(24-Mar-2021, 19:09)Razza1974 Wrote: Well i had a 3 year old phantom gold and decided to upgrade to 2 new phantom I's (gold version). The hifi shop (great shop, nice owner, was knowledgeable and up to date on the devialets and talked a bit about things that might be coming in the future) and offered me a good deal for the trade in
Before i set them up, I compared the old gold to the new one. And just as he told me there is a subtle difference. I found the new golds not only looking a bit better (I like the matte colour) but also sounding a bit better. To my ears they were more lively, brighter sounding (not too bright). The oldie sounded a bit "muted" like he was a bit tired. Still sounding great and i think you would only notice when directly comparing them in the same room side by side.
Apparently there seems to have been a downgrade in sound quality if i am reading all the recent posts and this is indeed true. To my ears sound qualiy improved a bit. At the same time I have to say that to be able to "equalize" sound output would be very nice. Sometimes they have a "boom tskkk" profile (copied that from an old review on the gold i believe which described the exact same issue for the reviewer) and by this i mean sometimes the sound will get better by just downplaying the high tones a bit and also lessening the bass a bit. Its not with a lot of songs like this but often enough that being able to manipulate output would be great. Still like them a lot
I think I can understand what you mean with saying ‘seems to have been a downgrade in sound quality’, but from all the discussions here in which I participated it is not about a deterioration of sound quality, but rather a deterioration of hires signal throughput to the Phantom drivers. The SQ in the for us adult humans (probably 20+Hz to 16kHz- ) is perfectly preserved according to all measurements I recently did. Even better from 16Hz to 22kHz my measurements on old Gold Phantoms and on a Silver Phantom both in DOS1 and DOS2 using any of the lossless paths (all except Bluetooth) are great. Low distortion, way more room influences than speaker or source differences. I did repeated sweep measurements from 10Hz-30kHz with almost identical frequency response, from Silver as well as on Gold Phantoms. The Gold Phantoms have in the very low frequencies 10-90Hz a higher volume (about +4dB @20Hz decaying to asymptotically meet the Silver curve @90Hz) than the Silver, but else look very similar. The room characteristics is much more influencing the frequency response than the speakers or the signal path (optical, Spark, Roon, optical direct). In the high frequency I have not yet have sufficient time to identify differences. Both speakers go to 22 kHz almost in identical curves when the input is anything else than optical direct. In optical direct mode the frequency curves attenuate later and reach around 26kHz before being buried in the background noise in my recordings with the UMIK2. Surprisingly, very much the same on Silver as on Gold Phantoms. But besides that I had made blind tests with my wive and my parents five years ago and all including me could blindly identify the better performance/sound of the Gold Phantom compared to the Silver Phantom at same loudness. So, I fully acknowledge that our ears are more refined in hearing than great microphone technology as the UMIK2. Probably because our hearing can discern room influences much better that SPL recordings with microphones that are very precise, but do not tell us what really matters. Therefore, in conclusion I have no doubts that the latest Phantoms perform well, I just ordered a latest version of the Phantom I 108dB, as the Golds are now called and will compare them to my previous measurements.
