![]() With the Ocellia speakers on loan, it was very easy to lock into two very critical elements of music reproduction - tone accuracy followed by the balance of leading edge to decay. All this gets done upfront once and from that point forward you only have to select the appropriate input on the Hex-Toslink for video, USB for music-and voilà, the best of both worlds.īack to the Hex for musical enjoyment, it became the DAC which thus far came closest to the full immersion I feel when listening to vinyl and actually many times exceeded it. In OSX Lion it's easy to then set up the optical output as default for movies and PureMusic or Audirvana+ to short-cut optical in favor of USB for music. Thankfully there's a relatively easy workaround for somebody like me who insists on using the Hex also for video: connect the computer via optical and USB. With video the USB input's generous buffer to better manage computer-induced jitter makes said latency a non-starter however. My family was headed into an all Batman night to force me to reconnect the Burson urgently as that suffers no such delays via USB.įor video-less systems there's no issue without any visual reference. This wasn't exactly a crowd pleaser at casa Beudot. The Hex's USB processing involves an about 1-second delay to where playing a movie from the Mac mini has the sound arrive about a second behind the image. Unlike with the Burson Conductor where A+ with restored Integer mode remains my absolute reference for microdynamics, I consistently preferred PureMusic for the Hex. Yet I never felt that the combination of Hex and Audirvana gave the best results or provided the fullest expression of what the Hex could do on tonal rightness and flow. Reverting to an older version pre Direct mode or updating to A+ 1.4 then disengaging Direct solved the issue. I initially experienced the same issues John and Srajan did when A+ 1.3.10 refused to play ball with the M2tech driver even with Direct mode disengaged. The modified OEM USB module is incompatible with Audirvana's Direct mode. With the Hex not offering variable outputs I use the Conductor as preamp in its lowest gain setting when listening to the Hex mostly via USB. 21 Twin Signature review speakers All cabling is Ocellia including USB. My current system begins with a dedicated Mac mini running either PureMusic or Audirvana+ into a Burson Conductor as DAC/preamplifier driving a First Watt F5 into a pair of Ocellia Calliope. With Metrum's Hex we now have a rerun of sorts. We ran into this a few years ago when three of us described the effects of ASI Liveline cables in almost identical terms. Nonetheless opinions sometimes converge to focus on dominant qualities a component will express regardless of environment. Couple this with significantly different music preferences and listener biases and the reader will be lucky to find a few common threads from one opinion to the next. Components express their strengths and weaknesses differently depending on context. Once you get past the stock settings, it's a hair here and there.This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed belowģ rd opinion from Frederic Beudot: Typically when three reviewers listen to the same piece of equipment in vastly different systems, the results rarely overlap completely. I also thought that filtering out the aliasing images above the nyquist using the EQ helped clarify the audible spectrum - but this could just be brain trickery. ![]() I tend to favor fewer pre echos at the expense of more post echo because I value "attack" over "separation" and I listen to very congested music with tons of instrumentation (prog rock). After that there are super small differences detected in the steepness and pre-ringing settings as this changes the pre and post echos of transients. The biggest difference I heard was in using stock settings in forced upsampling (power of 2) vs not using it. Even with my TOTL IEMs I was hard pressed to hear real differences. Of course, if you don't have very fast and resolving headphones/IEMs (and amp), you may not hear a difference. In my case FabFilter ProQ 2 - I have 96db/oct at 18khz and another 96db/oct at 19.5khz - I run in "natural phase" modeĪll of this is covered in detail in the PM I'll send you. These settings are best matched with a low pass filter scheme and VERY good EQ software. Force to "Power of 2 oversampling only".cutoff frequency 1.25 (must be this high because of the super slow rolloff in the steepness).limit your software output bit rate to match the max of your DAC - in my case I limited it to 24 bits down from 32 (I swear I heard a difference, but it was hard to tell).I'm just a copier here, not original poster! ![]() In the meantime, here are some settings I've been using with A+ and iZotope upsampling that I've basically copied from the link I'll provide to you. ![]()
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