Electrocompaniet EMC II CD Player

Cello, I agree with what you write regarding the enjoyment of the EMC 1-UP sound. If you are referring to me personally by your comments about "complaining in a public forum", I believe you misread me regading my Spider evaluation. The fact that I do not hear an improvement when using the Spider is not a complaint, but rather an honest and real assessment. Not every tweak will produce better sound in every system, as you yourself mentioned in your previous post. And, how can we hope to learn from the experiences of one another if our opinions are all of a like kind?

My system is also highly resolving (Steve Nugent's mods contributed greatly in that respect), and I, too, can no longer take advantage of the XLR outs since I upgraded to a First Sound Presence Deluxe II preamp which has only RCA ins and outs. However, the Empirical Audio mod elevated the quality of the unbalanced outputs to a level such that they are very nearly equal to the balanced outputs...something they were not before.

Best of luck with your quest for better sound from the Electrocompaniet. I suspect you'll find changing the output wiring may help.

Tvad I was not referring to you at all with the "complaining in public" comment. I was addressing your point of the imbalance of there being a great deal more positive reactions/reviews than a greatly lesser amount of negative comments/reviews and why there might not be so many negative reviews.

The lack of negative reviews might also be driven by the owner, about to sell his component on Audiogon, not wanting to slam a product that he is about to sell to another Audiogon member.

I appreciate the fact that you are not hearing an improvement in your system where I am in mine. For my edification, I wonder if anyone could weigh in on what might cause the drastic difference of the reactions to the benefits of the Spider on our two systems. The component list that makes up my system is listed in my post of 1-06-04.

I will probably end up doing the Steve Nugent mod next time I go on vacation and let you know what it does for me. Hopefully by then, he has come up with some new great ideas for his mod.

I intend to ask Steve if there is anything to do about improving the RCA side of the outputs beyond just changing out inner connecting wires to the RCA outs.

I do welcome the critical comments as much (probably more) than the positive. It is hard to make an informed decision when one is getting a limited view of the issues.

Happy Listening !

Cello, Tvad- Why not get a cable that goes XLR>>RCA like I did. Now I'm running the balanced out to my Syrah. Don't have two identical cables with diff term to compare, but this a relatively easy way around that issue. And if anyone here wants to get in on a group purchase of Spiders (a herd of spiders?), email me privately.

Swampwalker, I experimented with exactly what you mentioned...two
times (once with an HT Truthlink XLR>RCA cable, and a second time
with XLR>RCA adapters). The first attempt resulted in a hum, which I
couldn't eliminate no matter how many cheater plugs I used. The
second attempt worked fine, but it was after the EMC 1-UP had been
modded by Steve Nugent, and I could still tell the player sounded best
running truly balanced. When I switched to the XLR>RCA adapters the
sonics still didn't measure up. After the mod, the difference is very
small, but using the "cheater" cable doesn't provide the same
benefits as maintaining the XLR>XLR connection. Still, as has been
mentioned before, the results may vary from system to system, and it's
certainly worth a try. My Neutrik XLR>RCA adapters from Stu Wein at
Audioparts were very reasonably priced.

Swampwalker,

Thanks for the idea of the XLR/RCA interconnect. Somewhere along this thread or possibly in the "Pre-amp Deal of the Century" thread that focuses on Supratek pre-amps, someone had commented that they perceived no sonic difference between going RCA to RCA from the EMC-1 versus your idea of going XLR from the EMC-1 into an RCA in the pre-amp.

It would be great to do an A/B comparison where you between using an RCA/RCA and comparing that to your XLR/RCA idea. If you are in a position to try that experiment, it will be great to hear back from you.

Mike from Father & Son Audio mentioned in this thread that he would entertain a group deal.

Please do give us your comments when and if you install a Spider. Is your EMC-1 the UP version ? Have you done Steven Nugent’s mod ?

Thanks for your input.