Avarice,2
Avarice + Squeezebox and PC ESI Juli@ sound card
Placing the Avarice between the Squeezebox and my DAC, and between the ESI Juliet and the dac, also resulted in significant improvement. It was not so extreme, however, than using it after a poor source like my DVD player.
The effects were similar as those described above. More natural sound, less irritating without loss of detail.
More natural, musical piano sound, which I consider a great test of gear.
Listening at systems other than my own
I tested the Avarice on a Lyngdorf integrated fully digital amp. I think it was the TDA 2200, or at least a very similar model.
This created a very minimalistic, “puristic” signal chain – sound card, Avarice signal processor, and the Lyndgorf – the Lyngdorf performing the DAC and amp function including volume adjustment.
The benefits of isolating the PC from the Lyngdorf galvanically, as well as feeding it with “time-aligned”, ordered ones and zeros, were obvious.
I am running out of adjectives here – the description of the sonic benefit is always the same as above, i.e. nicer non-irritating sound. I think the Avarice makes a very good match between a PC and a high end digital amplifier. It can also save a lot of money, as it improves the quality of digital signal on the output of cheap transports
--Tweaks, settings, conclusion
I listened to the high resolution material I have at home (classical music from Hdtracks.com, Linn records, rips of my own SACDs and DVD-A material.
Here, one has to appreciate two factors at once – the difference between Red Book standard audio vs. various breeds of high res, and the difference between the signal chain with and without the Avarice.
I would say the Avarice brought similar relative improvement regardless of resolution. The improvements with high res were sometimes less obvious during my listening – many high res recordings are excellent anyway, good orchestras and careful mastering in the studio – so, they basically sound great from a reasonable rig. It is harder to make them sound much better, if the rig was not really miserable to start with. The labels often start to sell their stellar, showcase titles on high res first, so no wonder they are good.
- The Avarice has some special settings that allow a change of the “filter characteristics” – I understand these are subtle changes in the mathematics of the digital signal processing that is performed in the Avarice - to accomodate various tastes, etc.
My DAC, the Lavry DA10, lost lock when I changed these settings away from the most general default, so I cannot report on those.
-Conclusion
I would say the Avarice is a great little component that can help get the most of any system that is built around a separate transport/DAC combo. I can recommend it to anyone running on separates. If you are using an integrated source, like a normal CD, SACD, etc, and wish to upgrade to separate transport + DAC, it makes sense to give the Avarice a try. Particularly, if somebody is testing a good DAC at home, it would make sense to try the Avarice out at the same time – if the digital output of your transport is not excellent, and the outboard DAC on its own is not able to reject the incoming jitter to a satisfactory degree, using the Avarice can improve the sound a lot.
Myself, I had difficulty hearing the difference when I tried an outboard DAC wihtout a component like the Avarice - the sound did not get all that better.
However, the Avarice (used primarily as a de-jittering box, ignoring for the moment its upsampling and galvanic isolation job) – basically repairs, addresses a particular problem, i.e. jitter arising between transport and DAC. Logically, the most dramatic result will be heard if the SPDIF signal from the transport has high jitter, and, at the same time, the DAC is quite good – but is sensitive to incoming jitter, and sounds inferior when fed extremely jittered signal.
Then, as the Avarice repairs the “weakest link in the chain”, a significant improvement is heard, as I saw with my cheap DVD.
If your transport is so well constructed that it sends out very low jitter signal, or, alternatively, if the DAC is either so good at sorting out jitter that it “doesn’t care” how high the incoming jitter is – or , at that matter, so poorly designed that it will sound bad regardless of the jitter – then you are unlikely to experience a super improvement with the Avarice.
I think the Avarice is particularly good for people who have a particular constellation in their system – a bit-perfect signal source with a certain amount of jitter (like a PC with a sound car), a medium level to high end outboard DAC, or they are feeding a high quality digital amp like the Lyngdorf from their PC card.
Users of such setups should definitely give this product a try, I believe you can save multiples of 1000 USD on the cost of your system with the Avarice – mainly, on the cost of your transport, which can be very cheap, and, secondly, on the cost of your DAC, as it needs only to be “reasonably, properly constructed”, as opposed to being a 7-10 thousand USD piece of high end gear.
Note:
(I am using words as “high jitter”, low jitter, DAC good or bad at rejecting jitter – I understand these are problematic words. The science (and pseudo-science) built around jitter in audio magazines is enormous, I do not dare to touch that subject, I do not have the theoretical background for that. By high jitter I mean an error in the time precision of the signals going from transport to DAC, using the most correct definition given the current state of the art. By a DAC “good at rejecting jitter” I mean a device that has circuitry that allows the DAC to convert the digital data to analogue sound on its analogue outputs, with great correctness, leading to pleasurable sound, even if the time error in the incoming signal is “relatively” high, high enough to cause audible degradation of sound if converted by an inferior DAC. Please refer to the theoretical articles which are linked somewhere on this forum.)