I'll send you an email...

Nick, thanks for 'pushing' Peter into this.

Mani.

Hi Paul, I'll be in touch in a week or so to arrange to come down to yours... unless you'd rather delay until your NOS1 upgrade is done.

Cheers, Mani

Hi Peter, I'm just off to catch a plane, but I simply HAD to comment on this first. Please reserve two USB upgrades for my two beautiful 'off-white' NOS1s. I'm back in the country on the 23rd, and my NOS1s will be on their way to you on the 25th.

This is very, very exciting stuff.

I have a quick question for you though: Where on Earth do you find the time to do all this stuff? Whatever 'efficiency pills' you take, I want some!

Mani.

Hi Flecko, in answer to your Qs:

I haven't really looked into changing any hardware for a while now. I still love the idea of listening to some Swiss amps though - FM Acoustics, Soulution and Dartzeel. But with the prices that these command, it would be just listening and not buying I think.

Yes, I still very much like the Sanders Magtech amp. It is the smoothest transistor amp I've ever heard and, as I've alluded to before, just works so nicely with the Quad electrostatics. I strongly suspect it would work well with other speaker types too.

I actually never managed to compare them against each other - I sold the Aleph4 a few days before the Magtech arrived. But if I could have only kept one, it would have been the Magtech. The Aleph4 was such an interesting design (100W transistor single-ended class A) and sounded really, really 'nice'. But it was just too much of a heat-generator for me to be using as my main amp day-in, day-out.

In summary, I'm very, very happy with the Magtech.

HTH.

Mani.

EDIT:

Sorry, I forgot one of your Qs:

You may have to contact Roger Sanders for the official answer, but I don't think it is. I say this because Roger recommends using the single-ended inputs to the amp and not the balanced inputs. If it were a true balanced design, I suspect this recommendation would be reversed. However, in my system, the amp is dead quiet and sounds wonderful via its single-ended inputs.

Thanks Peter. I'll just use the FF800 for recording from FM in my office then.

But just in case another 'Nosser' is thinking of adding a Juli@ card for whatever reason, you can do this and it will work, but you'll be restricted to using the NOS1 with Engine#3 only, as the 'correct' KS selection cannot be made. Unless a future release of Windows ever works better with Engine #3 than #4, this is probably a total no-go. Of course, choosing any other make of PCI card with its own drivers should work fine alongside a NOS1.

Oh, I alluded to selling my new Juli@ card if this wouldn't work out. No need - my brother's already taken it off my hands. As I said in my previous post, this is a great PCI card, especially for the price. For anyone looking for a nice 2-channel PCI card, I recommend it wholeheartedly - remember, this is how the NOS1 (probably the world's best DAC) is interfaced to the computer.

Mani.

Paul, thanks for your kind words. A lovely wife, lovely kid(s) and music with a lush mid-range - what more could a man ask for?

I'm really looking forward to reciprocating and hearing your setup sometime in August. As discussed, I'll bring my Berning Siegfried 300B OTL amp down with me - the NOS1/Siegfried/AN-E might prove very interesting indeed. We'll see...

Cheers,
Mani.

Peter, I'm not sure if this is the best place on the forum to place this, so please feel free to move...

I've just placed a Juli@ soundcard directly into a PCI slot in the music PC in my office to allow me record from my FM tuner which sits in my office. The quality of live FM broadcasts is better than perhaps many people appreciate, if you have a decent tuner and a large antenna high up on your roof, and there are quite a few live broadcasts this summer that I'd like to record. Dragging the PMII into my office to record these broadcasts just isn't an option I'm willing to pursue, so instead, I went ahead a bought a Juli@ card for €100. BTW, for those of you who might be looking for a decent cheap PCI soundcard, I can recommend the Juli@ wholeheartedly - for this sort of money, it's a steal.

In my office system, I'm currently running 0.9z-4-1 (will upgrade to 0.9z-5 soon) and I also have my second NOS1. Having placed the Juli@ soundcard in the PC, I'm now having a bit of a problem:

Engine #3
- I can see a Juli@ card marked 'Speakers (3- Juli@ Audio)' - this is the new Juli@ card
- I can see another Juli@ card marked 'Speakers (2- Juli@ Audio)' - this is the interface for the NOS1
- I can select either card
- everything works fine (remembering to activate 'Mon' in the Juli@ control panel for 'Speakers (2-Juli@ Audio)')

Engine #4
- I can see a Juli@ card marked 'KS: Juli@ Audio >>= esi_wave1'
- I can see another Juli@ card also marked 'KS: Juli@ Audio >>= esi_wave1'
- if I select the first KS card on the list, my new Juli@ card works fine
- if I select the second KS card on the list, XX simply switches back to the first KS card on the list

With Engine #4 selected, XX doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between the two Juli@ cards.

If this is a quick fix (I really hope it is), it'd be great if you could implement this in the next XX update. If the solution is more involved, that's OK - I'll just use my RME FF800 in my office (and sell the almost-new Juli@! if I can).

Cheers,
Mani.

I've just spent the day with a fellow 'Nosser' Scroobius (Paul) listening to some great music from 2L and iTrax. He's a lovely guy and great company. Of course, I was interested in hearing Paul's thoughts on the NOS1 vs. the PMII and was totally unsurprised by his response - the NOS1 is better by quite a margin.

I've heard from another source that there is at least one PMII owner in the US that is very surprised with my finding that the NOS1 is bettering the PMII (as a DAC) in SQ. He is a high-end dealer and has access to pretty much everthing. Now, this guy uses the PMII with the highly-touted 'Merging Technologies Mykerinos' card and it could well be that with this card the PMII is taken to another level of performance. This may in fact be true - if I feed an analogue signal into the PMII and use its ADC and then DAC in series, then what comes out sounds pretty much exactly the same as what went in. There is no doubt in my mind that the PMII is an outstanding machine. But I think interfacing it with a computer is its Achilles' heel. If I had $6600 free, I would order the Mykerinos card and find out for myself whether the NOS1 remains the better DAC of the two. But I don't. So I'm hoping that this dealer will contact Peter and get hold of a NOS1 himself. I'd be very interested in his finding.

Mani.

Hi Juan, this beautiful post requires a more in-depth response than I currently have time for, but for now I'd like to pick up on two points that especially resonated with me.


Yes, yes, yes! Like you, I haven't bothered playing around with XX settings since trying 'Special 128' with the NOS1. And like you, my legacy DAC has remained switched totally off (although its ADC will be used this weekend to record from vinyl).

Again, I totally agree - it's something I've alluded to in the past. But this is not due to HDCD per se, it's due to the HDCD decoder that Peter is using in XX, IMO. I believe this because my DAC has a built-in HDCD decoder which is obviously superior in SQ to the one in XX.


Ditto.

Thanks again for a beautiful post.

Mani.

Peter's findings are exactly the reason I went for a 'star earthing' system  (see http://www.phasure.com/index.php?topic=1445.0) - all components (including the PC) have 0V between them. HOWEVER, there are a couple of things that I feel need to be done over and above this for the best SQ:

1. The earthing system should have an ultra-low impedance to ground. This may save your life some day. But apart from this, any noise generated by components (think switching power supplies, etc) will have an easy way to ground, and therefore be less 'tempted' to travel across interconnects to get dissipated.

2. The earth used for the music system should be isolated from that used by the rest of the house. Now, this poses a real problem, as the Neutral is bonded to the earth at the inlet to the building (in the UK at least). The only solution I know of is to use an isolation transformer.

Mani.

Hi GerardA, I will download your file when I get home this weekend and take a listen then. But my experience of recording from vinyl seems to match yours closely - recorded 16/44.1 files sound substantially better than most CD rips. HOWEVER, with a [properly broken in] NOS1 most CD rips sound very, very listenable... so much so, in fact, that I no longer even think about buying hirez files.


Do you mean it could have been 20bit/60KHz, or something? Or are you talking about the quality of the ADC?

Now that I have a DAC capable of getting the best out of 16/44.1 files, I'm going to reassess the resolution I use for recording from vinyl. I had decided to go for 24/192, even though this always seemed like overkill to me. But it may be that this is no longer necessary if a NOS1 is used for playback. Something to try when I have some time...


I very much look forward to hearing your thoughts about this Peter.

Mani.

Hi Per, I think I'd prefer the flexibility of a separate scope. Also IIRC, the new PS Audio P5 and P10 units are quite expensive, >$4000. I've never bought a scope before, but I suspect you could get quite a nice one for this sort of price.

Of course, a scope wouldn't clean the mains up for you... But having had a PS Audio P300 (still have) and P600 (sold a few years ago) and also a PurePower 2000 (still have), I'm not convinced that a pure sinewave is necessary to get the best SQ. Indeed, on their older products, PS Audio offered 'multisine' functions which deliberately flattened the top of the sine wave, in order to improve the SQ.

I haven't given Peter's first post in this thread enough time to analyse and fully understand, but it seems to me that the earthing/grounding system is key. My understanding is that no filters, isolators or regenerators are permitted to manipulate the earthing/grounding system, for safety reasons. My hypothesis is that it's not just earth/ground loops that we have to worry about, but also 'noise' getting transmitted from one component to another via the earth/ground connection. This situation is exacerbated by using a PE which is shared with the rest of your house... and street! I was first alerted to this by the work of Arthur S. Kelm at 'Ground One' (http://www.ground1.com) who seems to be pretty much the expert in this field. If you read his site, you'll notice that I've adopted much of his approach and am very happy with the result. But I think air-borne 'noise' still needs to be addressed, ehich he doesn't seem to cover.

I'm still interested in hearing recommendations for a good scope...

Mani.

Mani.

Hi juanpmar, thanks so much for starting this thread. I have a friend who is interested in buying a NOS1 and has asked me to put a PC together for him. I can't replicate my own music PCs for him as the Zalman TNN cases I use are no longer made, and in any event, the mobos/components have moved on in the last 18 months or so. This thread will really help me to put a nice PC together for him.

Thanks.

Mani.

Hi Peter, thanks for sharing.

Since completing my dedicated mains line, I've become convinced that the mains is the single most important element contributing towards the sound. However, as you said, it's complicated and simply buying a mains filter, isolator and/or regenerator may not be the answer. Like you, my experience is that there seems to be a substantial air-borne component also.


Agree 100%. I'd like to buy one - do you have any recommendations?

Mani.

Oh, I'm not going to try this. I'm saving my pennies for future 'official' NOS1 upgrades...

Mani.