Can $2,000 buy bona fide high-end audio?
(Credit:
Woo Audio)
You have two grand to spend on a fantastic stereo system. Can your cash get you there? Yes, it can!
In this case, we're talking about a headphone-based system, but I will in the coming months cover speaker-based audiophile-grade systems for less than $3,000.
For the headphone system, I'm recommending the Woo Audio WA6 Special Edition vacuum tube headphone amplifier ($1,050) I reviewed in yesterday's blog, along with Grado RS-1 headphones ($695), and Oppo's DV-981HD SACD/DVD-Audio player ($229). All prices are manufacturer's suggested retail price.
Mind you, the Woo and Grado are hand-crafted in New York, and they are truly stunning designs built to last a long, long time. The Oppo is nowhere as extravagant, but the brand has gained quite a reputation among audiophiles for building budget-price high-performance players (I didn't have time to acquire an Oppo, so I used my Sony DVP-NS90V ($220) SACD/DVD player for most of my listening tests. DVD-As were played on a Pioneer DV-45A.
(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)
First, a word about the W-G-O's sound signature: the clarity and "listenability" made long sessions a joy. The tubes didn't--not even a little--soften the sound or add a mellowing influence. The resolution of fine detail was right up there with the very best I've heard.
"Lies" from The Black Keys' Attack & Release CD wasted no time in telling me what the W-G-O system did so well. The duo's distortion-strewn blues rock was all there, and it was great to be able to play it as loud as I wanted without worrying about disturbing my neighbors.
The W-G-O made it all sound vivid and immediate, as if there was nothing between me and the musicians. Bass went plenty low but never turned flabby.
Neil Young's Greendale on DVD-Audio upped the ante even more. I found the "live," you-are-there quality to the sound highly addictive. Neil's acoustic guitar, in particular, had an eerie presence over the W-G-O.
(Credit:
Oppo)
Oh, and there's no reason why you couldn't use the W-G-O to enjoy DVD movies. Two-channel home theater-in-your-head will be just as amazing.
Just for fun, I plugged my old Sennheiser HD-580 headphones into the Woo, and I have to say, they never sounded better. Nowhere as vibrant as the Grados, but the Sennheiser's more laid-back sound might suit some tastes better than the Grado. The HD-580 is no longer made, but the current model, the HD-650, might be a worthwhile option.
Steve Guttenberg is a frequent contributor to magazines and Web sites including Home Entertainment, Playback, and Ultimate AV. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
Finally, why not place the WA6SE in line with a scope to verify that the signal going into the amplifier isn't changed (other than amplitude) when it comes out? There should be a fundamental precept among amplifiers just as there is for medical students, "First, do no harm" becomes "First, alter no signals".
Regarding tube amplifiers, I'm pretty sure that their "special" sound is just an artifact of very specific non-linearity. A vacuum triode posesses quadratic characteristic of anode current vs gridle voltage. A balanced circuit cancels the quadratic component, but may not be able to do that completely. Output transformer adds its own cubic non-linearity. If you just simulate that characteristic with digital pre-processing, your $300 transistor amplifier will sound the same. That's it.
However, I always had in mind replacing it with a digital source later and am I glad I did. A ~$200 Chinese DAC (easily moddable, see reviews on head-fi.org) fed by lossless files dramatically outperforms the Oppo playing CDs in terms of soundstage and detail. I didn't have SACD discs to try; this is where the Oppo reportedly shines. Anyway, my DVD player's back now where it belongs.
About Grados, I can't say enough good things. Love the RS-2s: lush and warm. They and their big brother RS-1s are dazzlingly beautiful objects, too -- the Eames chairs of headphones. I keep thinking I'll jump on a Woo one of these days to treat my ears even better.
Alegr's allegation in this thread that tube sound can be readily faked can be evaluated by anyone on a PC by downloading the free demo of the Izotope plug-in for Winamp, "OzoneMP," a DSP which simulates analog tubes. It does some things surprisingly well, although to my ears it sounds like all DSPs: identifiably electronic kitsch. That said it'd be fun to see Steve compare DSP tube simulation to the real thing. How about it, Steve? Free column idea for you. Pit a $30 DSP plug-in vs. Woo's entry level tube amp at over 10 times the cost.
1. Raw encoded data is read from a CD in a $30 CD drive, decoded and error-corrected (suppose there are no uncorrectable errors) then buffered in RAM.
2. It's then fed to a DAC which is clocked by the appropriate master clock. Where the master clock is produced by a crystal oscillator+PLL, then phase-filtered by another PLL to eliminate phase noise (which is the jitter, BTW). Though with a well-designed PLL that second stage would not be necessary.
What would cause jitter in this scenario? Why a $2000 CD player with optical output or with $500 cable (like Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable) would work any better than a $30 CD drive?
And by the way, paying $500 for a length of CAT5 cable is so stupid. Nevertheless, there are people who buy that BS.
Funny comments...shame it's only true in your reality. I've heard audio component pieces who have price points that would put a serious dent in this country's national debt sound like absolute crap, and I've heard great sound come out of some truly affordable components that are indeed easy on the wallet. But by and large, the amount of effort in manufacturing and engineering that goes into those 'money grabs' (a title that you would seem to castrate them with) far exceeds that of the mass market gear that measures their life cycles in months at best before hauling them off into the nearest landfill.
Yes, the HDMI "super" cable is a fiasco. And the price of hi-end interconnects in general are for the most part laughable given how incremental the improvements may (or may not) be. But to expect the shoddy and cheap construction of a typical sweatshop $29 CD player special at Wal*Mart to match even a sundry, mass-market $200 unit...that only speaks volumes at how really uninformed you truly are.
I went through this exercise several years ago when I bought my Naim CD5. I listened critically to a number of units that were far cheaper...and several that were FAR more expensive, yet my ear kept coming back to the Naim. I spent weeks audtioning units, bringing examples home to listen on my own system. I definitely wasn't fond of the $4750 price of admission (with discount, no less), and I tried my best to find a cheaper alternative that I could say was as good if not better, but in the end I sucked it up and chose it anyways because it just did CDs better than anything else I tried. Now years later I've heard machines that outshine my Naim for only a fraction of the buy-in cost, but that's progress. Yet they still are nowhere near your blue-light special price point with it's imaginary "equality".
I am not sure why some folks think 1's and 0's are just 1's and 0's is that not like making a statement that all turntables are the same and that a particular bump is a particular bump whatever the equipment? Some questions for the original poster to think about. Does the CD player consist of more than 'perfectly' reading 1's and 0's and spewing them perfectly in analogue form out the rear? Is not the error correction required because it is a function of the disk read and transport stability etc. so that a better transport might require less correction? Do the internal circuits and components affect the signal quality both before DAC and after DAC? I oversimplify, but as far as I know electrical loss, distortion, RF effects, magnetic effects are a common factor of all materials and what the audio folks do is try optimise equipment with these properties in mind to give the best possible sound quality for the money while remaining competative.
Case in point is why playing a CD through a computer CD-Rom, MB and soundcard to your hifi sounds like pants compared to any stand alone CD player, let alone a good one.
This aside ... I really hope the quality of CD recordings improves, I just bought a couple and my head aches, they are so loud and compressed it's not funny!
Any error correction is perfected too. With silicon prices so cheap is't not necessary to cut corners and implement partial error correction.
Just kidding...no, really...I am...
- by dcstephens August 16, 2008 7:17 AM PDT
- I think that the low power requirements of most headphones, including the Grados, make them great candidates for tube amplification. I use a tube headphone amp to drive my AKG K701 cans, but use an Rowland ICEPower amp for my speakers. The two systems sound very much alike.
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(19 Comments)I see no need to "prove" my choices since my two-channel system is about enjoying music for hours on end with no listener fatigue and it does that as well as any system I've heard. The Audiophiliac is offering "reviews" here, so I understand the interest in specs, but for those that want leads as to what to go listen to for themselves, his advice is very useful.
Dave