Unless you are powering HE6, Hifiman Susvara, Abyss AB1266, or another headphone similarly revealing and extremely difficult to drive, then I would say there is no way you would be able to tell a difference. The kind of headphones as power hungry as would be necessary to take advantage of the massive power in balanced mode on the 789 are extremely few. So unless you have one of those very few headphones that are extremely insensitive and require serious amounts of power like a Susvara, don’t waste your money.I have owned this machine for half a year. The Roon support is excellent.
I would like to know if I add a THX 789 through XLR, will the SQ improve? since the THX 789 seems have a lower noise?
Thanks.
Welcome, looks like you made a great purchaseI just registered and this is my first post. I has been reading this website for about a month. The reviews here were done in a very impressive way. With certain engineer and research background, I always try to find a "proper" way to measure the performance of HiFi equipments. I used to trust others' experience, read a lot of articles and magazines, or try to conclude from some pieces of testing data that was done here and there.
Majority of time, I did not make good decisions based on those evidence. I had tried to buy something with good Price/Performance values and fantastic subjective reviews. That normally ends up with getting craps. I also tried to pay more premium and hope I can get what I paid for. Yes, sometime I did get something looks better, however the design is still sux, UX is still such bad, the quality control is still nowhere comparing to the price.
Discovering ASR opens a new door for me. I immediately placed my order after reading this review. For the first time I felt such confident about it. I will receive my Element X soon. I hope I would have some good time with it.
I received an Element X last week, which I intend to use in my office system. Playing with it over the weekend, I couldn't really hear any difference between its 7 internal filters, so I decided to measure the output of each filter playing back 44.1 kHz white noise. To my surprise, on my particular unit, all the filters measure identically! They all have this 'soft' attenuation:
Could it be that your source is already resampling in an improper way, i.e. Windows DirectSound?
No. Roon shows a lossless path to the Element X, and MQA works perfectly (though I doubt the latter could really be used to test for bit-perfectness!).
Also, I used exactly the same setup on with my other DAC, and it measures fine (see 2nd plot).
Eh, never mind. I'll just keep my Linn. I love the sound of it. I imagine that the Sabre DAC will impart a different sound to the music that I might or might not enjoy (perhaps, higher highs, or lower mids, or something along those lines that we hear with other DACs). The Matrix DAC/streamer certainly is an interesting proposition, though.
I'm currently liaising with my MA dealer about my filter issue. I've tried both USB and ethernet now, and in both cases I'm stuck with one very 'leaky' filter, irrespective of which filter I select on the Element X (24/44.1 white noise):
View attachment 46805
Unsurprisingly, this filter is causing extensive imaging (1kHz sine tone):
View attachment 46806
Looking at the manual, all the filter profiles show EDIT:good attenuation before the Nyquist frequency10dB attenuation by the Nyquist frequency:
View attachment 46808
EDIT: AndyetAmir's own measurements showfour of the filters going well beyond the Nyquist frequencyexactly the same:
View attachment 46810
I'm sure between MA support, my dealer and myself, we'll get my unit sorted out. EDIT:But whilst we wait for MA support to return from holiday, does anyone have any thoughts on all of the above?
Mani.
Yes, I realised as soon as I had posted, hence my edits.
Mani.