Why will no other turntable beat the EMT 927?

Thuchan,

Thanks for the detailed description of the room, very impressive! Power is a bitch in the cities. Many fine systems become unlistenable during the summer and now days since the last major brown out a few years ago in NY, the sound has never quite returned to what it used to be. Even a dedicated power system similar to yours doesn't improve things much in Manhattan, and to make matters worse we're 120v here. We moved to Utah about 1.5 years ago and fortunately we do have good power here. I haven't built the room yet but installed a separate mains transformer for the system and each component is on a separate line with its own dedicated breaker. Just started putting the systems back together so a long way to go.

I'm not at all anti-digital it's the medium of our times and I spend a good amount of time listing to it. Even if its not something that I love I have spent a lot of time and money figuring things out, there;s no turning back from it. I'm not a dCS or Burmeister fan. I don't mind dCS's top DACs but I find their up-sampling games and external clock gimmicky and degrading. The 2nd tier DACs aren't anything to get excited about imo. Further I find their transport is sheiße,

Back to the thread and your justified comment; “Regarding the Fidelity Research 66s I think we have two groups of Audiophiles. Those who know this arm pretty well, who are owning the matching table and wo did build it up perfectly and some others – they might outnumber the first group”

Just so that we're clear;

http://www.pbase.com/ddk/image/152083798

Not set up yet but I have spent many ours listening to the combination.

This is probably my last post here, but I would love to hear more on your speakers and exchange experiences.

rgds, david karmeli

Dear Thuchan, I am using both the Benz LPS and Benz LP into the Boulder 2008. I have settled at 500 ohms, but I haven't experimented much around this value.

Dkarmeli,
I am sure you are succesfully building up your room. This is a wonderful stage in the life of an audio guy. Maybe it will never end - with the right instruments you already have, so many similarities that I really cannot understand what happened to you on the digital side. But that's another story. The Scarlatti Transport is not really Scheisse, maybe you are pointing to the former Verdi Philipps drives. I see you know already the most important words in this language. When my wife learned German some 30 years ago she started with all these expressions as she got told its a kind of survival kit.

I agree the dCS stack is not easy boosting up to its optimum. I think many users out there don't know all about the capabilities of these machines. its quite a versatile system and it needs to be configured carefully, especially when you are using a masterclock (which you should!), also adding dither and on top maybe a rubidium clock in combination. The result then has nothing to do with a one box digital machine also not with the Meitners.
You feel very much having fallen onto the analog planet. btw nothing else could satisfy me as an analog afficionado.

I see you are preparing your FR-66s developing its virtues and blossoming to full scale. This is the job to do on the blue micro which also can be tuned ! I think I will write something about the speakers in the next time and let you know. Currently I am dealing with Neumann devices.

I hope its not your last post here as you have shown profound knowledge in the thread's topic and I enjoyed it very much exchanging ideas and critical remarks with you and others.

Dear Kmccarty,
that sounds pretty reasonable. Are you happy with the sound or do you think there could be some improvement? Which table and arm are you using?

Dear Tuchan,

All I remember from my high school German is the survival vocabulary, somehow you never forget it.

I found what I liked a few years back and haven't found anything better and no its not Meitner. I'm not sure what you mean about boosting the dcs equipment to optimum. The recorded CD is all it can be, up sampling, adding dither, reclocking is just adding artifacts you can't improve or change that CD. Your DAC is what it is, the chip, the algorithm and the output stage isn't going to change. Master clock in a playback system such as this is pointless and a marketing gimmick. You're only adding salt & pepper. The purpose of master clock is synching multiple digital sources to multiple output channels. Here you have a single source, your transport going into the DAC, reclocking is only a game, what I'm surprised is that you find two clocks better than one, so you're reclocking the reclocked signal that doesn't need to sync with anything and liking it; that should already tell you that something is way off somewhere else.

I use the FR66s primarily with heavy Ikeda cartridges like the 9 supremo & muss. My main problem with this arm is its silver wiring, I might get it rewired one of these days and see if I like it any better. I'm spoilt by the SME-3012, love how it sounds and the ease of setup is better than any other arm that I ever tried. I can align and set up any cartridge within 10 minutes on the SME and fine tune it with music in less than half hour. The FR is a lot more time consuming for me to get it right and even then I find the 3012 sonically superior with most of the cartridges that I use.

SX-8000, how do you tune it. I understand the difference you get going from thread/inertia drive to motor drive, did you do anything else to yours?

I see that you have a Neumann cartridge, you lucked out they sound incredible, now you need to find their tonearm.