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God is in the details...

I was reminded of that tonight. I was moving my gear around to make room for one of my turntable setups, none of which have been run for several years.

Most of the work was in re-cabling / re-shelving my DVD & VHS players (yah, my system is also a sorta AV setup... But most of the time, the AV stuff is all unplugged and it mostly acts as a very hair-shirt stereo).

But I did move the cMP2 around a bit while doing the other stuff. This takes some care as my harddrive and all my linear supplies are just sitting in the case (with some care to control vibrations), but not secured.

I put it all back together (after spending some time watching/listening to couple of movies through both the DVD and VHS players... They sound pretty good when the audio output is going directly through that hair-shirt stereo setup!). And it didn't sound right... Bright, splattery, conjusted, bass didn't flow. Since I moved it around, likely stuff shifted inside. I open it up and the HDD is no longer on it's damper feet (I have the drive mounted to a block of bamboo, wrapped in ERS cloth, sitting on three Herbie's feet, and weighed down with a VPI brick-substitute made from an old laminated transformer core). I put it back in as it should be, fire it up, and the sound is back to snuff.

I'm debating moving the drive outside the case if I can come up with a good mounting setup.

I'm also breaking in a couple of Hammond chokes in the AC for the dirty supplies... They're about a week into the break-in, I hear that they'll continue to change for at least another week, but I immediately heard some improvements in background blackness and bass detailing when I put them in and that has improved with break-in time. Remember, these are the dirty supplies... HDD, LCD, and the one active USB port for the mouse and touchscreen! They ARE serious linear supplies (oversized transformers & regulators, good diodes and caps, and 47,000uf caps on the raw DC) going through a 16'-long Ryland's-inspired braided extension cord to a separate AC circuit in my house as specified by cics. Shouldn't make much of a difference, huh? But it does and improving the AC filtering took it up another notch.

Some people want to use their computer to play music. They install some music software, maybe network it to other systems in their house, surf the net on it, run antivirus, let their kids use it for playing games, etc. They get one level of sound quality from this.

Other people want to setup a computer to play music. They build up a cMP2 or setup one of the many computer music playback configurations, PC, MAC, or Linex, XP, Vista, or Windows 7, whatever. They may select specific software and hardware, spend some time configuring the system to optimize it a bit, and likely use it only for music playback. They get a higher level of sound quality.

And a few people want to use a computer as component in a digital playback system. Here, they start to do the things that one would do to build a high-end CDP/DAC combo... Vibration control, optimized power supplies, radical system configuring, selected hardware, paying attention to connecting cabling, etc. I hear a lot of rewards in going this way... I won't be able to do a comparison between my cMP2 and my vinyl setup for a few more weeks, but my cMP2 is definitively besting all of my previous digital playback setups in every way. Yah, it's really nice to have my entire CD library on a harddrive and accessable with a few clicks of a mouse, but it's the sound quality that makes it really worthwhile.

And at this level, virtually everything matters. God is in the details!

Lotsa fun!

Greg in Mississippi

Everything matters!

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