The Ultimatum XLi is a new floor standing loudspeaker of compact proportions, It is engineered to deliver greater performance than the Ultimatum XLS by using a floor standing cabinet to deliver separate volumes for mass loading and crossover isolation. This follows a significant number of requests from retailers and distributors around the world who found that the performance of the XLS was ideally suited to potential owners needs but a ‘floorstander’ would have been more domestically acceptable.

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This year I am planning on getting a XTZ Room analyzer.  For what it does it’s not too expensive. For what improvements it can help you making to your system it’s really cheap.

It consists of a nicely finished USB microphone / sound card on a stand and some clever software.  It takes about five minutes to unpack and install or it should have.  I use a Naim preamp so I had to find a suitable RCA to DIN adapter to plug in the output of the sound card base.  So after fifteen minutes I was sitting in my favourite chair clicking buttons and measuring the low frequency response of my room.

It seems my room is quite even across the LF but there is just a little too much overall bass.

Here are a few images I borrowed from the XTZ website.  They show the hardware itself along with images of full range and LF only measurements.  The RT60 plot is also useful.

I’ll come back to the XTZ as soon as I have a spare day- Father’s day perhaps.  It’s really easy to get going and to get some results, but it will take time to turn this into a better sounding system.  I’m convinced that it’s possible though.

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This is the first major revision for this product in over 7 years. This takes the CDX2 into new markets delivering greater performance and far increased flexibility. The price remains the same.

The new version CDX2 adds a switchable S/PDIF output on a 75 Ohm BNC connector for the correct impedance match.

Radio Paradise (RP) is a commercial-free listener-supported radio station.  Listeners supporting the station during October are automatically entered into the draw to win the NaimUniti and n-SAT speakers.

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It’s around £200, if one shops around, so I decided to risk it.  I also purchased a cheap PC Express to IE1394 card to fit my HP2133 netbook.  Lots of fiddling around and finally all the drivers matched up and were running.

My best DAC, or at least the best that will do anything above 48kHz, at the moment is the Cambridge DacMagic so I tried it it with the output from the TC.

Very interesting, the combination delivers the best computer audio sound quality I’ve achieved so far.  It has a rightness and a feeling of grip that is so much better then the shiny chromium plated sound that it’s so easy to get.

Huge amounts of listening to do and many experiments to carry out and hopefully a Naim DAC to play the Konnect through in a month or so.

More as I get time to listen

Why? Because they were playing some choral music that sounded fabulous, excepting a bit of room boom, and I wanted to find out what the music was.

I’m sure I’m not alone in being interested in finding new music.  The trend to music servers or music from laptops or memory sticks is great for the ease of the companies doing the demos, but there is a really strong tendency to hide what is playing.

In the case of the Magico demo the problem was exacerbated by the demo maestro being in the corner furthest from the entrance and the room was absolutely full.

It would have been to intrusive to cross the room in front of the audience so I asked the rest of the staff in the display area of the room.  Maybe too many people had asked, maybe it was a bad day.  Whatever, I left the room feeling irritated and still without the name of the track.

Totally unfair on Magico: had they been running a bad demo or using uninteresting music then I wouldn’t have commented.

So a plea to companies running demos at hi-fi shows: besides good systems, good choice of music and pleasant atmospheres can you please just make it easy for us music fans to find out what you are playing.

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Next week I’m in Munich for the High End show and by coincidence will be sharing a booth (or to be more exact one of my clients Thorens is sharing a booth) themed Sources of the Future – as it’s vinyl and streaming – with Higoto who are Germany’s streaming experts.

The demos will be of Thoren’s new Tri-Balance turntable, the Logitech Transporter and a Macbook running iTunes with the Amarra software into a Weiss DAC.

Should be very interesting.  It’ll bring out all the digits is digits posts again, especially as Amarra is around $1500.  That means the price of Mac Book Pro , Amarra and DAC will be around £5-6k.  Cheaper than my CD player. But will it deliver as much?

Will it be fabulous hi-fi or fabulous music?

I’ve just moved to the beta of Windows 7 because even in beta it’s more stable that Vista. To give it a fair chance I thought I should start with a clean install. Sorted everything out but bloody iTunes. Haven’t lost the apps for the iPhone but have lost all the music on the hard drive. Not the one I installed Win 7 on – I’m not that stupid yet, but a second drive used for miscellaneous data and iTunes.

Luckily the music is still on my iPhone but getting it back to my HD seems to be very difficult. I’ve done it before but that was when it seemed to be possible to tell the iPod it was a HD. Doesn’t seem possible with the iPhone.

I’m sure someone out there will tell me it’s easy. Hopefully.

If only it were that simple to get a great sound from CA.  The more I experiment the more I realise that CA is absolutely similar to analog audio or indeed any audio when taken seriously.  Every change is audible. Assuming one has a good enough system.

Of course, just because a change is audible doesn’t mean it matters.

The expression bandied about on forums about Computer Audio is bit transparent.  The theory is simple: it’s getting the bits from the Hard Drive out of the computer without them being manipulated/changed in any way.

I’ve tried many music playing apps and they all seem to sound subtly different.  Even different releases of iTunes are reported to sort different.  Life is far to short to bother to try different releases.  As they say, I tried it once and didn’t like it.

For convenience for quick playback I tend to use VLC www.videolan.org.  It seems to play almost everything audio and video and can even stream stuff over  my network.  It works well for Radio Paradise too.

If I want to get serious say when I’m comparing DACs I tend to use Foobar.  It’s not my favourite user experience but it is easily configurable. For use under Win XP it’s possible to use the ASIO add in to bypass the K Mixer (assuming you have a suitable sound card). I use the M-Audio Transit. For Vista the WASAPI add in also bypasses the Windows (Kernel Mixer aka K Mixer) mixer.  With volumes set at 100% one should be achieving bit transparency and the sound should be just that little bit cleaner, less splashy and the space between notes will be greater somehow.

CA still never gets truly close to good CD playback.  Not yet for me anyway.  And it’s not ’cause I haven’t tried hard.

It’s a bit simpler with a Mac (the classic Mac and a DAC route) assuming you remember to set the right bit depth and bit rate in the Midi settings but I can’t say it sounds any better.

Using track 7 , The Chain, showed the original as having a slightly ‘sharper’ delivery, more detail perhaps but certainly less music. The main difference was in the low end but this changed the overall presentation. The Maplin just delivered more music but in a controlled and balanced manner.

I then dug out the 500VA transformer I’d tried before – now in an aluminium box and with a ferrite on the output – in common with the original Dacmagic’s supply.  This PS delivered more power to the presentation, more extension apparently  but was slightly slower. It had better separation of instruments, but not really more music.

The more comparisons of power supplies I do with the Dacmagic the more impressed I am of the overall balance of the design.

I will carry on using the Maplin PS.  It is easier to hide away, as it isn’t a walwart, and more importantly it improves the performance making it just that little more balanced and even handed.

The music playback system was a HP2133 netbook running Foobar and ASIO drivers connected by USB2 to a M-Audio Transit sound card which was connected with a  Chord Optichord to the Cambridge.

Sound quality is generally rather good.  Good in a bandwidth limited, obviously live but solid sort of way, but one recording did sound as if it was made of a fluttery cassette.

I played it back from my HP2133 into a M-Audio Transit into my Behringer SRC2496 upsampling to 24/88 all feeding my Naim system.  Maybe a bit OTT but well worth the effort.

Thanks to John Atkinson, editor of Stereophile mag for bring this superb resource to my attention

Highly recommended

Theory one, is that it’s possible to get good sound from a computer feeding a DAC.  The debate tends to be as much around whether a Mac is better than a PC as a source as which DAC is ideal.  The general feeling seems to be that a Mac Book with a DAC costing around a £1k is cable of delivering better sound that a serious or very serious CD Player.  I agree a Mac and a DAC is cable of delivering a very good sound – but not a great one.  The Mac/DAC to my ears delivers a polished performance with poor dynamics downwards and little soul.  A great CD player adds back the soul, and reaches down into the quiet to somehow increase the space between the notes.  I’m sure it is possible to get a great sound from a ‘puter but it am sure it’s going to take a bit more effort than just plugging a DAC on to the output of a Mac.

Theory two, is that if a rip is perfect it should sound the same as another perfect rip of the same CD.  Seems pretty logical to me but somehow it doesn’t seem to be the case.  Listening blind and sighted to different rips which are identical, according to CRC and EAC’s file compare, they seem to sound different.  Consistency of results leads me to believe I’m not fooling myself.  Now, don’t expect these differences to be huge and obvious.  And don’t expect these to hear differences unless you have a revealing system and time.  If you have both and are willing to try a few rips then relax and let the tracks play through and observe your reaction to each track from an emotional level.  You need to be relaxed and not trying too hard – tension and stress are great ways of hearing less. When last trying this blind Malcolm Steward and I found differences in the rhythm of the track.

My conclusions are the same as usual with serious hi-fi.  The more I understand the more I realise I don’t know.

This by the way is not the way to do something for long-term use.  This is just as a quick test to see if it’s worth experimenting further and if the results are good the tranny will be mounted in a decent case suitably fused. This is not the type of experiment I suggest for anyone outside of a lab.  The mains is dangerous.

The listening results today are different to those at Malcolm’s last evening.  There it was pretty conclusive that the new supply confused the balance and lost some integration. It wasn’t bad at all, just not quite as well balanced as the original supply.  Shows that Cambridge put some time and effort into the whole package.

Today and in my system the results aren’t quite so clear cut.  There are elements of the same as last night but at the same time the system with the experimental tranny has more drive, is a bit more dramatic on the dynamics front and makes my foot tap more.

It’s really very track dependant: a couple of Paul Simon tracks definitely favoured the larger supply, a Springsteen just showed off the slight forwardness the supply delivered and sounded harsh. Another Springsteen – I’m on Fire – worked.

Would I recommend trying a supply if it were available on some try before buy deal – yes – but only if it were a no strings try before buy deal.  I’m sure that with the, very justified, success of the Cambridge DacMagic there will quite a few companies offering upgrade power supplies.

Finally it might be worth noting that the cost of the transformer delivered was around £35 so it might easily be a £100++ power supply if sold online and all neatly packaged.  Quite a investment for a budget DAC even if it’s a great budget DAC.