Moving up to Vivaldi

[Alpinist]

i can understand why Jim is excited....the Vivaldi is a world class digital front end and compares well with any other front end I have listened to...including the Select II. The Select II is the current shiny penny similar to the Trinity of years back that slowly faded. The Vivaldi just continues to stay relevant and dCS has provided one major upgrade along with the upcoming MQA release.....they also go out of their way for their customers

from my listening the two units differ slightly in presentation and perspective...but both get the fundamentals right. Not sure who pee'd in KR's coffee but he is way off base on his assessment. Whether he owns both or not he is just off IMHO...I think the quote above says enough about his perspective

I agree that the Vivaldi is a world class digital front end and is right at the top with the Select II DAC. However, I totally disagree that the Select II is in any way similar to the Trinity, which has slowly faded into obscurity.

The Select II is an entirely modular design with 8 hybrid ladder DAC modules, Femto clock module, constant impedance attenuating preamp module, dual mono power supplies and digital input modules that are on the cutting edge of this technology.

These modules are developed in-house by MSB, which is at the forefront of digital technology. MSB continues to come out with updates and enhancements such as their new Renderer input module, which has capabilities of 3,072/32 PCM, 8X DSD, full MQA decoding and is a Roon endpoint, all through an Ethernet connection.

Ken

 

[nonesup]

Erased

 

[nonesup]

IMO listening is inherently subjective. Sometimes a system can sound perfect to me -- I can come back to it a day, week or month later, play the same music that grooved me so much the first time, and have a completely "blah" response -- when the only thing that's changed is my mood, or the relative humidity, or my waxy buildup, or the position of the planets, or lord knows what. If I can't hear the same from one session to the next it's a hell of a leap to assume that any other listener hears the way I hear.
The highfidelity.pl site often reports on listening society sessions, and these experienced guys are definitely not hearing the same thing the same way at the same time. While it's nice to share enthusiasm with a fellow enthusiast, I would never make a blanket statement about someone else's experience. The Truth is not out there ...
Parker

+1