Would it be worth paying someone to do it for you?

It's about time I wrote something about this DAC. We've had it on loan for 7 days now, so that's 168 hours of playing; it's been left playing 24/7.

I feel very much as if I'm setting a hostage to fortune; with Martin saying he's going to pontificate on it soon, I risk having mud all over my face. However, having gone on record in another thread here recently as saying we should trust our own ears, here goes...

I was worried on several counts when we started. Would our not-very-high-end-at-all (by the standards of HFC) kit even let us hear the difference between old sources and this DAC? Would hi-res be wasted on us? Would it all sound sterile and "hifi"? Would the out-of-band content (musical or filter-related spuriae) play havoc with my amps? Would a piece of kit from Arcam (sorry, but I'll admit I do carry prejudice about them from the past as being somehow "second-tier", and have never considered buying anything from them before) ever be any good and be worth this sort of money? So this DAC had a hill to climb before I even turned it on...

Wrong on all counts. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And boy, am I glad to say that!

In a nutshell, this is the most consistently and beguilingly musical source component that we have ever heard in our system. And I include in that assessment a large number of the averagely-crap LP pressings that live in our collection (though I'll admit that my old DIY phono stage may be responsible for some of that...).

To use an automotive analogy, it has the kind of unstressed "grunt", the iron-fist-in-velvet-glove feeling, that you get when going up a quality product range from something small-but-fast, with 4 cylinders and a turbocharger, to something with a more adequate number of cylinders and cubic centimetres.

It's agile, it's fast, it communicates timing very well, but it doesn't have any vestige of what I think of as the Krell sound, the "look-at-me-I'm-being-expensive-hifi" sound. It keeps all that hidden behind what could almost be a more valve-like demeanour, and just gets on with communicating the music. It simply doesn't make a fuss. At all. No glare, no shrieking, no sharpness.

Illustrative case: My wife's not a great one for sitting and listening to long tracts of music, she tends to fidget and look for something to hold her attention. She's also not a great fan of June Tabor. So I was playing JT this morning, my wife was sat on the sofa, and I realised she was (a) utterly lost in the music and (b) had tears rolling down her face. I think that ticks the "communication" box quite nicely. The track was Les Barker's "Sudden Waves", from Angel Tiger.

We have thrown all sorts of music at it over the last few days, some of the best-recorded and some of the worst in our collection. The best sounds divine, the worst is at least rendered tolerable, it's not torn to shreds.

Some examples:

- Up close and personal with John Lee Hooker in Dark Room, in an ad-hoc "field" recording of a solo gig at a uni in the 1970s, you sit with the audience, being slightly annoyed at their chatting as the song starts, and are swept up along with them until, at the song's end, you could hear a pin drop. And you follow the song perfectly, I've learned that this track is a timing torture test and the D33 navigates it with ease.

- Rusted Root's anthemic "All I want is Food and Creative Love" bounces infectiously around the room, the slight strains very audible in the tempo as the various band members don't seem to be quite sure when they agreed that they'd change gear...

- Jennifer Warnes' Way Down Deep just makes you fall in love with her; John Martyn's Solid Air is genius.

I could go on, but it's late.

Bass lines are rendered far better than I've heard before. String bass notes start and stop with aplomb, synthesised bass lines slam out of the speakers in a way that I simply didn't believe that the MartinLogans were capable of. A couple of examples of comedy "dub" bass today have been Moby's Jam For The Ladies, and Benjamin Zephaniah & Eliza Carthy reworking Tam Lin for The Imagined Village. I know it's a cliche to say that an extra octave turned up, but it did; and the power down there is astonishing.

Further up the frequency range, I've no complaint with male voices at all. Female voices, and instruments in the same sort of area - clarinet, harmonica - are perhaps pushed a shade further back in the mix than the perhaps over-bold presentation that I'm used to.

A new album turned up from Amazon this morning - Melody Gardot's The Absence. Normally, with new albums, we tend to stick them in the car for a while so we "get used" to them and see if we like them. Odd, but there you go. Anyway, I just ripped this one and stuck it on loud. Wow. Brand new, unknown music, and the D33 sold it to us, first play. No ifs or buts, we just sat there for the whole album, got to the end, looked at each other and said "that's good!".

The main thing that we haven't yet played with is the switchable digital filters. The word (via the dealer) from the Arcam rep was that I'd probably end up using it with the default filter - that is, good stop-band performance but with plenty of ringing. Keith Howard in his HFN review preferred Filter 2 - lousy stop-band performance but no pre-ringing, minimal post-ringing and fairly clean phase. Haven't played much, but so far I'm with Keith on Filter 2. Tried the default filter a couple of times much earlier in the run-in process, and each time I lost interest in the track before it had finished! F2 seems to deliver better timing, a more urgent and coherent performance. In our system at least - playing with phase and stop-band performance is going to be horribly system-dependent.

(I'm coming to the conclusion that Keith Howard and I seem to have a similar set of musical "values". I'm with him on coherent single-driver speakers, and now I appear to be on the same page as regards these filters...). Anyway...

So, what of hi-res, then? Would I hear the difference? Oh yes, at least once I'd persuaded the Squeezebox that I really didn't mind it streaming 5Mbit/s over the house network (see earlier post). I don't own any HD material, so I've just been playing with freebie samplers. Gwyneth Herbert is an artist I haven't heard before, but "Perfect Fit" is a 24/44.1 free download from Naim and sounds better than I've heard a CD sound before. A 10-minute Mozart track (at 24/96) from 2L is just amazing, I was swept away not just by the detailing but by the pulse and the general "humanity", if I can put it that way, of the music.

So there we are, we like it! Others may differ. You'll notice an absence of terms like soundstage, or stage depth, or that sort of thing. What we value above all is the ability to communicate musical intent. I want to be swept up into, and lost in, the music; not distracted from it by details. That's not to say the D33 isn't detailed - I think it is - but it's putting the detail into the service of the music, not highlighting it in order to sound "hifi". Hence the earlier reference to valves!

KH commented in his HFN review that his only potential criticism was that he felt that the DAC sometimes pulled its punches when asked to deliver "extremes", in favour of a more even-handed approach. I can see what he means, I think, but if pulling the occasional punch on some extremely dynamic "audiophile" material means that the rest of our music collection is rendered listenable, that's a price I'll pay. The DAC's tonality certainly strikes me as "warm" and embracing, but it seems to me that that's being achieved via an absence of "cold" nasties rather than via any deliberate policy of warming...

For reference, the system surrounding this D33 is:

- Digital sources are mostly Squeezebox Touch (doing PCM streaming as per previous post) over digital co-ax with occasional use of Linn Ikemi over AES/EBU.

- Power to D33 supplied by PS Power Plant Premier, itself fed from an Isol8 G2 minisub.

- D33 connected over balanced VdH The Second to Music First transformer passive pre-amp

- MF pre-amp connected single-ended (using pseudo-balanced silver-on-copper cable) to a pair of 400W mono switching amps

- MartinLogan Ascent speakers, stators powered from the PS PPP.

- 6x6m room, sofa 4m or so from speakers, a completely uncalibrated iPhone app says that SPL peaks are around 99dB at the sofa.

That's about it. Back soon when I've played with filters, mains supplies (may as well...) and also tried hooking it up to the TV and BD player...

Feedback welcome. Please. I haven't heard other high-end DACs at home. Am I about to make an expensive mistake...?

Wise words, Martin, thank you. Yes, the two of us have fallen in love with it; there's an argument that that may not be a bad thing for something that we'll have to live with for longer than some marriages, but that's for another day... :-)

Compare and Contrast is the hard part. I've asked here a couple of times what else I should be listening to, and haven't really had any answers. MSB, DCS, etc are too expensive. The Metrum has limited connectivity and anyway is a buy-before-you-try deal, which I'm not happy with. I've never been a huge fan of the "Naim sound" and anyway they'll soon want to sell me another £2k box in the shape of a power supply... What else is there...? The restrictions imposed by my disabled son mean that I basically need regular-shaped boxes that go in slots on a wall, nothing with exposed valves or significant heat output is possible, which rules out kit like the Lector stuff which I've loved the sound of in the past - again, that organic sound :-).

Those who live in or near large metropolises may find this easier, but here north of Cambridge - an affluent Uni and hi-tech town of 100k+ souls, as unaffected as anywhere in the country by the recession - there's no dealer that stocks this sort of stuff. The local dealer, whom I've dealt with for years, now stocks much more multi-room and home cinema stuff than he does 2-channel, and does a lot of custom install work, presumably 'cos that's where the money is. He's dropped his Absolute Sounds franchise because it wasn't viable. The county's other major town, Peterborough, is deep in recession and there's no significant hifi dealer there that I'm aware of; so that's pretty much it for Cambridgeshire.

I'll see how much longer I can keep the D33 for... :-)

I know! I think that the one on the market square was University Audio, wasn't it? Cambridge Audio was somewhere up Chesterton, unless I'm imagining it. I used to go to a chap - Pete Moulton, if I recall correctly - who ran Cam Audio on Mill Road, then there was Steve Boxhall up Victoria Road as well. All now gone. Cam Audio became a fruit & veg shop. When Steve Boxhall shut up shop, the premises were taken by Bev Reynolds from The Audio File in Bishop's Stortford, who expanded her empire up here in collaboration with a local chap (ex-sound engineer) named Steve Streater. I have no idea what the commercial relationships (if any) now are, but The Audio File, owned by Steve, now relocated to Mitcham's Corner, remains our only hifi dealer, as far as I know...

Yes, I think that if nothing else at all useful has come out of this thread - and it probably hasn't - then that streaming config setup "tweak" - if that's the right word - was worthwhile.

Have extended D33 dem into next week, and have arranged for a friend to come and act as 3rd set of ears (and bring his old Meridian G08 to give us a fixed point) over the weekend...

Rigged up my first ever direct digital feed from a Blu-ray player to this DAC this afternoon (I have a very nice TV, bought "off the wall" at the branch of Sevenoaks in Peterborough as it was closing down...) but I'm not a 5.1 home cinema buff...). Cor! I suspect that's more a "cor!" at what I've been missing in general, rather than at the D33 in particular, but still, very very nice...

Yes, I cannot understand how such kit remains legally on the market - and certainly not ethically. The CE certification for audio equipment IIRC requires that no part of the case rises above 40degC above ambient, with just a let-out for "indicators". The legislators clearly didn't anticipate that anyone would design a product with a large part of its workings being fragile, hot and carrying potentially lethal voltages outside its "case". There is also a drop-test onto concrete and remaining safe requirement - again only got round because the drop test, again IIRC, is for a level drop, unlike the requirements for mobile equipment which actually require you to drop it at the worst possible angle.

Certainly when I was the Site Product Safety Engineer (on top of my normal duties as a design engineer) for one of my employers I would never have let such kit be designed let alone released on the public market, especially being mindful of changes in the law since the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, where you can now pick up automatic jail sentences for allowing unjustified risks to public safety. If you look in the product manual (or sometimes on the kit itself) you will see the CE declaration of conformity: the person who signs this is the man who goes to jail when people get hurt - even if the actual design error was by somebody else within the company.

My wife has MS and has had to largely give up cooking because the resultant lack of co-ordination and poor reaction time led to burns and dropping of pans of hot liquids - I can imagine her comments if she had to give up using our entertainment equipment because she might burn or electrocute herself.

Congratulations Pete. I guess it just wormed its way under your skin...

So all the money you saved on the SB has been spent on the ARCam!!

Good to hear it is all going so well.

Absolutely fascinating, Pete.

I've just bought a SBT. It will eventually be used for streaming but my main complaint is how darned difficult it is to use compared to my Roberts Stream 83i. Adding internet radio stations on the 83i is quick and simple with useful functionality (last listened etc.). SBT is a nightmare. But it sounds better!

Secondly, why don't Logitech allow WMP as the server? I don't really want to download the SB server software to stream music off the HD but I have to. Nuts.

I wonder how difficult it will be to start streaming (Roberts was virtually instant).

Then do I go NAS or just add a large portable HD to the PC and do I buy a good DAC?!

Which Qnap, Martin?