It wil be two weeks this coming Monday since we started breaking in the Meitner pair - about 300 hours.

We figure about one month, or 600 hours, is about the minimum breakin period for these puppies.

After the first week, with all of the improvements over the previous, non-signature editions, the sound was still somewhat lean.

Now, at about two weeks, the sound is already at, oh, at about 90-95% of the full weight of our previous pair. One can still tell they are not completely broken in during really quick percussion transients in the upper midrange which still sound a little brittle.

Our impresions of the overall improvements of the CDSD Signature and DCC2 Signature editions are the same as that after the first few days:

An evolutionary improvement on just about all fronts with no negative side-effects (thank goodness, as sometimes ‘improvements’ are often a very mixed blesing - think ‘Adobe Photoshop’ - but not in this case) with primarily a darker background feeding more detail, especially in the bass, better midi- and micro-dymamics, and in general more clarity feeding the awesome ’signature’ transparency which is the real revolutionary impact of Meitner ’s consumer-targetted digital equipment, from our point of view.

We are playing CDs on the Emm Labs pair 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

At night, and when we have guests auditioning other equipment, we ‘play waves’:

This CD is mostly ‘white noise’, with some amount of bass when the waves crash on the beach and some diminutive bird calls in the background. Very easy on the ears and one can listen to it as background ‘music’ over and over and over and….

… without going… batty.

Unfortunately, our 3-week update on the breaking-in process will be a little late… because we plan on attending the Stereophile HE 2006 show!

The updated Meitner DAC and transport arrived today.

For those of you unfamiliar with the digital equipment from Emm Labs, these are the widely acknowledged current state-of-the-art in CD and SACD players. They are so well-respected among the cognesceti that you can read many places about this component and that component, at every price point imaginable, which are defintiely better than the Meitner. Not because they are better, but because they all wish they were better. It has become ‘The One to Beat’.

Our previous pair, with the gloss finish and the transport with the fancy metal drawer, are headed out the door, so we won’t be able to compare the pre-signature and signature versions side by side… you know, play a CD track on one then the same track on the other - but those types of shootouts don’t tell the whole story anyway.

Besides, the Meitner takes a good month to break-in. A good lonnnnng month.

And this includes playing lots of ordinary everyday redbook CDs and not just SACDs.

Why?

To break-in the upconversion hardware and who knows what else that is unique to the redbook playback hardware. Otherwise redbook CDs sound harsh and bright just like….like the player hadn’t been broken in yet….This is why some people on the net talk about ordinary CDs not sounding as good as SACDs. On our older Meitner it was very hard to tell the difference between redbook and SACDs - usually we had to look at the box or the front of the transport to see which it was. SACDs have a little more detail and resolution, a little more separation. In fact, it is my experience that redbook CDs sound less harsh and less digital when compared to SACD.

This also includes using the analog output stage during the entire break-in process.

Why?

Because the Meitner output stage is amazingly pure - but it doesn’t sound amazingly pure until it is broken in. I often feel that people who prefer to use a preamplifier with the Meitner (or Prestige for that matter) either have not broken in the output stage or are looking for a little tube warmth in their overall system configuration - which is fine, but does not have anything to do with the Meitner per se, but the system temperature as a whole.

Of course, before any break in happens we need to plug the things in and find somewhere to put them (or the other way around…). Hopefully we will get that going tonight…

Then we can talk about first impressions - but that is all they will be until we get some solid playing time on these puppies…

There are some pictures, of course, in the meantime

Emm Labs CDSD Signature CD / SACD Transport

Emm Labs DCC2 Signature DAC

Enjoy!

Just some fun pictures we had laying around on the hard disk…

Closeup of the diamond tweeter and ceramic midrange of the Marten Coltrane speaker. This is the walnut version of these speakers and the wood is starting to take on a nice rich patina as it ages.

The Edge NL Reference 800 watt ‘pyramid’ amplifier. This picture really captures the sleek metalic look of the amplifiers.

Closeup of the top of the Edge NL Reference 800 watt ‘pyramid’ amplifier. Here you can almost see how nice it is to touch these amplifiers, the powder coating feeling very nice, almost soft, to the touch. The cap on top and the way the sides are fastened makes the amplifiers water tight (and maybe even dust tight, which would be nice… see below).

The EMM Labs Meitner DCC2 at dark on an HRS M3 Isolation Base. This picture captures the color-coding of the buttons nicely, as well as showing a how the volume knob is so much fun to turn by hand.

The Lyra Titan cartridge on a Brinkmann tonearm. This picture does not show it perfectly, but there is this feeling of the loooong tonearm snaking out fron the depths at the back of the turntable, the head ready to strike with it diamond tooth into the platter.

Closeup of the Brinkmann tonearm. Ah, engineering. Lovin’ it.

Closeup of the Lyra Titan cartridge. Dust. There are lots of little dust particles, perhaps hairs from the wool carpet. They do not look serious enough toimpact the sound. But they are everywhere…

The Blue Magic Diamond cartridge on the Walker tonearm

Closeup of the Blue Magic Diamond cartridge on the Walker tonearm. More dust particles.

The Brinkmann Balance turntable control buttons. Left is 33 rpm, right is 45 rpm, center is OFF.Sometimes we turn it on and off just for the fun of touching the buttons.

The Nordost Vidar cable burn in device. More pictures from the post a few days ago.

The Nordost Valhalla cables on the back of the Marten Coltrane loudspeakers. I like the reflections of the cables and binding posts in the shiny carbon fiber on back of the Coltrane.

The Nordost Valhalla cables on the back of the Marten Coltrane loudspeakers. More reflection. These are the EU-safe WBT binding posts.

The Nordost Valhalla cables in sunlight. I like the pattern of shdows the various layers of conductors make. When this picture is blown up large, this looks like a work of abstract art. Or maybe industrial art.

Closeup of the Nordost Valhalla cables in sunlight held against the blue sky. You can really see how the cable is constructed. As desribed on the Nordost website:

“Each conductor is made from optimized diameter solid 99.999999% oxygen free copper that has 78 microns of extruded silver on the surface. The surface of each conductor is highly polished before a high precision Micro Mono-Filament wrap is applied.

The Micro Mono-Filament is helically wound over the conductor. A precision FEP jacket is then extruded over the conductor. A number of proprietary methods are used in this difficult and extremely precise manufacturing technique that reduces dielectric contact by a factor of more than 80%. Extremely mechanically stable, the conductors are effectively suspended in inert air, preventing oxidation. ”

Well, hope this all was as fun for you as it was for me!

We use 10 meter optical cables to connect the EMMLabs / Meitner transport to the Meitner DAC.

This is so that we can have the transport near where we sit and the DAC (using its nice built-in preamplifier) within 1 meter of the amps so that we can use a very expensive interconnect, the Stealth INDRA, between the DAC and the amplifiers. These optical cables cost about $50 for the 3, all told (10 meters of INDRA would cost about $57,000.00 - assuming you could get them to make you a pair).

There are 3, bright orange 10 meter optical cables that connect to the DAC. No, this would NOT be our first choice in colors!

You can see we have to label them so that we can tell one from the other. The cables that we decided on only came in one color.

The other sides of the cables are connected to the transport - also labeled, of course.

Yeah, not quite audiphile grade labeling - cheap masking tape and crude pen markings. Hmmmmmm…. Maybe someday we will upgrade to using…. *gasp* colored tape and no pen scriblings?

Here is Neli’s description of how and where she found them:

“The emmLabs ST interface cables are 125/62.5u (micron) multimode simplex ST to ST optical patch cables. We ordered them from GoCables – http://www.gocables.com/

Here’s the category listing here:
http://www.gocables.com/Fiber_Optic_Patch_Cables/
/index_multimode_simplex.htm

And here are the specific cables here:
http://www.gocables.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=G&Product_Code=GCFA1TT

When I researched cable sources, I wanted a high quality connector — not plastic connectors — GoCables says:

> SC, ST, LC, FC, MT-RJ, E2000 and MU connectors have polished ceramic ferrules for precision and durability.

This is one of the reasons that I selected these cables, even though it would be more convenient to have 3 different colors, or 3 different color terminations at the end — we marked ours so that we can tell ‘em apart when they’re all laid out. We have not heard a difference between these and the stock 2-meter cables that emmLabs ships with the pair. Sometime, I should order another set and have ‘em cryoed, and see if that makes an improvement.

I remember looking through a number of network equipment sites before settling on these cables.

There was also some talk some weeks ago on Audiogon regarding audiophile-grade (and audiophile-grade-expensive) optical links. Haven’t tried any of these.”

With the caveat that the Meitner is 50% more expensive than the Prestige, we will try to provide some illumination on our impressions of the differences and similarities of these two CD/SACD players… both with built-in linestages.

The Prestige is still not quite broken in but it does have about 600 hours on it - and the Meitner CDSD tranport has an upgrade which we have not had here yet. But I think we can say something about their relative sonic attributes.

In comparison with the Meitner the Prestige has about the same soundstaging and imaging capabilities, though perhaps a little higher noise floor and a little less detail - as one might expect from a tube output stage - lending to a little bit of fog between the musicians in the sound field.

In some sense the Prestige is more enjoyable to listen to, presenting the music with an enthusiastic and optimistic attitude, with a slight exaggeration of various tonalities lending it an ‘analog warmth’. This seems to me to be much more so than the Capitole, which had an ‘analog-like’, somewhat accentuated, macro dynamic attack but not so much of the wonderful micro-dynamic attack and inner warmth of the Prestige… at least that’s what I am hearing, anyway.

The way I think of it is that the Prestige sounds like the way music sounds after a half (YMMV) glass of wine. The Meitner sounds like the music does when stone-cold sober.

The Meitner sounds real, like it really sounded like in the studio. It is a wayback machine with frequently astonishing capabilities - like having the awesome privilege of having a special ticket to attend, in person, the recording sessions of your favorite music.

And for those who have not heard the Meitner and hear something completely different than what I hear when listening to live sound, whether in a studio or elsewhere - this is not the overly etched, harsh, in-your-face dante-reality of the accuracy-must-mean-extreme-exaggeration-of-treble-attack-and-decay-so-it-sounds-like-delta-function-hell situation here. This is the ‘you are there, believe it or not, this is what the musicians cum studio engineer actually sounded like’ show.

The Prestige sounds like music, like the way music is supposed to sound. Enjoyable, a smile and toe-tapping required (in this toe-tapper sense I felt it was better than the Meitner - but we have yet to try the HRS Nimbus trick on the DCC2, so stay tuned), beautiful with all the detail and coherency and clarity that our minds want, along with all the juice that our hearts want.

So, really, it is up to each of us to choose our poison, or, actually, to choose our preferred elixir.

Next: The Audio Aero Prestige vrs the Audio Aero Capitole.

Party on, Garth!