politician wrote:
Very interesting, @Mr 10Percent.
I have the BeoLab 90s and am heading down the same route. I have a couple of questions for you.
You said you have the full Auralic stack, presumably including the DAC. Do you find this gives you better sound when connected to the BL90s' analogue input compared to a direct digital connection from the streaming transport?
Do you find the music server gives better results than a generic NAS?
Do you find the Melco CD ripper (which I'm presuming is a D100) gives better-sounding files than ripping using a computer and a quality program with AccurateRip?
Politician.
To address you points as best I can:
1. I went for the Melco N1Z H60 first. I was fed-up of my WD NAS and the way it performed (slow, difficult access and yes....noisy)
2. The Melco is a dog to control on its own but it does do DNLA - so all my older Beo-Systems (TV, Essence) could pull the files effortlessly.
3. I purchased the Vega G2 DAC - mainly because I was not overly happy with the Melco to BL90 over USB or SPDif. I was also worried that Auralic have had issues changing their coding and the BL90 not being receptive. This is common with a lot of Streamers/DAC combos that cant talk to one another. By purchasing a Vega G2 DAC, I could stream analogue (which is what all digital music is anyway) via XLR and get good results. I used a reasonable priced cable here (AQ Water 2) to move the signal 6m. BL90 has a USB limit of 4.8m so no good for me hiding black boxes away.
4. Later, I added the Leo Clock, the Aries G2 Streamer and finally, the Sirius G2.1. I would say you could quite easily stop at the either one box solution of the less capable streamer (VEGA DAC) or connect fully digitally with the Aries). Adding the Clock made a very small difference. The Sirius however (the VEGA-LEO are combos as is the ARIES-SIRIUS) made what I think is a very noticeable addition to the sound by up-sampling almost everything from Redbook to DSD512. This (and the Aries too) helps the DAC compute much better and filter off the noise.
5. The analogue waveform then goes to the BL90 as 192kbps where it is re-digitised, DSP-d and re-analogue. One can say too many processes? However, it does sound very good and somewhat future-proofs my system. (replace BL90s with something else, use Auralics somewhere else?)
6. I have ripped my entire CD collection twice. Once with my PC and dbpowerAmp/Accurip etc..) and once again with the Melco. In retrospect, the Melco gives very good results and is effortless apart from pushing a eject button and twice on the Melco N1Z to record. I do not use the Melco D100 with my PC. I do use Jaikoz to re-tabulate my music file metadata.
7. one more unforeseen issue was with the BL90s generating a very distinct humm at 0 sound volume. This was attributed the Auralics running on the same power circuit as the Labs. The PS Audio Stellar P3 was then purchased to power all the digital sources (with a Audio Macro 6-way power distributor) on the high performance Regen line. The other equipment runs on the standard regen line.
In terms of it all holistically.
1. The BL90 adds the biggest bang for buck by far.
2. There is definitely more money involved here than sense. It sort of addictive in a way. Beware.
3. Music quality (mastering) as you know with the BL90 is THE major problem.
4. Adding more black boxes improves the quality of the sound. The Law of diminishing returns. The argument is...can you really tell and can you measure it?
5. Is my solution better than a BS Core. Yes. Absolutely. Testing a Core and the PLink from a Beovision. No difference/improvement between those two in my opinion. However, there is $$$$ attached to the big difference between the Auralics and a BSCore.
6. What I think erks me the most is pairing the BL90 with something decent, but not stupidly expensive decent. There is nothing in the middle and those loudspeakers deserve something good and they deserve well-recorded material to play.
