despite the Akurate DS still being visible and usable to roon and I can access the DS's web config page. Only thing left is to uninstall Konfig and re-install it. I've clearly upset it. What I really need to do though, is get hold of a microphone and figure out what my room is really doing. Given the room size, furnishings, surfaces etc., I fully expect it to be showing a fairly flat response with no roll-off. The curve I arrived at when playing around in Roon was a result of trial and error, starting with a fairly mild falling response and eventually, through rotating the curve clockwise in increments, arriving at the curve I have, which is pretty much full-on in terms of the ideal in room roll-off response, hence why I think I'm getting pretty much zero natural roll-off from the room and hence the unnatural and overbright untreated result. I'll pick this up again, but it could be a while!

Thanks sunbeam and mbast. Perhaps I gave in using SO v1 too easily. When I checked (briefly!) it seemed I couldn't set the frequency of the treble shelf lower than 8kHz, which was a bit of a stumbling block, amongst others. I've also been PM'ed some hints for manually editing the SOv1 config file. Will check again and report back to this thread.

Last year I tried a Cisco 2960 but eventually went back to my Netgear GS105. The Netgear didn't seem quite as rigid, the music seemed to flow and bounce along better. I've since bought a GS108T that I've been using in place of the GS105 for a few months. I haven't had any inclination to take it out but as it should be nicely burned in now I'll swap the GS105 back in at some point and compare. Apologies if this sounds like I'm making shit up.

SO v1 also has a bass shelf and treble shelf (low shelf and high shelf in Roon speak) but now I've checked it, turns out they don't have sufficient flexibility for creating an effective house curve as above unfortunately. In SO v1 you can only have one bass shelf and one treble shelf at most, the bass shelf is limited to a max boost of +3db, the treble shelf can't be operated lower than 8kHz and has -2db of cut at most. Neither allow the Q to be adjusted. I appreciate though that defining a house curve is not what SO is designed for, just a pity that the existing 'tools' in SO don't have the extra flexibility that would make this possible.

Sennheiser HD650 frequency response (green trace) (Courtesy of Super Best Audio Friends forum) Taking into account the differences in the scales used for this and my PEQ plot, they're remarkably similar