As I continue to change my setup and slim it down, it’s honestly made bottlenecks more and more apparent. I guess having too many options blinded me from other problems in my setup lol. Well one of them was the ability to improve my digital to digital setup, which was remedied and sounds pretty fantastic now lol. That being said, the largest bottleneck honestly was my switching setup. While I really do still love my flock patch 64, it is now clear to me that my chain sounded much better without it. The convenience and flexibility it offered me was insane, and I still love it for that, and for lower end setups I found no sonic problems at all. But in current situation it was a bottleneck for a few reasons. 1, I was unable to use higher quality interconnect which in the end I think is a problem, mogami gold is great and all but it really did limit what I was getting out of the setup. 2, even making a custom higher end breakout cables improved it but still was limiting, getting it out of the chain really improved things for sure.
But that posed the problem of what I can use for switching that wouldn’t have as much audible impact. Thankfully I happened to have one solution already on me for single ended, the manley skipjack. This thing I can barely hear in the chain at all, so I tried higher end interconnects and the quality was maintained, so that’s a win there. The problem is that there is no balanced version, so somewhat sol for my balanced gear now. I did get a potential solution, but I’ll have to see how that is when I get that set up. But currently running the coleman switches and they do sound a bit worse than the flock patchbay, but at least now I just press buttons on a physical box and don’t have to arrange things on my pc to switch, so a bit more added simplicity now (although the flock software was stupid intuitive so no complaints to them). But the differences are noticeable enough that I have recently gravitated more toward my single ended gear since at the moment it just sounds better due to the setup with the manely and nicer ic.
Another thing I now notice is that I am in the range where I’ve safely reached the limits of what my system can handle dac wise, I’d take a stab that I’d receive no further benefit if I took the step forward dac wise again (I can’t afford to anyways and already too happy where I am at, so not really a problem lol) for the mass majority of headphones and headphone amps I have
Edit: and tube rolling the the lampizator pacific, I was not expecting to settle on 300b’s, generally from my experience the kr 300bs have sounded always a bit too dry and lean in other things, in this dac the kr rk 300b sound extremely balanced and technically capable while having great organicness and density. I have a set of rk px25 that offer the technical performance, but don’t have that sweetness so 300b is the way to go here it seems. The 101d are a big let down in this dac so didn’t bother with those for that long
I have been fortunate enough to acquire a LampizatOr Golden Gate Discrete. I’ve described my journey in this post: My Journey and Experiences with DACs
I just wanted to continue this conversation in case anyone has any questions about what one would hear out of a DAC out of this caliber or comparisons with the Amber 3 or any of my previous DACs.
Let us know what hits you first from the step up from the Amber. Congrats BTW! Was this one one on the market with a little nick in the back of the top cover? I looked at that one… just looked cause too rich for me ATM.
Of course there is some preference to it. I should preface by saying I prioritize presentation and timbre the most. My goal is to be able to close my eyes and pretend I am transported there as a form of escapism. I like speed, attack, detail, and the rest, but presentation and timbre is top priority.
Next, I want to stress that Amber 3 is an amazing DAC that “sets the foundation for things to come.” Amber was the DAC that made me go, “okay, I cannot unhear these things from now on.” It would have been my endgame DAC if I wasn’t fortunate enough to land a good used offer that I couldn’t pass up.
I love the presentation of Amber. The stage is very wide and appropriately deep. It stresses on timbre to give you such a sense of realism to all of the voices and instruments. You can easily imagine following the movement of lips and all of that. You can also quickly tell a violin from a viola from a cello or even a dreadnaught vs. a classical guitar. You can almost feel the twang of the guitar and imagine what the strings look like and how they are vibrating.
Going up to the GG, the largest improvements I got were stage depth, imaging, lots and lots of microdynamics and how detail is resolved.
Now, the outline around every voice and instrument is much sharper. The stage is deeper with accurate imaging. The DAC added a ton of room information. In regards to my preface earlier, now when I close my eyes, I can completely imagine what the stage/room looks like. I can imagine where the sound is bouncing from and “walk up to any of the instruments.” There is a lot of detail, but the decay and resolve is done so well. It is not quick just to be quick, but more importantly realistically resolved.
I’ll stop here for now before I write more of a novella compared to what I’ve done so far. I want to end by saying Amber is NOT devoid of the same traits. GG just resolves and handles it with more delicacy.
How much difference do you feel DACs make with speakers vs headphones?? I haven’t gone past 1.5K for a dac, so my experience is limited. I seem to notice a much more apparent difference with floor speakers than headphones. Is this normal or do you all find that you hear the change in DACs with headphones as well?
It depends, I think generally source gear changes tend to be more apparent on speakers overall given equal tier comparison of headphones, but that being said depending on the headphone setup it can make an equal difference or possibly easier to hear on headphones. This entire comparison was done with headphone setups being the only thing used to evaluate for example. Depends on the tier of the headphones and the tier of the speakers as well. Imo a dac is going to make a larger sonic impact on a pair of midrange speakers rather than midrange headphones for example, but I think getting into the higher end side of things it can equal out at some point. But overall speakers just have a higher performance ceiling so eventually it will lean much more toward speakers as you continue to go up.
I can easily see that being the case depending on the specific setup at hand. Also really depends on what sonic aspects you are looking for. Anything spatial recreation wise is going to be more apparent on speakers than headphones imo, while perhaps let’s say resolving power might be more equally apparent on headphones and speakers. But it’s hard to make generalized statements that end up being mostly true, so I’ll just boil it down to it depends on the setups you are trying to compare imo
I remember Elac when they launched their Uni-fi UB5 that people were raving about at shows, they had a lot of high end hardware upstream for that very reason. Some midrange speakers can scale VERY well.
I think a midrange speaker that can scale insanely well is the magnepan LRS, you can absolutely pump that thing up to crazy amounts source gear wise and still get rewarded for it (but that can be a problem since it sounds pretty bad with lower end source gear, double edged sword)
One I’d love to have in a collection. If I downsize to an condo, I’d seriously consider them simply because you can pick them up, move them to where you want when you listen, then move them back when you’re done.
