Newbie Analogue Journey

I have started my hifi journey many years ago even before streaming are main stream music. CD is predominantly the format in hifi for a long time until streaming changes all that, even more so for the Vinyl record. I personally have been in digital music most of the time with the beginning of FLAC / WAV until moving into DSD. So over the years many DAC I have own with all kind of players too. Few years back, I came to experience in analogue music listening to some pretty nice turntables.

I started to research and read up on turntables. What to look out for mainly for a newbie to get into Vinyl music. Few things to consider when looking for turntables. Firstly, its the drive (motor) to spin the platter. There are 2 types, the belt drive and the direct drive. 

From picture you can clearly see there is a belt being use from the motor to the spindle. This drive and spin the spindle than on top the platter of the turntable. The advantage of this is less motor noise that might introduce into the sound. This is quite important and Vinyl is very sensitive to external noise. The disadvantage of it is the start of the spin and the time it stops spinning is slower than a direct drive.

This picture is show a direct drive turntable with the motor directly attached to the spindle. Is different from the belt drive that this type doesn't required a belt. The advantage of this will be the spin will be almost immediate for the start and stop. The disadvantage will be the noise the motor might introduce into the sound.

The next thing to look for is the speed. Mainly there are 33 1/3 or 45 RPM in speed for turntable. The thing to look for is how easy you can switch in between speed. Some turntable is very easy with just a push of a button. Some have to remove the platter and made adjustment. Example of the Rega P10 turntable with this external power supply has 2 switches to change the speed.

 Next piece to look now is the tonearm. This is very important to having a good steady hold of the cartridge while is tracking the Vinyl record. In this part the thing to think about is how easy it can be adjusted to setup the tracking force of the cartridge and also height of the arm sometimes is important to have the proper tracking. 

The one last thing and the most important is the Cartridge. Two different types of cartridge, the MM (moving magnet) and MC (moving cartridge). The different types have different gain which is important to consider for your hardware which is the phono pre amp. 

Its kind of overwhelming when I first started to read to understand all that. Put that all aside, there are many turntables this days are all ready to plug and play. Some turntables are able to even stream through bluetooth or even USB capable. Technology has change analogue quite a bit too. Out of the box many turntables are good to go and they are reasonably good start.

For me one more thing about vinyl record is all this beautiful records. This is one of the only media you can actually see the beauty as it spins. Good music is important but esthetic is pretty important too as you will be seated to enjoy the music while enjoying the beauty of your records.

 

A kick-ass hifi system for under RM3000

This is something I always have in the back of my head of what is possible if I put my budget just below RM3000 but I want to have streaming, local media play back and a little bit more if I wanted to have CD player to be added to the mix. Well hifi system can be very simple as one amplifier with one pair of speaker and you are done basically. In the old days, usually be CD player or cassette or even a minidisc player. In more recent times of course digital media is kind of the main stream. Keep that in mind, I just wanted something very simple and affordable which I can just set it up to listen in my living room area. It can be family entertainment and as well as for guest coming to visit.

Now to be realistic with limited budget , it is quite obvious to look into the used market. After all, used hifi gear does have quite many variety to offer. Since this is going to be in the living room area I will pick something not too space consuming. So for speaker, the ideal choice is a bookshelf speaker. It's quite a bit of searching for something that I like and need to be low cost. After some months of going through the search, I came upon a nice pair of Monitor Audio Gold 7. This speaker is the top bookshelf back for its days back in the 90's. Definitely is a very old pair of speaker. The speaker is discontinued back in 2009. I like this speaker very much for the high which makes vocal in music very prominent and not ear piercing at the same time. Well being a bookshelf although the lower end is not comparable to floor stander but it does it very well. The condition of speaker is really good given the years this speaker has seen. I got a good offer this pair for RM600. Quite a fair price to pay.

After picking up this pair of speaker , than the next important part is the amplifier. What should be a good amplifier for it. Being a British speaker is also means is quite the warm sounding speaker. Of course the gold metal tweeter is a bit more forwarding. Probably I am thinking of some British amp probably or even Japanese amp which is more neutral. The selection for me is, I wanted an amplifier that has everything in it with DAC, USB, Coaxial, Optical, RCA. Most old school amp will be rule out for sure. Have to be something a little into the millennium to fit the bill. Most newer generation amp with all build in doesn't come cheap and also not many choices as well to fit the budget. After some long searching, decided to get this little amplifier. The Sony UDA-1  USB DAC amplifier. This unit was launch in 2013 and is discontinued back in 2018. This is a shoebox size amplifier. Is has 2 USB input, one in front and one at the back. The DAC can support up to DSD128 and support hi-res as well up to 192khz. The back it has another USB, with coaxial, optical and 1 pair of RCA input. There is also a pair of RCA output as well. The standard speaker binding post can be use with bi-wire or banana plugs. It has a credit card size remote as well which is pretty cool. This little cost me RM1300.

Now the final piece will be the speaker cable. I am keeping in mind that the speaker is kind of forwarding with the metal tweeter and now with the Sony amplifier it will be on the neutral side. I was thinking a little bit of mix in the cable with copper and silver should be nice. I found this used unit of DH Labs T-14 speaker cable. It is copper cable with silver coating to it. I have this similar cable for my home theater setup which I really like the vocal the cable produce which is clear and sharp. The cable is 2.5 meter pair and it cost RM500 for this pair. Is probably quite a bit of spending here. 

With amplifier and the speaker, I can simply hook up a laptop or even my Ipad / Iphone to the USB and I am ready to play some music. The good thing is it can support hi-res which is good for me as I am using Apple Music which recently have launch the hi-res audio. The total cost of all 3 components cost RM2400. Pretty much it is ready to rock and roll. To make things a little more , I have added into the mix a Asus Tinker board S (Single Board Computer) install with Volumio player as a media player which I can use for streaming spotify, apple air play or even listening to internet radio. This little unit cost less than RM500 which will bring my total cost to RM2900. 

Overall, I am very happy with this setup. It fulfilled all I wanted to get it for listening to music with different sources. Probably I can add in CD player in the future. For now it is covering all that is needed. The overall sound quality is pretty awesome. A short recording of the sound. Recording

Bass Tuning! Bose Acoustimas Series Woofers

Dr Amar G Bose started his career as a Professor in MIT. Later he would start the Bose Corporation by licensing his amplification algorithm for American military use & the likes of NASA. It was much later that consumer products like the Bose 901 series speakers hit the market. The 901 series speakers was a polarizing product as people in general either loved or hated it. The Bose 901 series speakers does hold some scientific promise, but was the result reflective of those published scientific papers? That's what makes it so polarizing.

Many years later, Bose moved away from conventional box speaker products and started moving in to the Acoustimass series of satellite speaker with sub woofer combo. Still very based upon the earliest premise of Direct/Reflect Sound Technology, but also add to the premise that low frequencies, a.k.a. bass becomes omni-direction below 80Hz. This comes at a time when urban living became more dense, homes got smaller, but people still wanted good sound with room filling bass. And judging by the Accoustmass series sales numbers, it was a home run!

Now, I know many audiophiles have some kinda beef with Bose, due to the construction & materials used, and that smoothing, well rounded, limited bandwidth sound ani't what we call hifi either. However, to the other 98% of the world population, that didn't really matter at all, despite those high price tags which resulted in fat margins. Fast forward to recent years, Dr Amar G Bose wanted to cash out, hence sold Bose Corporation to Apple Inc. Apple already own Beats By Dr Dre. And now Apple have merged both entities to become Beats By Bose!

I started with a little history & background of Bose, because I am squarely in the 2% of the worlds audiophile population, yet I am one of the few who loves Bose products for what they are today, lifestyle. My household is just all Bose sound mostly, in the non audiophile areas. And lastly, I find the Acoustimass bass modules, or woofers just so useful to have around, especially the passive ones. they are easy to integrate in to any existing sound system, and with guarantee extra room filling bass. What else do you want? Me, I always find the Acoustimass modules bass to be a little flabby, and when playing loud, port chuff becomes very apparent, especially the older series 1 models. Which is what I have exactly in my home office/study area.

And here, I set about doing something about that port chuffing sound. This DIY work is rather easy, and I think every Bose Acoustimass woofer user should try it. Do you know you can tone down that flabby bass & port chuff sound by just stuffing the Bose Acoustimass woofer? Here's a step by step guide how to do it. 

Bose Acoustimass series I bass module.

Once turn around, you will find back panel access screws & speaker input & output connectors.

You'll need to unscrew all the screws on the back panel, including those holding the 4 feet.  Do not unscrew the speaker terminal screws.

The back panel open, revealing all the internals inside, you will notice there is already some poly fill inside. Those white fluffy pillow fill. Just look at the materials used by Bose, woodchip board, crappy looking Pasar Road drivers & cheap x-over parts. Nothing special, but industrial grade only.

A closer look at the cross-over, all stuck to the rear panel.

Add more polyfill or pillow fill, there are generally 3 types on window fill, you can have foam or feather, both sadly are no good for this application. Then you have polyfill of various density, which will work for this case. What I have is of rather high density polyfill.

After filling the accessible side of the box to about 70% including the original polyfill. I stop and work on closing back the rear panel, making sure all the wires are still connected and in contact. As it quite common for Bose Acoustimas bass modules to fray & delaminate around the edges & corners of the box, so I wrap my module corner & edges with black duct tape to keep it protected. Even if the Acoustimass bass modules are designed to lie down, they can be placed in various positions, those liitel red feet you see are actually rubber door stoppers available from your local hardware shop. 

The bass quality after stuffing of polyfill in to the Bose Acoustimas bass module is tighter, cleaner and certainly less bass port chuffing effect. The immediate feeling is that the upper bass has been toned down, with slightly less kick and an overall bass volume reduction. So in essence, you gain some and you lose some. but for me it certainly an easy mod that takes just 20 minutes or so and it work a joy. Here are some other Bose Acoustimas bass modules that have gone thru similar bass tuning process.

Bose Acoustimass series III, I use this to complement the main hifi rig in my man cave. I loev this passive sub because even though it's one box, there is actually 2 units of  6.5 inch drivers inside running in stereo configuration! 

Here is how the Bose Acoustimas series III looks inside, still 2 units 6.5 inch drivers inside working as stereo pair. The box chamber design is totally different, but you can still access the box via the back panel where the speaker connectors are located. With simplified construction, all you need to do is to uncrew 6 screws in back panel to be accessible to the chamber which I have circled in RED. You just need to stuff the polyfill in to the chamber(as circled in RED) by 30-50% for bass tuning, results depends on your preference & room acoustics interaction.

I not only use Bose in my home, but also inside my car too. I use this Bose Acoustimass Canon in my car boot to augment bass to the OEM system in my car. I also need a 2 channel amp to drive this too. Again my main issue here is port chuffing & car interior panel vibration.

There are 3 chambers inside the bass canon. You can stuff polyfill in to the center chamber as circled in RED by 50-70%. As I preferred tight bass in my car, I filled the middle chamber by up to 70%. The chamber is accesi8ble via the tuning ports with end caps on the long port side. You just need to unscrew all the screws around the tube diameter on the end cap. For my interior panel vibrations, I added sound dampening materials to them. With panel vibration gone and bass tuning to very tight less, I some times can sit in my car, after reaching the destination. just to finish the song, before getting out!  

Bose Acoustimass Canon for home theater use. No I don't have this, but one of my buddies used to have it in his HT den, back then in the 1990's. These Bose Acoustimass Canons were considered high end at the time! I remembered my friend demo-ing Top Gun movies in his Dolby Digital 5.1 HT system. They were pretty convincing back then. However, the Bose Acoustimass Canon is very rare now, and hard to find in the used market.

There you go, now you know my fetish for Bose Acoustimass bass module!

 

No longer headless

 

So what is so headless about ? In computer or digital world , headless pretty much is saying that you are operating some hardware without a screen or keyboard. Practically you don't see any kind of interaction with the hardware. What is in the picture is a DIY box of music player / streamer. The inside hardware is a single board computer (Asus Tinkerboard S) loaded with volumio O/S. The idea of it is to have a remote without the need of any kind of display which is convenient.

Although this is what the whole intention is about but no doubt sometimes it will be also nice to have some visual while we are enjoying our music. Even we listen with our ears but something nice to the visual is always a plus point.  After all, hifi is an entertainment. It does make sense to make the environment to be as good as possible. Of course this also meaning that what we see during the listening is critical in adding on to the enjoyment.

So here it is, I have added a small monitor of 11 inch in size to the unit via HDMI. The Tinkerboard do support A/V as with its HDMI capable of 4k resolution and even atmos / dts X surround. That is another story. So is pretty use to have a monitor add on to it to have the nice display of the unit. The display is pretty standard is showing what is playing, volume level, the minutes, play, pause. I guess with the display you have a sense that there is something playing behind the scene of the music. This is a standard fullHD monitor but it does work with touch screen monitor too. Initially I was thinking of touch screen monitor but is quite a bit costly. I am happy to settle with this. Very much happy with it and will surely enjoy my music a lot more to come. 

Man cave diversity

After the completion of the room setup for home theater, I am pretty happy with the result and watching movie is never the same again. At the same time, other part of me getting itchy again. I was thinking now about what I can do more. During this time, I was experimenting of some DIY players which I wanted to use it for music playback. It has been a couple of years trying many different solution but don't really find something I like. Finally found this little box. Inside this plastic box is a single board computer from Asus (Tinkerboard). With this I am more enthusiast about now in music. The thing is I still need a DAC for this to work. 

I started hunting around to see what I can get. I had an old Arcam Irdac but doesn't support DSD. During this time, I was also looking for some other hardware to replaced my integrated amplifier. I guess is the timing or coincidence but I bump into Wadia DAC. Personally I only know Wadia by reputation of being the leader in DAC. I had an audition in Perfect Hifi on the Wadia hook up to the KEF REF3 speakers. Just simply listening to it already make me want to just swipe my credit card and take it home. That is exactly what I did. Now the Wadia 322di is seating in my room, LOVELY.......

At the same time I also picked up the Audio Research from Perfect Hifi. The pre-amp LS25 tube pre which is what I need as I need the function of HT bypass as it will be use together in the home theater setup. As I still needed a power amp to complete the setup and I gotten a use Audio Research REF110 from a friend of mine. Now it is a complete set. This stack of hardware is pretty much dedicated to hifi use. This is also the point of no return in getting myself into the rabbit hole of hifi world.

Personally I think I still need to get some basic right before going further into more hardware. Lets get the fundamental which is the power (electric) right. I came across Frank Power bank during KLAV and I decided to give it a try. Frank Voon is really a very nice guy to deal with and he came to install the power bank into my room. Now I don't just love my music but is totally awesome. 

Now I feel like this is maximizing the room and also the speakers. I totally never regret in getting into hifi. Although a very good friend of mine did poison me about it. During this meddling around with cables (speaker, interconnect, power), even changing all kind sockets, plugs. The speaker also had additional 2 inch white oak plinth under to get better stereo imaging. Many other voodoo as well as it goes. Well this is all the fun part of the hobby. Hope you guys enjoy it. 

Man cave construction & transformation

5 years later from the day I have my own dedicated man cave. Its time to go a little bit further. I had from my first experience in having a dedicated room was the fact that, plaster ceiling in the room is a big headache. The simple reason, is the LFE from the subwoofer is creating music on the ceiling. 😋 Its pretty annoying while you are so concentrated in the movie. Second lesson, is the power supply for the room is very important and is necessary to have enough of juice. 

So here we go with the start of the work by tearing everything down. Please pardon the toilet there. The original room was 13 feet x 17 feet. Is decent size but quite a bit tight in space. So the first thing is to get a bigger space. With the extension now the room is 17 feet x 20 feet. From the picture below, the red colour wall is where the projector screen going to be install.

This picture below is the back of the room. Had a small raise platform build up as I wanted to have 2 rows of seats. The raise floor is about 1 feet. Can't really do much as the height of the room is about 9.5 feet only. 

After the floor is taken care of, the next thing is the ceiling. Having plaster is simple and nice, however the rattling problem will still need to be address. How this is done instead of the usual aluminum frame use for conventional plaster ceiling, plywood is use instead to build the frame. In order to reduce vibration further is to fill it up with rockwool. The idea is to have weight on the plaster ceiling to help control the vibration. It cost a little more but I will say its worth the price for it. 

Speaker, power, HDMI cables are all lay in at the same time. There are 4 ceiling speakers and 4 surround speakers to be install later once is all done. 

So the basic of the room is taken of already. Next part is the electrical. I had wired the room with dedicated phase from my 3 phase electric for the room. This DB box is specially put in for the room. 

Each MCB is also direct to one power socket on the wall. 2 x of the MCB is specially direct to subwoofers. I had added many wall sockets in the room. The picture is one part of it. I just want to make sure I have enough even for future expansion.

The room is completed with wall papers and laminated wood flooring. Most of the equipment are from the existing with some additional add on. The first big thing that was the PB13. From the picture it can seen that its so much bigger compare to my tiny speaker. 

The front row seats with some recliners. It feels right during that time but soon I realized is a bad idea. Most of the time I will fall asleep on it rather finishing the movie 😆

The JVC projector is mounted  directly above the first row seat. The second row seat is 3 seater sofa. 

The roller blind is there because behind is glass wall blocks. 

First run of movie and its non other than Toy Story 3. 😊 Ever since this day, my children dominant the room more than me. 

Some movie posters just to have a bit more of cinema feel. 

Finally it is all done with the change of the room. That is all for now. This is the biggest work done for the room. Moving forward is pretty much changes of hardwares and some other minor decorative add on to the room. The room slowly do evolve a more into stereo listening as well rather than home theater which was the original purpose of the room. Will share more next week on the never ending journey.

Two in one system

Starting from the living room and moving into the dedicated room, the journey continues. All this while, I am doing the room for home theater purpose. Watching movie have never been the same again once you a have dedicated room. Although I had enjoy much of movies but something else crept up on my mind. What about stereo music ? The B&W speaker is really made for stereo and using it only for home theater is not fully utilizing it. Now having that in mind, I do something that is capable doing double duty. After doing some research and some consultation with friends, decided to get rid of the Emotiva processor and the power amp.

Looking from the pic above you can see that I had gone back to AVR from pre pro setup. This is the Yamaha A-3050 , the first Yamaha AVR that supports Dolby Atmos and DTS X. The model is from year 2015 and is the top of the line Yamaha AVR in that time. This is a 11.2 channel AVR. The price is very reasonable too, roughly about RM7,000. Keeping in mind that I wanted dual usage on my setup, I wanted Yamaha for the neutral sound. So this AVR will serve the purpose of surround sound and also pre amp on stereo.

Next up will be the new integrated amplifier which was highly recommended by a friend of mine. This is the Musical Paradise MP-501 integrated tube amp. It has 4 x KT150 power tubes which is capable of 65 watt in stereo mode. Coming from solid state amp into tube, it really makes me love music. The price for this nice amp is about RM6500, I guess is quite ok for this is a China brand. One of the important factor is that this integrated amp support HT bypass. With the HT bypass feature, with just a flip of a switch it can be an integrated amp or merely being a power amp only. This serve the purpose for me to be able to have pure 2 channel and also using it as power amp for the home theater. 

So now we have all the hardware for the audio, except that I still needed something to playback for my audio. This is the first time I have venture into digital audio playback. Had been reading quite a bit online on DAC. To be honest after much reading, I still don't quite know what is the DAC going to do for me. Nevertheless, I went to get this Arcam rDAC. A very simple dac with coaxial, USB and optical input with 1 pair of analogue output. It pretty much do 24/192 sampling. I simply hook up my Dell laptop to it play with foobar. All the files are loaded in external hard drive to be use. 

This is how the overall setup had changed into with the Yamaha, tube amp and the Arcam DAC. This is pretty decent given the fact that I have no idea what I was doing but just reading from internet. As a matter of fact, I had enjoy it very much. Hifi is really something far more complicated than home theater. Getting music nirvana is something I had invested a lot more than my home theater throughout the years. Till today, there are more things that I had wanted but still haven't get the chance to try it out. Hopefully this year will the the time to venture into analogue audio with vinyl record and turntable. Till that time comes, the journey continue.

First dedicated room setup

 After years of setup in my living room on the upper floor, finally I got a chance to get into my own dedicated room (Man Cave). It's a bit of a luck I found a house with good space to have a home theater room. The room size is about 10 feet x 17 feet. First thing was getting rid of all my old gears of Pioneer. Than came this white colour pair of B&W CM8 with matching center of CMC. Got it from the B&W showroom which is now located in the "Garden Mall". Back in year 2009 the set of speakers cost about RM12k, the price had gone like 40% up since than. Somehow I got a thing of white coloured speakers. Even till now , every speakers that I own are white.

Now the hardware that is going to be driving the speakers are non other than the famous EMOTIVA. This is my first experience with pre pro setup. The processor is the UMC-1 and the power amp is the XPA-5 gen 1. Bought it direct from EMOTIVA in the states and had it Fedex to KL. Currently it will be a lot easier to get EMOTIVA from Max Audio in Seremban. The processor is a 7.1 supporting DTS-MA and TrueHD with 3D passthrough. It uses the first generation of DIRAC auto calibration. Very good software I will say, although I know nuts about auto calibration still. The XPA is a 5 channel power amp with 200 watt per channel (All Running). Its definitely a power house. 

Now on the left side of the picture , standing tall is the non other than the SVS PC-12NSD subwoofer. Its a 12inch subwoofer down firing. Its cylinder just like a tall drum with its driver at the bottom of it. The sub is driven by 400watt of sledge amp of SVS. This sub had quite a small foot print as it is standing rather than a square box. Nevertheless it is a capable sub in rattling the ceiling. Will speak more about the ceiling rattling , which is definitely a mistake. Another topic to discuss next time.

On the back of the room is the surround speaker of KEF IQ-8. Its a di-pole speakers bought from highway laser. I couldn't find white colour on this one, so have to live with it. Being at the back of the room, unfortunately I don't have enough space to mount them on the wall so ended up on speaker stand. Also due to the narrow room, I have to put the case behind the room for all the movies. Many DVD still but the BD collection is slowly growing. Eventually all this DVD are dump few years later. 

From my previous living room setup still what it is now in this room certainly it has change significantly. Now I really love my home theater. Well the only thing didn't change was my old plasma TV. Eventually I got it upgraded as well from 50" to 65" plasma. Will share more upgrades next time.

De-jittering with iFi S/PDIF iPurifier for Spotify

Continuing from my last post on my music exploration with Spotify (here), I continued to think about what other tweaks I could try out to improve Spotify's MP3-equivalent sound quality. 

I thought about jitter, which we audiophiles have learned is one of the big influencers in digital music replay quality. So I decided to search for a de-jittering device, something like the Ultra Jitterbug from Sonic Frontiers or the Genesis Digital Lens of yore, to see whether it would make any difference to Spotify's sound quality feeding my TAD-D600's DAC.  

Again, I didn't want to spend too much money, not knowing a de-jittering device's efficacy on the TAD-D600, given that TAD has paid special attention to the D600's master clock to reduce jitter with a proprietary high precision crystal oscillator. 

After some research online, I turned up with the iFi S/PDIF iPurifier (there is also a iPurifier version for USB), which iFi says does its work in 4 stages - " isolation, regeneration, a memory buffer and re-clocking. This restores the industry standard ‘square wave’ which represents the desired signal". The iFi S/PDIF iPurifier can also convert between coaxial and optical input/output too. I don't want to get into its technical specifications too much, you can read more on iFi's website.

Again, I found a used one online, it is a S/PDIF iPurifier version 1 (list price USD150). iFi has come out with iPurifier 2 which performs the same functions as far as I could ascertain. 

My need is the iPurifier's coaxial connection. For this, the iPurifier has a female RCA on one end, which the digital data feed from my Bluetooth receiver will go into, and a male RCA on the other end, which will be plugged into the digital input on the TAD-D600.

The iPurifier comes with a wall wart power supply that converts our AC into 5v DC which iFi says is a low noise power supply. I ran the iPurifier with this wall wart for a start. In no time I could hear the iPurifier's contribution to the sound quality. Basically, the improvements came in terms of improved precision, with a clearer sound and slightly heightened resolution at both ends of the frequency spectrum. The images became more focused with better definition in the bass and treble regions. 

With prolonged listening, despite these improvements, I felt that that was a certain hash in the sound that I didn't like. So I got myself another battery pack to supply 5v DC to the iPurifier, just like I did with the Bluetooth receiver as in my last post. That did the trick, the sound became smoother overall.  

Here are 2 recordings used to compare the effects without and with the iFi S/PDIF iPurifier in the loop. Noted that resolution wise they are at Spotify highest quality setting which is 320kb/s, less than a quarter of the CD's 1,411kb/s, so we can't expect miracle here. These recordings were done with an iPhone SE, hand held. The sound quality differences may be difficult to hear on mobile devices' or a PC's built in speakers, a pair of good headphones should do better. 

1. "Historia De Un Amor" by Lisa Ono, on her album "Romance Latino Selection" 

1a. Without iFi iPurifier

1b. With iFi iPurifier

The effects I noticed may be deemed subtle, but they are there. I found that the decay of each piano note cleaner with the iPurifier, There is also a similar effect with Ono's breathiness and decay at the end of each phrase of her vocal part. Each musical note, including the bass notes are also rendered with better definition. The brushed cymbal (from 1:32 onwards) stands out a little more with better dynamic shading, though its resolution is limited by the bitrate.

I prefer the sound with the iPurifier, but I can understand too if some listeners preferred the slightly warmer and looser sound without.

2. "Imperial March" - John Williams and Vienna Philharmonic from "John Williams in Vienna"

Listen to the entire track and compare how each one holds your listening attention more from beginning to end.

2a. Without iFi iPurifier

2b. With iFi iPurifier

To me, this example is all about rhythm and momentum. The recording with the iPurifier holds the musical line tighter and propels the music along better, with the music sounding more relentless and more urgent, as it should be.

Lastly, just sharing a track that a reader requested. Nice song. I just played it from Spotify and recorded it with the same setup:

3. "It Knows Me" - Avi Kaplan

Putting on the audiophile hat, I think in this recording there is a tilt in the balance towards the bottom end, it is bass heavy. With the resolution level offered by Spotify, the bass part is dense rather than well defined. The situation is further exacerbated by a somewhat recessed vocal. This track can be a challenge to a system with too much bass to play it in a well balanced manner in my view. 

Final thought - ya, in HiFi, little things do add up. The tweaks I did improved Spotify's replay to a level that is more palatable to me, which is a good thing - Spotify has become a staple in my HiFi system for me to explore new music.