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MS300 Review on Six Moons

Murray,

I went to the House of Music in SF today and spent a bit of time with the MS300 and I was very impressed. The dealer also sells the Escient product line and I got a chance to play with them back to back through XR28s, MX-135, and a pair fo 501s.

I really like the MS300! Great user interface!

Yes, you can access it just like a network hard drive on your desktop, and I think that you can control it as well. I know that you can drag and drop files (songs) like other computer files.

It is a really cool product, and inistead of a MCD-205, I will be buying one of these!

Another pretty cool feature of this McIntosh dealer is that if you buy a MS-300 from them, they will rip your cd collection for you so you won't need to spend a weekend on it (or shell out the $ for a Sony or a Kenwood 400 disk player!)

I don't have a 1200 cds, but I know that I have a couple of hundred. I don't mean to sound like such a cheerleader, but it was really fun chatting with folks that live and breathe the stuff that I like.

The only bummer was that the new XR2K system was not set up yet. I saw a lot of it in boxes, but it was not ready yet...

Master Lu, I was VERY impressed with what I saw! You must have quite a listening room! :thmbsp:

Michael
 
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Yeah, I'd love to go up there but it's over 500 miles from here. Maybe I'll go take a peek in the LA or SD area. There's a realitively new dealer in the area but I was down there a few months ago and they only had a few pieces of McGear and I had a hard time getting anyone to pay attention to me even though I was wearing my best blue jeans with no holes in them. When I finally did flag down someone, they guy lied (or flat didn't know) about what I was looking for and that was pretty much the end of my shopping experience. What the heck, everyone's had the same experience once or twice.

Anyway, the MS-300 is making more sense and would be a lot of fun although I'm not ready to ante up the $ right now. We'll see.

Murray
 
Great article. I've been trying to get someone to explain 16/44.1 vs upsampling 24-96 and 24/192, and S/PDIF for a long time, but now, with the concept of time-dependent vs non-time-dependent signals, it's starting to make sense...sort of.

I wish there was something like "A Digital Primer" that one could read on the whole topic.
 
Thanks for posting that, #9. Interesting read - not that I understood all of it, but, learn something new everyday.

Murray
 
The author's company, Empirical Audio, has interesting products. The USB Off-ramp Turbo presents an interesting option albiet at a seemingly high price for an off-brand black box. If it works as promised, you could make a viable alternative to a MS300 with one of these and a decent computer for under $2000. You won't have the excellent Mc interface, plug and play ease and great looking box, but you can expand it just by adding hard drives.

I have been looking at this new Sony Vaio XL1 Digital Living System. It is a very interesting Windows Media Center computer with a 200 CD/DVD changer/BURNER! You can rip 200 CD's at a time onto the hard drive and add up to three internal hard drives and unlimited external hard drives. Ripping into FLAC or wave files and outputed through one of these Empirical black boxes to a digital coax input on one of our McIntosh controllers would give you a potentially amazing machine for about $3000. However I read some forums saying that the Sony is extremely buggy but mostly with video, which I am not concerned with.

Anybody know anything about either of these devices?

JR
 
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I have had only very limited experience listening to the MS300 but the owner of a local shop (a very honest guy whom my father has purchased equipment from for years) stated that he cannot tell an audible difference between the MS300 and the DVP861.
 
It is my understanding that the "guts"" (transport and DACs) are the same as the 861 (per a pretty well known Mcintosh dealer)
 
Hi all--

I am new here, but I need some help. I just finished hooking up my new MS-300 and I have to say I am pretty happy with the sound quality. One issue though...does this machine not support gapless playback? I have not yet ripped a CD to the hard drive, but I am getting a pause in-between tracks when listening to a CD. That is really annoying.

I listen to a ton of live recordings and this is virtually a must have feature for me. I can't find anything about the MS-300 and gapless playback...interestingly enough, the escient site advertises that the E2 does support this feature, "Gapless Audio Playback – no more gaps between tracks when you rip classical or live CDs." Since the Mcintosh is an upgraded Escient, I would be surprised if the features are different, although I guess anything is possible.

Anyone have any information on this and the MS-300? Any chance that this is a feature that might be added if it is not currently supported?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Lewis
 
I have not seen a way to do this either. I agree, this is the one gripe I have. According to Ron from McIntosh, there was a recent automatic software upgrade, but I guess that did not fix this issue. If anyone hear's anything on this, I too would love to know.

JR
 
Well, I have a little more information. It looks like gapless playback was a feature that was made available via a software upgrade to Escient users in November http://www.escient.com/support/updates.html.

Since it would seem to me that this is a pretty important feature for an audiophile quality piece, I am hopeful that Ron can help us find out if we can expect an upgrade to address this issue in the near future.

I also read the post from Ron on the software upgrade, but had anyone confirmed that it actually came through. My version of the software is MusicServer - 1.0.2.2. Can anyone confirm if this is the most recent version?
 
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Ron's at CES, working and schmoozing his ass off. We all get to wait till he gets home and recovers, but I'm as interested as you guys, or more, since I just got my MDA-1000 hooked up to the MS-300, and am lovin' the sound.

I can't tell any difference between the MS-300's CD unit and its HD, and nothing between either and an MCD-751. As advertised, the MDA-1000 makes any decent input sound great.
 
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The current .2 software for the MS300 can be downloaded in the utilities section. This does support gapless playback when normal CDs are ripped. If you store a concert CD in FLAC you will hear a short dropout between songs as the break is processed as an artifact. This seems to be a FLAC issue and I will try some experiments tonight on mine.

Thanks,
Ron-C
 
Ron--

Thanks for the reply. It looks like I have the most recent version of the software. What you describe is what I am experiencing...when playing back a live CD, I am hearing a very slight pause in between tracks. This led me to believe that the unit was not supporting gapless playback as it sounds like what happens on my ipod although it may be another issue. I ripped the tracks to FLAC both directly on the MS-300 as well as on my computer and then moved them over. I get the same result in both cases.

Interestingly, I was hearing the same pause when playing back straight off of the CD prior to ripping. This really seems weird as I have listened to this disc hundreds of times on many different players and never once heard this before.

Any help or guidance you can give would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Lewis
.
 
Thanks Ron. What else can we do with the update? Will we ever be able to directly access external hard drives? This would be nirvana!

-JR-
 
ron-c said:
The current .2 software for the MS300 can be downloaded in the utilities section. This does support gapless playback when normal CDs are ripped. If you store a concert CD in FLAC you will hear a short dropout between songs as the break is processed as an artifact. This seems to be a FLAC issue and I will try some experiments tonight on mine.

Thanks,
Ron-C
Click to expand...

Thanks, Ron. I am also having that problem with live recordings. If we download the current .2 software for the MS300, will we have to re-rip the live recording CDs again, or will the software take care of it?
 
Negotiableterms said:
Ron's at CES, working and schmoozing his ass off. We all get to wait till he gets home and recovers, but I'm as interested as you guys, or more, since I just got my MDA-1000 hooked up to the MS-300, and am lovin' the sound.

I can't tell any difference between the MS-300's CD unit and its HD, and nothing between either and an MCD-751. As advertised, the MDA-1000 makes any decent input sound great.
Click to expand...

I am using the MS-300 with the digital coax into the MDA-1000 with balanced XLR into a FirstWatt F1 by Nelson Pass. What an incredible combination! I have about 800 CDs stored on the MS-300 in FLAC.

I use the browser interface to control the MS-300 from a Sony Vaio T250 notebook computer through wifi. My only real gripe so far is that the browser interface doesn't work on my wifi PDA. I hear that they are working on a resizeable interface for PDA, but it hasn't happened yet.
 
Live disks will have a gap between cuts and normal CDs play with thier normal gap, using the latest .2 software.

thanks,
Ron-C
 
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