Shuffle

Every once in a while I protest—ever more feebly, I realize—that I’m not really an audiophile. That I’m just a guy with a discriminating ear, a mitochondrial devotion to music, and enough disposable income (and the legitimate tax deduction) to make high-end audio my hobby. That I’m fussy about a lot of things, including sound. That I have a techie itch that is nicely scratched by gear that partakes in producing sound once it’s placed and plugged and interconnected.

But who am I kidding? Add up all the above and you have a bonafide, card-carrying, registered audiophile. That’s it: no shilly-shallying about, no waffling, no beating around the bush. I’m the real deal. Yet there are times when I shudder a bit at the very word: audiophile. At best it sounds woefully middle-aged and geeky. At worst it hints darkly of pedophile or concomitant Greekified terms with sickly overtones. The noun form is even worse: audiophilia. That one sounds downright creepy, offputting, unsanitary even.

How sad. It’s not me that’s creepy and offputting. It’s that damn word. Here I dwell, a fine upstanding professional gentleman, happy in my utterly charming and postcard-ready pre-Earthquake San Francisco Victorian house, blessed with not one, but two admirable audio rigs. The larger getup resides in the living room, anchored by lordly Bowers & Wilkins 803D speakers. The smaller, in my home office, is a world-class headphone station anchored by glorious Sennheiser HD 800s, fed by a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-or-deranged-expensive Luxman P-1u headphone amplifier. But neither system is monolithic or unchangeable. In fact, I have had quite a lot of fun shuffling equipment back and forth between the two, in accordance with my needs, my moods, and, it would appear, the inscrutable meanderings of Serendipity Itself.

As flocks of birds know instinctively the moment to rise in a body and begin a migratory journey, my internal clock says Now and I realize it’s time to rearrange my audio furniture. That isn’t to say that I toss the whole thing about wantonly. The broad outlines are fixed: no matter what, the 803Ds remain in the living room and the 805’s in the office. That’s a simple matter of necessity, not to mention sanity. Since the speakers stay put, so do the amplifiers: the NAD M3 for the living room, the Arcam D70 for the office. Each is perfectly suited for its assigned task. But just about everything else has been grist for my restlessness and hobbyist mill.

Churn chez Scott has been at maximum intensity in the case of DACs, or digital-to-analog converters. That’s not as silly as it sounds. A DAC is the heart and soul of a modern-day sound system. That will come as news to any number of folks, given that most people never give their DACs a second thought, if indeed they give them a thought at all. And yet DACs do most of the musical heavy lifting for us nowadays. DACs transform heartless binary data into analog audio signals that can then be fed into an amplifier—hence to our speakers or headphones or earbuds. Ergo, if they screw up, everything downstream is screwed accordingly. Conversely, if they sing ecstatically, there’s a chance that their effulgence might suffice to glorify the downstream audio chain. DACs are ubiquitous workhorses in our lives. We all have a bevy of them whether we know it or not: we have them in our cell phones, our televisions, our clock radios, our home stereos, our computers and iPads. No DAC, no sound: that’s the long and short of it, or perhaps I should say the 1 and 0 of it. Without DACs, the digital revolution would have taken place in utter silence—and in the dark as well, since digital video also requires a DAC to turn digits into image.

Becoming a DAC connoisseur, a.k.a. snob, is one of those distinctions that separate the audiophile from your basic ordinary Joe. Or, less charitably put, it’s the dividing line between normal people and raving fruitcake nutjob stereo wackos. Instead of accepting whatever DACs lurk hither and yon, the discriminating audiophile, a.k.a. fruitcake nutjob, goes forth to seek the DAC that will satisfy his oh-so demanding ear (and don’t even try railing about the pronoun gender: audiophilia is a guy thing, dammit) or at least his pathetic need for pointless self-validation (a guy thing, right?). Regular Joe makes do with the DAC in his CD player or TV or even computer (God forbid) and doesn’t even suspect that digital Nirvana might lie at his fingertips, if only he were to wise up, wake up, and pony up. Then again, Regular Joe might be inclined to ignore all that. Regular Joe might have all the common sense. But we audiophiles (OK, I said we) have all the fun.

Thus my DAC tango: acquiring new ones, shifting current ones about, and selling off those which no longer suit my polished tile Foglesongy dance floor. I’ve gone through quite a few of the puppies—and will undoubtedly go through more—in the quest for just that right something, that ephemeral je ne sais quoi, that silkiness or blackness or there-ness or this-ness or that-ness that will convince me that I have reached my auditory/erotic plateau of the moment. Pundits may speak mournfully of audiophilia nervosa, but those stupid slobs are talking through their hats. We’re not talking here about dissatisfaction or disease or unhappiness. Nope. It’s all about hope and belief: hope that an improvement, however subtle, can be made, and belief that Product X will provide that improvement. I suppose one could define such aspirations as tanha, the existential struggle with life’s grim realities so perfectly expressed by the Buddha in the Four Noble Truths. Or not. Let’s get real here: It’s just not that lofty. It’s about having fun, eeking out just a bit more oomph, squeezing out a bit more pizzazz. It’s play, as in sandbox, as in electric trains, as in baseball cards and stamps and coins and comic books and model cars. Guys, remember? We’re all a bunch of snips and snails and puppydog tails. And bully for us.

Thus DACs carted from box to office to living room back to office and back to box and off to wherever. Last summer I assembled what could only be dubbed the headphone rig to challenge the gods themselves. My office computer—acting as a transport only, never allowed to so much look cross-eyed at bonafide musical material—output via USB into a Musical Fidelity V-Link, an ingenious gizmo that slaps a computer’s USB output into a well-behaved and musical stream worthy of an audiophile’s lofty equipment. Hence to a Bryston BDA-1, a true-bred aristocrat amongst DACs. From the Bryston to my aforesaid insanely expensive Luxman P-1u headphone amp, then to the Sennheiser HD 800s. There’s just no beating a rig like that. It was so good, in fact, that it was showing up my “big” system in the living room. So I promoted the Bryston to the living room, where it booted out a fine Benchmark DAC-1, a sterling piece of audio engineering that offended only in being just a tad clinical to my ridiculously fussy ear. My royal favor settled on the subtle but unmistakable warmth of the Bryston, so it became the living room DAC and began serving happily in those relatively elevated surroundings.

That left me without a truly right DAC for my home office. I sold the Benchmark for a fair price and for a while used an Apogee Duet II for my home-office DAC. But the Apogee’s service was transitional, and we both knew it. Miscasting, to say the least: the Apogee is at its best going in the opposite direction—i.e., as an ADC that turns cassette tapes and LPs into digital formats. For a while I tried using a HeadRoom Ultra Desktop Amp, with its spiffy DAC stage, for my office stereo, but that just wasn’t going to wash for long. I like the HeadRoom, but it just isn’t sonically in the Bryston’s class. Not many DACs are. The HeadRoom is admirable, but it is a tad grainy, a tad clinical, a tad hard-edged.

Around these parts, that last sobriquet—hard-edged—is an item’s express ticket to the “for sale” list. Just as I cannot abide clinical-sounding pianos (meaning that the entire pianistic output of Asia is so much woodworking to me) I vastly prefer audio equipment that evinces at least some semblance of personality. Coloration, some cry. Distortion, others accuse. Maybe, I reply. But audio gear is made by people, and people have tastes and likes and dislikes and biases and emotions. Audio gear can’t be utterly, completely, absolutely neutral. Or maybe it can be—but I wouldn’t want anything to do with such gear, any more than I would want a completely neutral piano.

Listening isn’t quite as one-way or passive as some might think. There’s an active aspect in that our ears are all tuned just a little differently, in that we all hear things a bit differently, in that we all react to certain stimuli in certain ways and to others in others. A perfectly neutral wire is acceptable only to perfectly neutral people. So forget that. Given that I was avoiding listening to my exquisite Sennheiser headphones and Luxman amp, all because of that hard edge the HeadRoom was throwing into the mix, I knew that change was mandated. My audiophile’s alarm clock went off and rang Now. Birds migrate. I went shopping.

75 Prosper Street welcomes an Audio Research DAC7, a much more “musical” instrument in the classic sense of the word—silky, refined, without unnecessary and gratuitous hard edges. It’s got spunk. It’s got personality. It’s a pricier DAC than the Bryston, but all in all the two are on about equal footing in the Social Register. As if I were going to venture downmarket; fat chance. That’s the thing about audiophiles: we just don’t ever trade down. And yes, I said “we”. It’s not just that I protest too much. It’s that I know perfectly well that I’m not fooling anybody, including myself.

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