Phantom Gold Review in HiFi Choice

[yabaVR]

Sure. But it's only for the brave and strong hearted.

I have been wondering about the pin connections to the binding posts, but I thought 'as long as there are many in parallel...'. This shows that the best is probably a direct or soldered connection. You loose the XLR input this way. Maybe soldering will improve this too? Very brave stuff!

No, no you don't loose the XLR. The photo is taken in the mids of work. The XLR is directly soldered onto the 4 last pins on the right. And what a big improvement to the SQ of the XLR-Input. This was the main difference between RCA and XLR. The RCAs are directly soldered to the main board and some guys here at devialetchat mentioned they would prefer the RCA-Input over the XLR-Input SQ-wise (mostly timing-problems with XLR). This problem is solved by this mod.

With this modification you get rid of the Pickup-Circuit-Board with all it's soldered joints for the XLR-Input and the binding posts and the Metal-Clamps (don't know the material, looks like steel) .
It's a massiv reduction of joints and varied material in the signal path and it's even shorter. It's a big improvement in SQ I have to say. It's like focussing the already lasersharp D by a large margin.


About the parallel pins.
Devialet had to use so many due to the amount of current transportet to the binding posts. They use Pin-Connections for the fact they want to keep the manufacturing simple/fast/cheap. I think you can put together a D in less than 10min if you are trained, no soldering, just plugging and screws.

But that's a good example for meassurement against hearing. Sure the 7pins/binding post would meassure as being sufficient to the task...BUT does it sound as good as a single solid core cable to the binding posts.  No, it does not (I have to use 2pins for one cable to get sufficient contact though).

And here is the reason.
If you use 7 instead of 1 connection you have 6 more soldered joints for the signal. Expect every soldered joint to be a disruption to the signal. It would meassure the same resistance as a single wire for an instrument, but that's not the point...
Think of power (electrons) flowing like water. It's an assumption I know, but no scientist ever saw an electron moving through a wire. Does it push, jump from orbital to orbital, does it flow through? Take what you want. For sure it moves in a 3D-Manner and not as the 2D-Sinewave shown on the screen 
Ok, the signal takes its route from the amp to the binding posts and all of a sudden it has to diverse into 7 'streams' (the pins). There after it joints together as one. Think of it like water running through pipes. You will create a large amount of swirls, different timings the watermolecules pass through the pipes, etc...it's just an analogy (and yes, not proven), but you get the point.

Scientifically we step back and just look at the meassurements but I don't think that's all we want to know here.

The problem is we can not see what's going on and therefor have to rely on meassurements and theories and senses.

Last but not least it's a material thing we are talking about and not just a number on the screen...there is an edging/border/frame, movement, different materials, temperature, etc. ...and most of the scientific guys think that doesn't matter because they can visually not see the effects of it but anyhow they can not rely on their senses (for what ever reason).

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