The Mike Moffat (#2 at Schiit) Blog

So by the time I was in ninth grade, I had a paper route, a Heathkit Williamson amp (tubes!), A Dyna PAS-2 (more tubes!) , all the space I had in my room filling AR-4a speakers, and a brand new Stanton 681EE cart. I was satisfied by then that tubes ruled over early SS which as I may have said sounded like noisy ass. I was starting to feel really smug over being a tube holdout because by now, solid state stereo gear had all but replaced tube stuff. Because the deepest discounts were available on carts, I decided to find out all I could about them, and my buddy Dennis was doing the same. The big three brands were Shure, Pickering, and Empire. Grado was a runner-up, but still widely available. Stanton was a separate Pickering brand, there was an exotic Danish cart available called B&0, and a big, fugly square British thing called the Decca Mark II that would only work with a Decca cast iron plumbing pipe kinda arm with a miniature anvil looking counterweight that tracked at 4 grams. 4 GRAMS?!!? f**k that. -- If I had only known.

Anyway, Dennis had the B&O, and I had the Stanton and we would battle them over and over, but there was no clear winner. Some tracks sounded better than others on each. About that time, Grado did a (unique at the time) moving coil that was so low output that it wouldn't work with any preamps. (I still have one today I bought many years later. - When I finally met Joe Grado he told me low output was why he licensed all of his MC cart patents out to the Japanese.)

Even though it was around this time I was distracted by the pursuit of girls, I still kept my audio system going as a hobby. There was just less money to feed it, and the girls liked it since I hadn't yet started to pay more attention to the audio than them. I was just fine until this guy named Lew Brown introduced me to a system with entirely different transducers. Quads and Decca. Limey Hi-Fi? At least I had the tubes right.

 

I had always wondered why Joseph Grado had created all of those Moving Coil patents and then abandoned making MC for making Moving Iron cartridges. Now I know. Cool story, btw.

 

But if we're talking about simplicity, that's the simplest route (unless you're talking about CD transport to DAC via digital out). All the other solutions are way less simple and can be quite time consuming.

 

I'd put off buying one of these but I really am clueless with the finer points of setup and don't want to futz with a bunch of printed protractors. This seems pretty dummy-proof. Especially useful as 1) I need to set up my dad's new rig and 2) I've had my stylus long enough and done enough dumb things that I might need to compensate for some bumps.

 

As badass as that is, no way I would drop $50 to buy something that can only be used to set up my dad's decent but cheap hand-me-down table. I could consider it for my SL 1200 though, as I won't be changing any time soon. Thanks. $50 for printed laminated paper vs $50 for a big piece of rubber with ridges in it. yay vinyl :/

 

Yeah, there are other things to get tweaky with, for vinyl. Hold off for a bit until you get an idea for how it sounds. I swap cartridges around, so i do need to dial it in, but with 1 cart on one arm, paper should be fine?

 

@baldr my intro into music in general was via a Dynaco PAS-3/ST-70 combo into Advents source by a Marantz tuner or an AR turntable. I even think that Stanton cart may have been the main at the time before my dad swapped over to Shures. Every single piece of that gear is still either with me or my father, and most of it still sounds pretty damn good. Love to hear about the classic gear experience. We never made it over to the quads though.

 

Interesting run-down of digital interfaces by @baldr on his blog on HF. I suspect this is in anticipation of an impending release of some sorts...

Not sure if he's planning to cross-post, so I'm putting it here:

 

OK, OK.............. I am still working on USB interfaces - BUT

(rant) Thirty years ago we had people with car-priced audio system hardware (that they were always dissatisfied with) with less than 10 musically insipid audiophile Lps (that they were too musically lame to dislike).

Today we have music hoarders with hundreds of thousands of hours of audio content stream-able or on a storage device/computer (but they always want more or more bitrate). They couldn't listen to it all in ten lifetimes. They f**k up all this music they do not have the time to hear by running it through the snot coated lens of USB. They do this for convenience and they want it right away.

They have no idea that having a physical CD, playing it back on a real transport coupled with a proper interface which was designed for audio is the only digital way to fly. Period. Try it if you have fallen into computer audio apostasy.

I have steadily improved this unfortunate interface. I do so only because of its ubiquity. This interface suffers from unfortunate layers (with different OSes (or not)) which add sonic vomit to the audio information. This is whether or not AOIP is involved (different fucked-up sounding layers). I am not jacking myself off by subscribing to any notions that any new USB (or AOIP) will ever beat physical CDs. I have always postured that USB as a sellout for convenience, and that it is a sex with chickens like interface for digital audio. So as our USB interfaces improve, the chicken becomes prettier and stinks less. I have always said this.

Further, audio progressives pronounce CDs as digital audio media to be dead. I view this prevailing attitude as a fantastic opportunity to buy a f**k-ton of software on the cheap. That audio opinion leaders are almost always myopic.

Here's the rub - who wants to make a transport? They break, they are hard to source for long life products, and they involve major OEM components which severely mess with supply chains. So until I make a transport, it is really tough to make a claim to a solution of the USB/AOIP cesspool problem.

Meanwhile, the relative unavailability of modern transports should keep the price of digital media low for a while longer, until we hit the inevitable inflation and then bubble.

Sigh, if people do not want to hassle with CDs they certainly will not have the endurance for analog. Convenience really sux for audio quality. If they only knew.

Don't get me wrong – I will still endeavor to improve interfaces to beat any in the USB/AOIP arena. It makes sense for those who demand convenience over quality. One can argue a case for syphilis cures as being less consuming of resources than sexual partner reeducation camps. That reeducation curriculum is CDs rule – period. (\rant)

 

Long live the CD transport. I have burned all my USB bridges, transferred all my FLAC files to discs and use my Tascam transport for playback exclusively. The difference is noticeable even for a newbie like me. Used CD's are dirt cheap and if you know how, you can transfer Tidal to CD as well. I hope the CD never dies.

 

Mike...wow. Of course most everyone here wants to get the best quality. We all love music and we want to hear it in it's most pristine and idyllic form. And I have to laugh while I read your post and stared at the usb cable protruding from the back of my Gungnir Multibit. I guess I've fallen victim to convenience you allude to in a sense. But it's not like I won't work harder to get better audio quality, I will. And it's not like I wouldn't spend more money, I have...many times.

I love your DACS Mike. I really do. I guess I need to get serious about giving up the convenience of usb if I want to get to the promised land.

 

From one Iceman to another, coax is really worth the effort. You don't have to go off the reservation like me and ditch the computer for a CD transport but a good usb to spdif converter will help. I had a Singxer for a bit and it was an improvement over straight USB but the transport was another notch above that solution.

 

Most of us here don't use USB in our digital audio chains anymore, but 99.99% of the digital listening world does (I should amend this to say 99.99% of those who bother with anything beyond the built-in DAC of their computer or phone).

 

Software and OSes f'ing with the audio stream before it's gets to USB is a separate issue, one would like to see fully handled on all platforms.

 

You are now honour-bound to call any future USB upgrade board "Sexy Chicken" of course.

@Ice-man - USB to your Gungnir Multibit? Now you made Little Baby Jesus sad. Time to bodge together something with good clocks and BNC SPDIF?

 

I would be willing to invest in a good transport and furthering my CD collection (in fact I would love to) but I'm moving overseas in the not-so-distant future and it's just not practical to me to invest in a transport and build my CD collection now. I feel like I'm getting a pretty good signal from PC Coax to Modi Multibit and I'm enjoying it.

 

In your esteemed estimations, what percentage improvement is all this dickering around for? (vs non-shitty USB).

 

It isn't only transports that are becoming rare. CD's are getting harder and harder to find.

Most of my collection is on CD, but with big retail stores like HMV closing my options are mostly limited to the interwebs. I find it harder to justify buying a physical CD and shipping it over the convenience of a digital download.

 

I'm still all about physical media. Love my CD collection and my vinyl.

But, the majority of my day is spent in front of a computer and any kind of transport makes little sense for work.

So, what are us poor saps to do? I have a Regen that helps a bit, but it's still USB. Cheap usb to toslink converters don't seem to be worthwhile. Others will point to a Lynx card or something similar, but I don't have $700 to fix USB on a $500 DAC.

 

In that situation I listen a lot with [computer/phone streaming app --> network-connected Raspberry Pi2 running Volumio + Pi2Media board --SPDIF--> DAC+amp] and find that to be a nice affordable intermediate solution. When I want higher quality I can tell Volumio to play FLACs stored locally on the Pi or on a network share instead of streaming to the Pi. This solution at ~$150 is a strong value IMO.