Recent content by EdW

If you purchase the RPI4 it is advisable to be buy a heatsink case in order to prevent the CPU running at a high temperature. A frequent recommendation is the FLIRC case which performs well, protects the RPI4 from mechanical damage, and is quite neat.

This looks like a good amp. If you like the sound and it continues to work well why do you need to consider a change? A new, more powerful, amp might be able to squeeze another 3dB out of your speakers but if overload isn’t an issue when you’re listening then this is no advantage. Room...

Since the introduction of the 1ET400 many have wondered when Purifi will deliver a more powerful amplifier so that large speakers like the Revel Salon 2 can be fully driven. More power without sacrificing the remarkable performance of the 1ET400. Some serious competition to McIntosh...

I’ve used the free version of Macrium Reflect to make a bootable clone of my 1TB disk on a 1TB SSB when I upgraded my desktop PC. Then I just made the SSD the boot disk in the bios and it worked immediately. Extremely easy!

You make a good point. Speakers distort way more than amps and DACs. Particularly at high levels and low frequencies. But speakers are pretty clean at modest levels where amps might suffer from crossover distortion and DAC linearity is (on low level signals) not be as good as when the signal...

To take a perhaps unlikely case we could find that the distortion of one piece of equipment in the chain is anti phase with the distortion generated in the second piece of equipment thus cancellation occurs resulting in lower overall distortion. So as usual what appears as a simple question...

Except in the rather unlikely case of both pieces of equipment producing identical distortion characteristic (same harmonic in the same phase) they do not add arithmetically - just as you correctly surmised. Generally non linearities are added on an ‘rms’ basis with the assumption that they...

Might break the shelf supporting the amp? More usefully a weight might stop a cheap amplifier case from rattling if it’s near the loudspeaker?

I too have heard the Mscaler/Dave demo at a local dealer. The Mscaler does have some attenuation (about 3dB) in all modes including bypass. I assumed this was to kill any intersample overs with the up to 16X interpolation. In fact the Chord DACs themselves have a similar protection which...

I’ve ripped all my CDs to my NAS. I used dbpoweramp software on my PC to perform the rip to FLAC. This S/W does a checksum on the rip to ensure no errors and helps out with metadata etc. You get a free trial period with the S/W but it’s not expensive to buy. I also use S/W called Asset UPnP...

AKM4499 vs ESS9038 PRO? If the DAC hardware surrounding the IC are well implemented both are superb. The ESS chip may be a little more tricky to design with (remember the ESS IMD hump?) but if we compare the Topping D90 vs the D90SE (AKM4499 vs ESS9038 PRO) we see that the D90S has a few dB...

If you really want to clean up the harmonics and noise on the mains supply then use a constant voltage transformer . . .but there are a few downsides 1. They are very bulky 2. They are very mechanically noisy (50+dB spl). - need to locate remotely 3. And not very efficient (typ <90%) - so...

So a bridged IET7040 might drive speakers like the Salon 2, KEF Blade or similar rather well. Pair that with a Topping D90SE and PRE90 and you’d have a pretty fine setup until of course the Topping power amps are available :)

One obvious way to get the increased power delivery into 2 Ohms in the IET7040 vs the IET400 would be to double up on the O/P stages. This would allow the same PSU to be used but just in a mono application. Such an amp might be expected to marginally improve the delivery into 4 ohms as a well...

Great setup with the P452. Very hard to better!