More updates....
Last night, I swapped out the Pangea power cords and tried some Audience powerchords and this was a very nice improvement. The soundstage got bigger and the Dragons sounded more open. This was not a subtle improvement.
I'm using the dragons with no preamp. I'm going direct from the Empirical Audio Overdrive dac into the mono blocks. My source is a 2011 Macbook Pro laptop, using Amarra version 4318 (this is the version Steve at Empirical recommends). For the USB cable, I'm using an inexpensive Belkin Gold.
So far my biggest grumble with the Dragons is that they don't have XLR inputs. My dac sounds significantly better using the XLR outs versus the RCA outs. As an experiment, I'm getting my Placette XLR cables modded to have RCA connectors on one end. We'll see what that does.
Also a friend of mine just read this thread and offered me to try out his Sophia Princess 300B's tubes! (Thanks Scott) I'll let you all know how these Sophia's sound in the Dragon.
Last night, I swapped out the Pangea power cords and tried some Audience powerchords and this was a very nice improvement. The soundstage got bigger and the Dragons sounded more open. This was not a subtle improvement.
I'm using the dragons with no preamp. I'm going direct from the Empirical Audio Overdrive dac into the mono blocks. My source is a 2011 Macbook Pro laptop, using Amarra version 4318 (this is the version Steve at Empirical recommends). For the USB cable, I'm using an inexpensive Belkin Gold.
So far my biggest grumble with the Dragons is that they don't have XLR inputs. My dac sounds significantly better using the XLR outs versus the RCA outs. As an experiment, I'm getting my Placette XLR cables modded to have RCA connectors on one end. We'll see what that does.
Also a friend of mine just read this thread and offered me to try out his Sophia Princess 300B's tubes! (Thanks Scott) I'll let you all know how these Sophia's sound in the Dragon.