Another great play date this afternoon with T and his younger brother J. A music scholar, journalist and Bach expert of rank, albeit without his elder brother’s merits as a musician. We spent four hours playing everyone’s test tracks submitted for the event.
Two conclusions from all of this:
- The system is sounding really good with the latest (V3) Mitchco filter iteration. Really good. Have no idea how easy or difficult it is to refine a FIR filter to this level of performance (I decided I just don’t have the time to learn it and try) but Mitch does it really well, is affordable, and is a pleasure to work with.
- And here’s the really interesting thing. After T’s last visit I had reset the output level on the Bartók to 2V. Had intended to check the input sensitivity on the T2 just to make sure I am not overloading it but not gotten round to it. Anyway, the session started with listening to J’s tracks, none of which I was familiar with. I thought they sounded OK, but there was a hard edge to them which made it very difficult to relax and enjoy the music. T was silent but I could see the telltale signs of pain on his face. Anyway, after 5-6 tracks he politely asked if we could switch back to 6V. Instant relief! In the context of this system and the diminishing returns curve I have been pursuing this was a major difference, like a change of DAC or amp. Strange. I doubt it is an inherent difference between the 2V and 6V stages in the Bartók (although it could be?), so I assume it is to do with the matching of the output of the Bartók with the input of my Nord 3 (input sensitivity 2.52Vrms 10.24dBu into 8Ω, input impedance ~50K㏀). But whatever the explanation is this was not subtle, and flies in the face of the conventional wisdom iiuc?