Home Digital Drive

Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

RE: Interesting

Yes, I have plenty of higher-rez material but the vast majority of my library is Redbook CD.

I was very disappointed with the new int. amp at 575wpc. The OPPO was fine with my old BMC C1 int. amp, much like my Esoteric was, only the OPPO being more musical.

Once I was able to extract fabulous new levels of performance from the new int. amp the musicality or sonic characteristics was not the issue by any means. Yes, the new amp was a tad more forward in its soundstaging but no big deal. The cause of this overwhelming electronics induced jump factor was limited almost solely to the excessive watts per channel.

Partially because of other technologies I employ at the components that among other things makes my system extremely dynamic. Well, if you combine an already extremely dynamic system (now with a slightly forward soundstage) plus with an amp that's now kicking out potentially 3 times the power of my previous BMC, that became a big problem with the dynamics of initial attacks so in-my-face and sooooo unnatural. Plus my listening volume ranges can range from say 84db to 105db depending on the music.

My APL was the newer more custom version of your's, which I think was the Denon 3809?? at about $5000. Yes, it was significantly more musical than the $5000 Sony SCD-1. But then again, a $600 Marantz or $250 OPPO was probably significantly more musical than the SCD-1.

Two things about the APL.

1) Although it was a good performer, I became convinced there was a lot of brainwashing going on about just how fabulous Alex was and his APL products were. A group of guys I was with at THE Show 2006 who all had fairly to well-trained ears (more than me) were listening to my own APL unit being used in nuforce's exhibiting room and we were comparing it to a $2000 Marantz unit that nuforce brought with them. I thought the Marantz was every bit as good as the APL and darn near identical. After hours of A/B comparisons, the group went their separate ways. I confirmed what I heard with my very savvy buddy who's an APL nut (and owns APL's $35k Esoteric unit even now) and posesses very well-trained ears. He said, yes, except he thought my APL unit had just a tad more definition in the bass. I'm thinking, what the frick? All this hoopla over APL products and it sounds near identical to a $2k off-the-shelf Marantz?

2) I had already grown to greatly dislike Alex, who IMO is a bad seed. Between that and the so-so performance and I started looking for a replacement. That APL unit wasn't even in the same league as my $9k Esoteric CDP. I also vowed never to deal with custom modders again simply because product support boils down to one busy and potentially flaky modder. So I apply risk mgmt there.

Back to the APL's performance. To confirm or solidify my thoughts on the APL's performance, my buddy who's now owned the $35k APL for about 5 years and lives 2500 miles away so it's not like we get to hear each others' systems. When I was exhibiting in Newport Beach in 2011, he joined me there and with my humble system and my product only operating at maybe 3 - 5% of its full potential (my product takes weeks and months to advance in performance), my buddy's listening to his music and in particular Miles Davis Kind of Blue and he said it was the best mid-range he'd yet heard.

I also had a local friend with the same APL Denon 3809 model as mine and he too purchased the Esoteric UX-3SE to replace it.

Audio's a funny, odd business. I suspect there's a lot of this mind-over-matter type situations like this one, even with some very smart fellers, and ever since that experience I try to stay far away from all of them if/when I can spot them. I've learned my lesson and it wasn't cheap. Besides, I can extract levels of performance these custom modders couldn't even begin to approach, and I never even have to pop the top.

I also realized that my buddy who was and remains very knowledgeable about live and reproduced music and the industry in general, was in the end, not much different from many and was potentially just as gullible.

Oh, well. Live and learn.



Edits: 02/14/15

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