ericleehall
Active Member
I just got a new McIntosh C47 to pair with my Mc7300, into Wilson WATT/Puppy 5.1 ....
It replaced a fully restored MX110z (Tube) Pre, which was just not a great pairing with the Mc7300.
The first thing I played was thru Tidal, Steely Dan's Gaucho...
Now I'm a huge SD fan, and have multiple copies of all their albums in different formats, including Master Tape backup copies.... and I'm primarily a Vinyl/R2R tape aficionado.
The Tidal stream sounded so damn good I (and my friends who were here for the unboxing) were taken aback. all conversation ceased. everyone sat down, mouths agape. Truly one of those special, rare audio nerd moments. FYI, this was a "Master" software rendered MQA stream.
Since that sounded so good, I surmised, then my new Led Zeppelin digital files, 96KHz/24 bit, from their recent reissues, MUST sound even better.... so I cued up Housed of the Holy, thru VLC on my laptop. (Also there is a Jitterbug in the USB line)
I had my USB Driver settings on the PC to play files 384KHz/32bit as the "Shared Mode" Default, which worked fine for Tidal, with the C47 showing 384KHz/32bit as the source (Is it upsampling?) ...
At first, with VLC, no sound. I had to set the Shared mode driver setting back to 96KHz/24bit (which matches the source file)
It sounded terrible. Tinny. Royally F*cked up. Everyone thought I had accidentally messed with the controls. So we put on the R2R Tape, the LP & the Tidal Master version. Just fine....
What's going on here?
It replaced a fully restored MX110z (Tube) Pre, which was just not a great pairing with the Mc7300.
The first thing I played was thru Tidal, Steely Dan's Gaucho...
Now I'm a huge SD fan, and have multiple copies of all their albums in different formats, including Master Tape backup copies.... and I'm primarily a Vinyl/R2R tape aficionado.
The Tidal stream sounded so damn good I (and my friends who were here for the unboxing) were taken aback. all conversation ceased. everyone sat down, mouths agape. Truly one of those special, rare audio nerd moments. FYI, this was a "Master" software rendered MQA stream.
Since that sounded so good, I surmised, then my new Led Zeppelin digital files, 96KHz/24 bit, from their recent reissues, MUST sound even better.... so I cued up Housed of the Holy, thru VLC on my laptop. (Also there is a Jitterbug in the USB line)
I had my USB Driver settings on the PC to play files 384KHz/32bit as the "Shared Mode" Default, which worked fine for Tidal, with the C47 showing 384KHz/32bit as the source (Is it upsampling?) ...
At first, with VLC, no sound. I had to set the Shared mode driver setting back to 96KHz/24bit (which matches the source file)
It sounded terrible. Tinny. Royally F*cked up. Everyone thought I had accidentally messed with the controls. So we put on the R2R Tape, the LP & the Tidal Master version. Just fine....
What's going on here?