Antipodes DX Gen3 vs Innuos Zenith MkII SE

[flkin]

Hi Khun Krit,

 

So glad you've got your UltraRendu working with your Antipodes. This weekend will be fun! 

 

For those interested, it turns out that Kritpoon and myself both live within a street from each other in Bangkok! And with completely different front end systems but both attempting to push the limits of server/render technologies. Kritpoon will be coming over on Sunday to compare his system with mine at my home. 

 

My system is Front End --> Vinnie Rossi DAC 2.0 --> Vinnie Rossi DHT preamp (w/Takatsuki TA-300B tubes) --> YBA Passion 1000 mono blocks --> Wilson Watt Puppy 6 with the new woofers 

 

Dedicated AC power and house wiring for the mono block power amps through Shunyata Hydra 8. Front end electronics through Topaz 1kVA on strip.

 

Kritpoon's front end comprises of the

1. Antipodes DX Gen3
2. UltraRendu / LPS-1
3. Mutec MC3+, Mutec Ref10 clock and combinations thereof.

 

My front end comprises of the SOtM Stable

1. Non-optimised but bridged MacBook Pro with dCBL-CAT7 and iSO-CAT6 ethernet cleaners
2. Trifecta: D-Link DSG105 w/clock mod, sMS-200 w/clock mod, tx-USBultra providing the clock
3. IsoRegen
4. Cybershaft OP14 clock
5. DC power using assortment of LPS-1 and sPS-500, no sharing Y cables

 

We haven't decided what to test but the following will probably be on the table:

• Antipodes vs. SOtM Stable
• Antipodes(server), UltraRendu(renderer) vs. SOtM Stable
• Antipodes(server), UltraRendu(renderer), Mutec MC3+, Mutec Ref10 vs. SOtM Stable
• SOtM Stable but with Mutec Ref10 clock vs. SOtM Stable with Cybershaft OP14 clock
• Antipodes(server) --> SOtM Stable vs. everything above

Hopefully we'll have time to do the above and try other combinations that might come to mind at that time. 

 

Kritpoon is bringing over his Antipodes and Mutec Ref 10 clock a day and a half earlier to ensure that the devices are warmed up enough before the comparisons. Will do a writeup of our experiences after. 

 

[flkin]

That was a great meet Khun Are @Kritpoon! Thanks for coming over with your equipment and spending 4 hours with me on swapping cable, power supples and other stuff.

 

We have Interesting results that will probably involve both of us spending more money! 

 

These are the tests that we managed to do:

1. Cybershaft OP14 vs. Mutec Ref.10
2. Antipodes with MC3+ vs. SOtM Stable with MC3+
3. Bridged Macbook unoptimised with MC3+ vs. Antipodes with MC3+
4. Bridged Macbook unoptimised vs. Antipodes with MC3+
5. Antipodes with SOtM Stable with MC3+ vs. All of the above
6. Antipodes to UltraRendu to MC3+ vs. (5)
7. Habst 75ohm cable vs. Pasternack RG216 75ohm cable 

Will try to write it up over the next few days. 

 

 

[flkin]

haha, not sure if I can, the final setup was pretty mind-blowing... 

[flkin]

Ok, so here are the results of our SOtM Stable and Antipodes comparisons. Firstly I have to thank Khun Aek @Kritpoon for kindly coming over with his equipment and leaving it behind for a week. The world is truly small and to have two top tier front ends systems within a stone throw of each other in Bangkok is a nice surprise for us both. 

 

 

There are two schools of though about sources. One is to have an optimised computer with low noise, properly powered and even re-clocked perhaps feeding a DAC directly. The other is to use a simpler server of music like a Macbook or Mini and pass the signal through sophisticated rendering and cleaning systems. Both approaches have avid supporters and here we are looking at an instance of both approaches with interesting results.

 

As we have a lot of equipment and many various connections required to get each setup to work properly, I will first list (did it before but to summarise, here it is again) out the different equipment we had on that day of the test:

 

Source:
Antipodes running Roon Server
MacBook Pro running Roon Server 

 

The MacBook Pro is unoptimised (actually running as a Plex movie server for my kids as well) but bridged between an Orbi network WiFi secondary router (w/Teddy Pardo 12/2) that acts as the only data input point in the room and the SOtM clock modified D-Link DSG-105 switch.

 

 

Antipodes system:
- Antipodes DX Gen 3
- UltraRendu (LPS-1)
- Mutec Ref.10
- Mutec MC3+usb (mod for LPS-1 DC) w/Habst Digital BNC 5N Cryo Silver, 70ohm cable to the Ref 10
- BNC Coax cable Digiflex Gold II 

 

 

SOtM Stable:
- 2 SOtM dCBL-CAT7 ethernet cables and an iSO-CAT6 ethernet cleaner box
- The Trifecta consisting of the 3 items: D-Link DSG105 w/clock mod (LPS-1), sMS-200 w/clock mod (sPS-500), tx-USBultra (sPS-500) providing the clock connections
- IsoRegen (LPS-1)
Clock:
- Cybershaft OP14 clock w/ original Cybershaft 50ohm cable

 

 

Rest of my system:
Vinnie Rossi DAC 2.0 --> Vinnie Rossi DHT preamp (w/Takatsuki TA-300B tubes) --> YBA Passion 1000 mono blocks --> Wilson Watt Puppy 6 with the WP7 woofers 

 

Here are the tests we did and had 3 pairs of ears on them. We mostly agreed on the differences as they were not subtle. No blind tests were conducted. In all cases, the MC3+ was clocked by the Mutec Ref.10 via the Habst BNC cable.

 

          1. Cybershaft OP14 vs. Mutec Ref.10
          2. Antipodes to MC3+ vs. Macbook to SOtM Stable to MC3+
          3. Antipodes to MC3+ vs. Macbook to SOtM Stable
          4. Antipodes to SOtM Stable to MC3+ vs. All of the above
          5. Antipodes to SOtM Stable to MC3+ vs. Antipodes to UltraRendu to MC3+  
          6. Habst 75ohm cable vs. Pasternack RG216 75ohm cable 

 

 

1. Cybershaft OP14 vs. Mutec Ref.10
Khun Aek @Kritpoon brought over his equipment over the day before and so it would be warming up for around 30 hours prior to our tests. We figured this should be enough for the clock and other components to sound at it’s best.

 

And of course, I couldn’t help but to have a listen the night before the tests alone after around 8 hours of warming. This was probably the simplest test to perform as I had my SOtM Stable already set up and it was only a matter of switching the Cybershaft 50ohm cable from the OP14 to the Ref.10 50ohm connector. 

 

 

With the track Live from Las Vegas, Louis Prima & Kelly Smith track 15, Embraceable you, the Ref. 10 can be heard as more natural with more focus. More separation with the instruments and voices without being thinner. The separated sounds have a touch better textures and more details, the combined effect is that the sonic picture is more real.

 

 

With Breathe by Jax Jones, the Ref10 sync beats more clearly focused in space, tight and bouncing around the soundstage. Voice more texture and natural. Who would have known a club/dance electronic pop song like this can have vocals that sound audiophile?!

 

 

Tower of song by Leonard Cohen, voice larger with OP14 made it more enjoyable to listen to but perhaps less accurate. 

 

 

Tears in Heaven, Eric Clapton Unplugged. OP14 looser imaging and each sound image larger. Fun to listen to but Ref10 more focused and more accurate. Overall balance of sound comes across as balanced and complete, voices correct sizes detailed and textured, guitars clear and defined, backing vocals gently at the back left. The thumping bass is resolved enough to imagine heel stamping and you can hear the shoe tapping on the floor too. Nice!

 

That said, it’s not as if the Cybershaft OP14 is a slouch, it’s already very good and the best my system had ever been prior to listening to the Ref.10. The improvement over the clock in the tX-USBultra is substantial and well worth the upgrade. It’s just that the Mutec Ref10 provides even more of a ‘clock’ effect. A little bit better in all aspects. In addition to lower a phase noise in the Ref.10, I wonder if that has to do with their use of a square wave form instead of the sine wave in the OP14? 

 

The next day when my guests arrived, I suggested that we used just the Tears in Heaven, Eric Clapton Unplugged track as our test track. It’s an excellent sounding track with guitar strings, vocals in a live environment. Everyone arrived at the same conclusion which was the external clock matters and greatly so with the Ref 10.

 

From this point on, we decided to stick with the Ref10 clock for any external clocking requirements.

 

 

2. Antipodes with MC3+ vs. Macbook through SOtM Stable with MC3+
Next up a pretty obvious comparison was to use the Antipodes by itself to my Vinnie Rossi DAC 2.0. Unfortunately we couldn’t get the Antipodes to recognise the DAC 2.0 and eventually we tried passing the Antipodes through the MC3+ (Ref10 reclocked with Habst cable) and using a coaxial (Digiflex Gold II) to the DAC2.0 and this worked fine. So the rest of our comparison tests had to pass through the MC3+.

 

The first surprise of the day - the Macbook setup sounded better. Same Eric Clapton track was used. The Antipodes setup sounded thicker and less airy between the soundscape. Eric Clapton’s voice with less detail and emotion.

 

We had expected that the Antipodes with it’s specially customised Asus motherboard and optimised power source would be better but we didn’t hear it that way. Could it be that the SOtM dCBL-Cat7 cables and iSO-Cat6 device from the Macbook were doing it job and providing the Stable with a sufficiently cleaned signal to best the Antipodes? Looking at the wired connections more carefully, we noticed that the Antipodes was connected to the Orbi router with a standard Blue Jeans ethernet blue cable. I had an unused Ghent JSSG cable lying around and so tried it. Ah and there’s the difference, once the cable was swapped, the Antipodes’ sound noticeably tightened up. Now the sound from both systems were about matched. *

 

* I revisited this setup after the meet by myself as it's pretty unexpected and came to the conclusion again. 

 

This indicates to me that in my particular setup the server is not as critical as the renderer part of the source. A humble Macbook Pro (with power adaptor plugged in, eek!) and not software optimised still sounded comparable to a top quality server. But to achieve this it needed to be software bridged along with, I suspect, the triple cleaning effect of the SOtM ethernet filters to removed whatever noise that shouldn’t be there.

 

 

3. Antipodes with MC3+ vs. Macbook with SOtM Stable
Ok, then how about we remove the MC3+ from the Macbook setup? The sound becomes thinner and not as engaging as with the MC3+ in the path. It looks like the tx-USBultra, while doing a good job cleaning the USB signal, as is confirmed by so many others, can still be improved upon by yet another USB cleaner after it. Khun Aek informs me that up to 4 MC3+ devices can be chained together to further clean a signal noticeably! 

 

 

4. Antipodes with SOtM Stable with MC3+ vs. All of the above
So we established that the Stable with MC3+ added for double cleaning is necessary but what about adding the Antipodes as the source instead of the Macbook? This we haven’t tried yet as the (3) comparison was with the Antipodes with the MC3+ alone. And here the Macbook/Stable/MC3+ matched it.

 

 

Yes, this was the optimal configuration. The best of the lot. Beautifully natural sound, balanced of bass, voice details and texture with an open airy sound. There is no noticeable emphasis in the music, all parts of Eric Clapton’s ensemble are playing/singing in what feels like great teamwork, a musical sync without one aspect overwhelming another. Depth, width and even height of the music nicely rendered. When you hit a sweet spot, wow! The emotion really comes through. The differences of the various combinations of the equipment may not be all that much measured by percentages but when measured by the emotions of the musicians bared so clearly to us and the effect it had on us, it’s truly a 'goosebump' moment as Khun Aek put it. 

 

 

5. Antipodes to SOtM Stable to MC3+ vs. Antipodes to UltraRendu to MC3+  
Khun Aek recently discovered that his bridged Antipodes sounded better with the UltraRendu added as the renderer. It was the best his system sounded prior to coming over, so we decided to see how the UltraRendu would sound by swapping it in to replace the Stable.

 

Nope, the soundstage collapses quite a bit, several steps behind the last iteration in (4). Vocals are also slightly recessed. In my particular setup the Antipodes played through the Stable and extra cleaned with the MC3+ has some truly special synergy and here the UltraRendu cannot replace the Stable.

 

 

6. Habst 5N cryo silver 75ohm cable vs. Pasternack PE33403-36, RG216 75ohm cable 
Given the silver Habst cable was so expensive and since I had a new Pasternack RG216 double shielded cable around, we though it would be interesting to see how much of a change swapping the cable would show. This is from the Ref10 to the MC3+. The Stable was still connected to the Ref 10 via the Cyershaft 50ohm cable. 

 

So using the best sounding combination of equipment in (4) we tried this. Amazing change in sound. The Habst is far better. With the Pasternak the sound becomes unfocused, the bass and lower mids a smeared blob. The difference was almost as large as not using a clock. So the clock BNC cable matters - to the extent that an external clock is basically pointless without a good cable.  So much so that I am considering seeing if Habst can make up a 50ohm cable for my Cybershaft.

 

The Habst cable has 2 BNC connectors on the Ref 10 side - a thicker twin cable for signal and a thinner single for ground. We decided to fit the Habst back to the MC3+ but disconnect the ground BNC alone. With just the signal cable, the Habst is good but not great. The grounding BNC is essential but takes an additional port on the Ref.10

 

 

At this time, we decided to lay back and enjoy music for the rest of our meet. Some of the other tracks we listened to were:

 

• Livingston Taylor, Isn’t she lovely
• Nojima Plays Liszt (Minoru Nojima), Etude No3, La Campanella
• Jax Jones, Breathe
• Hilary Hahn/ Natalie Zhu, Mozart: Violin Sonatas K301
• La La Land (original motion picture soundtrack), Someone in the Crowd
• Imagine Dragons, Evolve, Believer

 

 

Man, I heard things I never heard before. In the Liszt track, the piano notes and pedal movements has always been fantastic sounding but for the first time, I could see the piano size and shape. This is one of my favourite piano tracks with beautifully captured attacks and ambience. Norjima's playing here is OK but makes 4 mistakes are even clearer now that I can count. ;-)

 

 

Imagine Dragons just came to Bangkok recently and with that high energy Believer track, they were back in town in my hifi room and sounded like we were on stage with them; soundstage width, depth and height extending far beyond the physical boundaries of my room.

 

 

And so after our meet, I can say I've reconfirmed some of my earlier thoughts about equipment contributions but perhaps reordered their position in the significance table. To summarise our findings :

 

• Clocks and clock cables - they matter greatly perhaps the most
• USB cleaners, more than one in series works and significantly
• Much can be done to improve the Source. The renderer part more so than the server part
• The Macbook Pro makes is a great Roon server when bridged and ethernet output cleaned
• But the best sound is to have an excellent source and further re-clock it and clean the output multiple times.

That’s it, hope this is interesting reading for all. 

 

 

 

[flkin]

17 hours ago, Confused said:

Just for clarity, could you advise the lengths of the RG216 and Habst cables used between the REF10 and MC3+USB?

 

Hi, thanks for your comment. The RG216 is 36 inches long.

 

14 hours ago, limniscate said:

Great write-up!  I was surprised that my Digikey sounded better than my Pasternack, but its' very close.

 

You all's findings are similar to mine and @austinpop.  However, given your findings, I do suspect that the Zenith MkII SE is better than the Antipodes DX Gen3.  Adding the sMS-200 Ultra to the Zenith MkII SE didn't seem to have an effect, but now I may want to test it again.

 

Thanks for your comment. Not sure if we can extrapolate our findings and conclude the Antipodes is inferior to the Zenith, probably should wait until someone has a chance to try them side by side? The Antipodes was improved by the full Mutec Ref 10 clocked Trifecta effect not only just a sMS-200.

 

13 hours ago, mahi said:

are u guys running roon as well? if so then decreasing the buffer size should bring higher transparency and quicker tempo (for direct usb connection without the rendu/sotm).

 

i also found deleting all the apps (save roonready in my setup) in the renderer brought another degree of transparency.

 

good writeup and great contribution to the community!

 

Thanks for the comment. Yes, both systems were running Roon. 

 

13 hours ago, rickca said:

Your BNC Coax cable Digiflex Gold II between the Mutec MC-3+ USB and DAC ... what is the quality and price of this cable?  It's pretty important because it's the final link in the chain.

 

I realize you were using the REF 10, but what clock is native to the Mutec MC-3+ USB?

 

The Digiflex Gold II belongs to @Kritpoon. Perhaps he can answer this for you. It's supposed to be decent. During our comparisons, we found the Antipodes had difficulty recognising the Vinnie Rossi Day 2.0 so we had no choice but to pass the signal through the MC3+ to make it work. All comparisons apart from test (3) was then though the MC3+ using the Digiflex Gold II into the DAC via coax so its a common factor and shouldn't play a part in the final comparisons. To be fair, in test (3) there are many variables there - like Mac/Stable/USB input in DAC via Lush cable and the other was Antipodes/MC3+/coax input to DAC via Digiflex. So it's fair to say the conclusion isn't as clear as I stated it.

 

Not sure what you mean about native clock in the MC3+ but in our tests, it was always re-clocked by the Mutec Ref10 via the Habst cable. 

 

10 hours ago, FredM said:

Many thanks for this great write up, really appreciated. Thanks for the effort you put in it.

 

To avoid biased reading from my side, a check: it seems that (after the cable swap) the Antipodes DX gen3 performs equal to the MacBook + full SOtM stable, right? (Where in both cases the MC3+ was connected)

 

 

IF this is true, the following is interesting:

 

1) Where was the test track stored?

Did you listen via ie Tidal, or was it stored on the Antipodes and MacBook, or perhaps on a NAS?The Antipodes seem to give the best result when stored internally on a SSD. So when the test is done by streaming over the network/internet an extra notch can be achieved.

 

2) Next month the Antipodes CX hits the market:

This is a €4000 server/renderder (exclusive the internal SSD storage), with usb and RJ45 outputs. With the RJ45 output a separate render der/NAA can be connected (such as the sMS-200 etc). From the Antipodes site: “The CX delivers stunning sound quality, exceeding the audio performance of even the excellent DX”. This looks very promising... The CX could well be THE one killer box front end:

a) a true one box solution, the CX has an internal psu

b) the total cost is lower (or at least similar) then the SOtM ‘stable’, which includes a modded switch, SOtM cables, psu’s, MacBook, etc (as mentioned in the description)

c) it is better then the Antipodes DX gen3 (so a possible extra notch compared with the full SOtM ‘stable’)

d) an obvious future upgrade path is available with the RJ45 output by connecting a separate (clocked) endpoint /NAA.

e) also important, Antipodes offers long term upgrade programs to excisting customers. 

 

If I don’t got things wrong/mixed up, I think my search for an one box killer front end is FINALY at the horizon. Or have I been reading all this with a tendentious hat on? I would appreciate to hear any sane thoughts..!!

 

Again, many thanks for your great write up!

 

Thanks for your comments. Yes after the ethernet cable was swapped, the Antipodes/MC3+ sounded similar to the Macbook/Stable. But like my above comment, I failed to mention that the former set was via Coax and latter via USB to the DAC. This would likely play a part in any differences heard. 

 

Test Tracks were all streamed from Tidal. We didn't get around to comparing the storage in the Antipodes, which I gather is pretty good, to the Mac storage which was a attached USB drive.

 

I believe the announced Antipodes CX is the source/server part and requires the EX to be the renderer and was intended to be a 2 box ultimate solution? Perhaps the CX can do both functions too, I'm not sure.

 

 

[flkin]

Oops, correction:

 

4 hours ago, flkin said:

..

Thanks for your comments. Yes after the ethernet cable was swapped, the Antipodes/MC3+ sounded similar to the Macbook/Stable. But like my above comment, I failed to mention that the former set was via Coax and latter via USB to the DAC. This would likely play a part in any differences heard. 

..

 

I should have said Macbook/Stable/MC3+ in the above sentence. Both the Antipodes and the Mac/Stable went through the MC3+