A Confused streaming system - Mutec / SOtM Ultra

[Blackmorec]

May be because the SoMT adding extra resolution on top of the Devialet? Because I think Devialet not warm sounding amp, its bit sharp/bright, it is OK if the speaker matched well. I found this in my system, when I upgraded the speaker, it break the balance... sometimes too much resolution is not a good thing.

With respect, the Devialet is neither sharp nor bright. Its virtually 100% transparent to the signal with which its presented, so if the signal coming in is at all sharp or bright the Devialet will reproduce that faithfully and will not editorialize, round or enhance the signal in any way.  But, like any audio component the Devialet is influenced by its support device. Put a Devialet on cones if you want it to sound more pinpoint, sharp and yes, analytical. But mounted on a neutral support, the Devialet is exactly that, neutral  and entirely transparent. This is a good thing because as long as the rest of the system is performing well, the Devialet will not add or subtract anything.  In my experience, hardness or brightness in a system is most usually caused by an imbalance in the system's resolving abilities. As an example, take a highly resolved signal and pass it through a cable that smears the signal. The 'lost' information that goes into the cable doesn't simply disappear, it comes out, but is now smeared and combined with other parts of the musical signal as distortion. In my experience, the area most affected is the air and ambience around instruments. which is typically what's lost when resolution is less than optimum. As this is all high frequency information, you are combining this high frequency energy with the same frequencies associated with other parts of the music, causing the system to overemphasise those particular frequencies.  This comes over to the listener as hardness, brittleness, brightness, sharpness etc..... simply an overabundance of high frequency energy.  Whenever you replace a component in a system with something that resolves more high frequency detail, like air, ambience and decay, the system always sounds at the same time more sparkling, shimmering and natural, with less harshness or hardness in the treble.

[Confused]

@Axel, @sam1000, regarding using the REF10 + MC3+USB to provide a word clock for the dCS Network Bridge, I too have read a report on Computer Audiophile where someone is doing this successfully. It is not entirely straight forward though, there is an issue when switching between music files in the 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz families, in which case you need to manually change the clock. One way around this might be to use Roon to upsample everything to 24/192, then the Network Bridge always sees the same sample rate. So it would work, but there are some issues.

EDIT: It occurs to me that you could run a Network Bridge without a word clock and simply run the AES/EBU feed through a REF10 referenced MC3+USB. Furthermore, you could do this and provide a word clock signal to the Network Bridge. Maybe this would cause some issues, I am not sure, but that is three different ways you could configure the REF10/MC3+USB/Network Bridge, who knows how this might influence the resultant sound quality.

@zdenes There is a good reason I have not tried the LPS-1 with the SOtM kit. The LPS-1 has a maximum of 7v, the SOtM kit is 12v. Curiously, May from SOtM has advised me that the 12v tX-USBultra and sMS-200Ultra work well if powered with 9v. I have this with my sPS-500 set to 9v, and yes, it works fine. Very strange!


@PeppaPig I would agree that the Devialet is not a "warm" sounding amp. If it was, this would mean that it was not an accurate or neutral sounding amp. You can make a system sound "warm" with a bit of mid-bass boost, perhaps roll off the presence / treble region. To be honest, I would be very surprised if a Devialet amp offered more than a fractional deviation from a flat frequency response from 10Hz to 25kHz. In my case, my system does sound a bit sharp/bright, in particular since adding the SOtM kit, but I do not blame this on the Devialet. As an example, a while ago I listened to a 440 Pro powering some Sonus Faber Olympica II's in a reasonably well treated room. This was a great sounding system, it was running SAM, and if anything it sounded a little bass heavy / dark. I recall Womaz having brightness issues, with a very similar Devialet / Sonus Faber system. So one Devialet / SF system sounds bright, another sounds dark. If you blame the Devialet for sounding bright in Womaz's system, would you also blame the Devialet for making the 440Pro / SF system I listened to for sounding a touch dark and bass heavy?

https://devialetchat.com/showthread.php?tid=2181

@PeppaPig - Where I think you have a valid point is where you state "sometimes too much resolution is not a good thing." - I would not agree that too much resolution is bad as such, but with my system I had an inherent brightness issue / tonal imbalance, and as I improved the system, increased it's resolution, this inherent issue became far more apparent. More specifically, it has gone from something that did not bother me to something that has stopped me enjoying my system.

This takes me to my weekend update. I have to say that I am enormously impressed with the service I have received from Thierry @homeaudiofidelity.
I sent my REW measurements to Thierry late Saturday morning. Later on Saturday Thierry was in touch asking about some anomalies in the REW measurements relating to the right hand speaker. The right hand speaker was showing some impulse response issues that were absent for the left hand speaker. Thierry suggested some reasons why this might be the case, one thing he asked, is there anything near the right hand speaker. The answer to this is yes, there is. The Blades need to be spaced 1m min from the walls and 2m min apart, which they are in my system. But my hifi rack does sit behind / near to the right hand Blade. I once had the speakers further out into the Room, so the rack comfortably behind the Right hand Blade, but a while ago I moved the Blades rearwards to a degree, this was based on REW measurements that indicated that moving them back did not increase the bass reinforcement I have, but it did serve to reduce a null I have at 125kHz. This clearly compromises my system. OK, hifi systems are normally compromised by the room, furniture, layout or whatever. What impresses me is that Thierry can pick this up just by reading my REW measurements.

Now I am aware of the impulse response issue, I have two possible plans. One is to revisit the speaker positioning, moving them further into the room. Another (more difficult) plan is to change the layout of all my kit, a new rack of a completely different type, a new location for my turntable. (The TT needs to be out of reach of a cat that likes climbing things and attacking random objects with extreme viciousness, as I said, compromises) It is interesting that it has taken the apparent brightness of the SOtM kit to drive me to getting the REW measurements checked and hence addressing the real issues.

Anyway, late Sunday afternoon Thierry sent me the convolution files that he had made. So a very swift turnaround, just over one day, and this is at the weekend. I will post more about how they sound when I have had a decent amount of time to listen too them, which will not be until Friday of this week unfortunately. I only had time for about 15 minutes listening, so I do have some first impressions, which is that they do sound good. Plus, from the quick listen yesterday I would say that the brightness / harshness issue that I have been accusing the SOtM kit of invoking has pretty much vanished. I will restate that this is just first impressions based on a very short listening session. I will provide an update on this once I have had some decent listening time. Meanwhile, I have received some good advice from Thierry, a kind of free consultancy included with the service, and two of his "HAF" convolution filters to try. All for the price of 'mid range' USB cable, looks like tremendous value to me

[zdenes]

@zdenes There is a good reason I have not tried the LPS-1 with the SOtM kit.  The LPS-1 has a maximum of 7v, the SOtM kit is 12v.  Curiously, May from SOtM has advised me that the 12v tX-USBultra and sMS-200Ultra work well if powered with 9v.  I have this with my sPS-500 set to 9v, and yes, it works fine.  Very strange!

Sorry, I have little knowledge on the LPS-1. I saw that some people tried that but I guess they must have the low voltage setting on the SOtM products.


Anyway, I converting the SOtM units from 9V to 12V is just removing a jumper. That probably engages or disengages and additional voltage regulator and burns voltage as heat. The units perhaps are optimised 9V. Apparently, Mr.Lee from SOtM suggested so. I read that at least one person found the original SMS-200 better on 12V but cannot recall any comparison on either the SMS-200ultra or the tx-USBultra. 
What do you hear? Any differences?

[Confused]

@zdenes There is a good reason I have not tried the LPS-1 with the SOtM kit.  The LPS-1 has a maximum of 7v, the SOtM kit is 12v.  Curiously, May from SOtM has advised me that the 12v tX-USBultra and sMS-200Ultra work well if powered with 9v.  I have this with my sPS-500 set to 9v, and yes, it works fine.  Very strange!

Sorry, I have little knowledge on the LPS-1. I saw that some people tried that but I guess they must have the low voltage setting on the SOtM products.


Anyway, I converting the SOtM units from 9V to 12V is just removing a jumper. That probably engages or disengages and additional voltage regulator and burns voltage as heat. The units perhaps are optimised 9V. Apparently, Mr.Lee from SOtM suggested so. I read that at least one person found the original SMS-200 better on 12V but cannot recall any comparison on either the SMS-200ultra or the tx-USBultra. 
What do you hear? Any differences?

I have not yet performed an A/B test between 9V and 12V.  As it happens, they are running on 9V now, I switched to 9V firstly just to see if they did actually work with 9V, and secondly to see if it made any difference to the HF issue.  They worked, and the HF issue appeared to be unchanged, which is what you would expect.  I think part of my problem since adding the SOtM kit is that whenever I listen I am just thinking about the HF issue, so it is impossible to evaluate anything else.  My hope is that the new HAF convolutions should neutralise the HF issue and let me get back to listening to music again, rather than listening to HF levels.  Assuming this is the case, I plan to do a quick trial of 9V versus 12V, and even try the 12V battery pack again.  I'll then have another think about maybe selling the sPS-500 in favour of SR-4's.  In the short term it will be one thing at a time, and the next thing will be a few (hopefully happy) listening sessions with the HAF convolutions.  Based on my quick listen yesterday they certainly make a big difference, so this will be interesting, a bit like having a new system.

[yabaVR]

May be because the SoMT adding extra resolution on top of the Devialet? Because I think Devialet not warm sounding amp, its bit sharp/bright, it is OK if the speaker matched well. I found this in my system, when I upgraded the speaker, it break the balance... sometimes too much resolution is not a good thing.

With respect, the Devialet is neither sharp nor bright. Its virtually 100% transparent to the signal with which its presented, so if the signal coming in is at all sharp or bright the Devialet will reproduce that faithfully and will not editorialize, round or enhance the signal in any way.  But, like any audio component the Devialet is influenced by its support device. Put a Devialet on cones if you want it to sound more pinpoint, sharp and yes, analytical. But mounted on a neutral support, the Devialet is exactly that, neutral  and entirely transparent. This is a good thing because as long as the rest of the system is performing well, the Devialet will not add or subtract anything.  In my experience, hardness or brightness in a system is most usually caused by an imbalance in the system's resolving abilities. As an example, take a highly resolved signal and pass it through a cable that smears the signal. The 'lost' information that goes into the cable doesn't simply disappear, it comes out, but is now smeared and combined with other parts of the musical signal as distortion. In my experience, the area most affected is the air and ambience around instruments. which is typically what's lost when resolution is less than optimum. As this is all high frequency information, you are combining this high frequency energy with the same frequencies associated with other parts of the music, causing the system to overemphasise those particular frequencies.  This comes over to the listener as hardness, brittleness, brightness, sharpness etc..... simply an overabundance of high frequency energy.  Whenever you replace a component in a system with something that resolves more high frequency detail, like air, ambience and decay, the system always sounds at the same time more sparkling, shimmering and natural, with less harshness or hardness in the treble.

This statement is so true it should be an opener article to read for every Devialet user in this forum.

@Confused
It's still my guess/believe (from this far away) that treating the HF issue you have in your audio system (only more prominent with the SOtM kit) with REW is like pulling the bulb of a blinking oil lamp in your car instead of fixing the leakage and filling up with oil. I think that @Blackmorec is absolutely right with his post and the solution of your problem is down this road.

My experience with many systems I tuned is that harshness/brightness always points to a big amount of 'musical information' captivated/locked (resonates, if you want) in that specific frequency range that bothers you. It's over prominent and you hear it every time. Personally I'm happy to hear something like this in a new system because it's almost always a big fortune once you released this 'captured musical information' (and it's proof the system is high resolving). Because when you solve the issue you can gain so much more transparency and ambience of recording/naturalness in music you wouldn't have thought of before.

If you flatten all of this (e.g. HF issue) by using something like REW you loose all this 'musical information' of a recording. No question it sounds good to the ear and it might be a great relief but you loose the magic you could've achieved when really solving the cause of this HF issue...promise.

gui

p.s. ...may I insert SMPS...sorry, couldn't resist

[Confused]

@yabaVR - you do seam to be missing the point completely. I am not using REW to flatten the HF issue. REW is used to measure my system, and then I am using convolutions to correct the frequency response throughout the entire range. Note, correct the entire frequency range, not flatten the HF. As to @Blackmorec comments, I think these were more directed at peppapig rather that commenting on my situation. Maybe I am wrong here, but the suggestion seams to be that placing the Devialet on cones will make the presentation sharper and more analytical, this appears to be the opposite of what I need for balance now, and my Devialet's are not on cones. I have no idea as to what the mechanism is for smearing signals in cables, but I have pretty decent cables, so I am presuming they are reasonably smear free.

Also note that the REW measurements I made indicated an issue with the impulse response on the right hand speaker. When I get time, I can mitigate this with some changes in my room / speaker placement. This is real, it is measurable and correctable. Science!

[yabaVR]

@yabaVR - you do seam to be missing the point completely.  I am not using REW to flatten the HF issue.  REW is used to measure my system, and then I am using convolutions to correct the frequency response throughout the entire range.   Note, correct the entire frequency range, not flatten the HF.  As to @Blackmorec comments, I think these were more directed at peppapig rather that commenting on my situation.  Maybe I am wrong here, but the suggestion seams to be that placing the Devialet on cones will make the presentation sharper and more analytical, this appears to be the opposite of what I need for balance now, and my Devialet's are not on cones.  I have no idea as to what the mechanism is for smearing signals in cables, but I have pretty decent cables, so I am presuming they are reasonably smear free.

Also note that the REW measurements I made indicated an issue with the impulse response on the right hand speaker.  When I get time, I can mitigate this with some changes in my room / speaker placement.  This is real, it is measurable and correctable.  Science!

Ok, you're right ...I'm out.

gui

[zdenes]

I hope that Confused's concern will be solved through with the HAF convolutions and/or power supply changes.

I thought that one question that may be worth talking about is what filters people with the SMS-200ulra (or Microrendu) use in HQPlayer or Roon.

As for myself, I sort of jumped on the bandwagon a bit and have been using poly-sinc-xtr-mp but a couple of times I went back to a few others. Now with so many good clocks in my system all 'referenced' to the REF10, I feel that the poly-sinc-shrt-mp gives better presence and more realistic sound, especially on acoustic instruments and vocals.

I'm saying this here, rather than in the HQPlayer thread that as far as I understand, the filters affect timing more than anything else and with the Ref 10 being so precise we may prefer other settings than people who have less precise clocks in their system.

I wonder if anybody else has experimented a bit with the filters AFTER adding the Ref 10?

[Confused]

I hope that Confused's concern will be solved through with the HAF convolutions and/or power supply changes.

I thought that one question that may be worth talking about is what filters people with the SMS-200ulra (or Microrendu) use in HQPlayer or Roon.

As for myself, I sort of jumped on the bandwagon a bit and have been using poly-sinc-xtr-mp but a couple of times I went back to a few others. Now with so many good clocks in my system all 'referenced' to the REF10, I feel that the poly-sinc-shrt-mp gives better presence and more realistic sound, especially on acoustic instruments and vocals.

I'm saying this here, rather than in the HQPlayer thread that as far as I understand, the filters affect timing more than anything else and with the Ref 10 being so precise we may prefer other settings than people who have less precise clocks in their system.

I wonder if anybody else has experimented a bit with the filters AFTER adding the Ref 10?

This is something that I have thought about myself.  A couple of weeks ago I did have a quick play trying alternative HQPlayer filters.  To be honest, this was a bit of a pointless exercise at the time, all I was doing was trying different settings and then listening to see if they mitigated the HF issue, which of course they did not.  In fact, there are many things I have planned to try, different cable lengths for the REF10, MC3+USB and SOtM kit, power supply options, trying the SOtM kit direct to the Devialet's USB, effect of the REF10 on the SOtM kit versus for the MC3+USB, @yabaVR's SMPS elimination test.  Lots of things, but all of this would be pointless if all I am doing is obsessing about HF.  I am really looking forward to this weekends listening, if the HAF filters provide the system / brain reset I am hoping for, then I will be a very happy boy.  In theory, the HAF filters should do just this, moving my system towards a frequency balance based on an established 'target curve', rather than it being what it just happens to be for the Blades in my room.  If nothing else it will be a useful experience.   If the HAF filters do not work for me, then I will need to formulate a plan B.  I am not sure what plan B will be, this depends on exactly what the HAF filter trial reveals.

Going back to the HQPlayer filter question.  Prior to adding the REF10 & SOtM kit, I had settled on a preference for poly-sinc-xtr NS9.  Prior to that, I had good results from poly sinc-shrt-mp, but over time I found that I was generally less keen on the mp versions.  Zoltan - It is interesting that with the REF10 and SOtM kit in your system you now have a preference for a particular mp version, this might just be your preference of course, but it could indeed be something specifically relating to the influence of the REF10.  I look forward to giving this a try, after my 'plan A' brain reset that is!

[Axel]

@Confused. : I hope you don’t mind me posting my findings in your thread.
I’ve had the SOtM Triple set in my system for nearly a month now.
My first impressions were not very favourable, in fact I didn’t like the sound which was thin and brittle at the top end, but this was with brand new components and new cables. I left the SOtM gear turned on permanently and with Roon playing a shuffle of all of my tracks. Roon has behaved impeccably, playing for over twenty days non stop without any problems at all. Testament to the reliability of Roon in my setup.
Listening now, things have improved considerably. I could bang on about the better bass, treble and room filling, almost wrap around soundstage etc., all true btw, but one word sums it up for me. Realism. I’ve never heard my system sound so good, so true and so Right. Listening now, it’s hard for me to grasp how the SQ could be bettered, but obviously my next move, when funds allow, will be to add a Ref.10 into the mix. I read that the sPS-500 is sensitive to mains cables, so I recently made one up with good quality cable, a silver plated mains plug and a silver plated Wattgate IEC connector although I couldn’t hear any difference compared with the stock cable, so maybe some burn in is needed?
I’m not hearing any of the annoying high frequency accentuation that Confused is hearing, but obviously it’s a different system, room, ears etc.
At the moment, I’m using the USB cable that came with the tX-USBUltra, but I’ve ordered a Wireworld Starlight Silver - I couldn’t justify spending £550 on the Platinum - to connect between it and the Mutec, hoping that this will bring further improvements. I’ve also got an Etalon Ethernet Isolator to add to the feed to the sMS-200 Ultra, and ordered some Ferite clamps for the mains extension blocks that all of my SMPSs are connected to. So some tweaking still to be done, but nothing too expensive for the time being! When I’m happy that everything has settled down, an interim measure will be to take some REW measurements with a view to getting Thierry to generate some HAF files for me.
Needless to say that I’m very happy with what the SOtM gear has done for my enjoyment of the music. I’ve had a large lump in my throat on several occasions. Thanks, @Confused, for your excellent posts and observations that have spurred me on to try this wonderful gear. I hope that this account doesn’t come across as too gushing and OTT, but these are my honest impressions.