Resolution Audio Cantata 3.0

[kravi4ka]

I hope my words will help someone find a DAC that will make him or her happy for many years. The Cantata is a technical marvel that is not as aggressively promoted nor cheap. 

 

I will try to be short, all those years I have been reading tons of reviews, comments and I always tried to read between the lines yet I was almost never satisfied with the flavour of the month DAC. Truth is that there are many advanced DACs but there are very few designers that actually know how to preserve that magical spark that makes music alive. Alive does not always means lots of details, huge stage or fantastic cymbals, we have heard a lot of these. 

There is a certain emotional link to the music that people who love NOS DACs cannot trade for anything. But the 3D, the fine detail that oversampling reveals from the ones and zeros is something that is not easy to forget...

 

I have had several well regarded DACs from the past, all R2R because somehow I could never feel emotionally attached to a sigma-delta based one, trust me I tried. Of all those I really enjoyed the Audio Synthesis DAX2, the Chord Hugo 2 and most of all Mark Levisnon 360s. The players I liked were Muse Electronics Erato II and Thalia.

 

The Resolution audio Cantata 3.0 is like a mixture of all that I liked in those - it is detailed yet warm, gentle with flute but fierce with drums,  it is intimate with Norah Jones and a guitar but a wall of sound with Scheherazade and Fritz Reiner. For the first time I found the DAC that has it all, all the detail you could ask for but always remaining truthful to the way the music was recorded. 

 

My system uses the C50.2 amplifier which was the way I got to the Cantata, it was the first solid state amp that did not make me want to turn the music down, speakers are Suesskind Audio Progress by Joachim Gerhard, these three components are the first ones in more than 25 years that do what I imagined audio should be doing - make you smile.

 

Now you see that I did not call this a review because words don't matter any more. But please, check all reviews of Resolution audio gear - it is all about music. It is not cheap, not at all but it is worth it. Not to mention it is a DAC, a CD player, a network player, Jeff Kalt is developing a phono board that could be added as well. Please add it to your list in the 10K price range, I have a guy who is a dealer in Singapore who would like to stay anonymous who has all the good stuff up to 35K and his go to demo machine is the Cantata 3.0, it is that good.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read.

[kravi4ka]

Just wanted to add something that I was hesitating to write. I hope no one will feel offended by it or try to tell me I don't know what I am saying. I am only trying to reach the people who will relate to what I am saying honeslty, not willing to start a war.

 

One of the DACs that I spent considerable time with hoping to be my last DAC was the T+A DAC 8 DSD. I could not afford a SG music server but I bought a very powerful one to try HQplayer at full power. I found the PCM section quite nice but my hopes were for the DSD section to create magic. Somehow it sounded great - smooth, organic, no shortage of dynamics at all but I had that strange feeling of overprocessed sound, one of those things that you cannot put your finger on yet you feel... I tried all filters(there were no closed form ones at the time) but in the end there was just something that prevented me from fully connecting to the performance. And I did try - I am deep into cables, power cords, vibration control, connectors and so, not to the level of mpingo discs but I have the time and patience to extract the best of what I am spending the money on, I have a family and I try to repsect both the family and the designers of the devices by giving it all that I know can make a difference for the positive and not do the:"Not good enough, next" routine. 

 

The Cantata has all that feeling of NOS fluidity, all the transparency and none of the glare, I guess Jeff Kalt has his recipie of what he likes and as it is sometimes with cars and food it turned out he is my Chef  I greatly respect all other truly smart engineers out there who are literaly fighting physics to make DACs sound great,I just wanted to say that there is a humble guy in California who knows how to create magic. 

 

[kravi4ka]

Well, I have listened to both the Yggdrasil and the 3.0, there is no contest. Difference is not that big, definitely the 3.0 is not several times better as the price but once you hear it and if you can afford it I cannot imagine I could do without the Cantata. The 3.0 is a technological marvel but it is also fine tuned by someone with great ears, I think the other guy that works with Jeff Kalt comes from the Great Nothern Sound company. The Yggi is great but the Cantata is simply a world level dac. I wish I could save the money...

 

The preamp section of the 3.0 is quite good and it takes a preamp in the 7-10K range to make it better and that means another 3-4K in interconnects as well. And the greatest about it is that if you turn the Cantata volume to 100 it switches the preamp off. 

 

I was hoping that the DSD512 was the magic bullet but I was sad to need to move to a real R2R dac for the natural sound I like. Sad because it is quite expensive. But worth it. 

 

The upnp part did not work for me, I will admit that I was just tired of switching devices and just went for the USB part, I had already gone through dad, the app that comes with the 3.0  is not good for anything.

[kravi4ka]

I use the Phasure Lush USB cable and plan to add the Lush 2 but I am a bit scared to have so many options to choose from, life should be simple...

[kravi4ka]

Just for the record - the Cantata 3.0 just murdered mercilessly a Chord DAVE plus M scaler and S.I.N. audio links( a substantial upgrade indeed)... It was so shocking! Some parts of the music was missing with the Chords, I would not believe it myselsf after all the rave reviews of the DAVE/Msc... I am owner of both, I was hoping the DAVE would be the new benchmark and I even had a customer for the Cantata,not good as it did cost a lot.

[kravi4ka]

Can’t really answer that question... I am struggling to make the Phasure work most of the time and I have just a Gen1 computer. The Phasure is at work and there I can only use the Ether 2 so not a direct comparison.

 

But the Phasure has a certain ease in the way it presents music that is intoxicating, if only the software was not so damn difficult to play and a bit less ugly... The Cantata is more demanding, it is not a relaxed player, it is fast, detailed and a bit dry, especially compared to the Wadia s7i which is warm, lush and even more details are evident but the Cantata makes it all come alive somehow. Like real people in the room, like a real cello in front of you, it gets the essence of the music as nothing else I have heard.

[kravi4ka]

8 hours ago, matthias said:

A guy on Audiogon Forum whose verdict I trust directly compared the Cantata to the Sparkler Audio S503 CD player and prefered the Sparkler because of its real organic natural truth to the music.The Cantata was good HiFi where the Sparkler had great realism in sound quality.

 

Matt

 

I am happy for the guy, if you are after NOS sound then no Wadia or Cantata will be good enough. 

[kravi4ka]

I have been through that many times, I think I have spent something like 50K in the last three years trying "giant killers" like that one. I went through 47 labs, T+A DAC 8 DSD at DSD512, discrete DSD DACs of all kinds, NOS DACs of all kinds and I am tired of that "what if". 

 

It looks like the CD player is using the same Sanyo transport that was the Magic trick in the shigaraki transport, I had 4 of those and I don't want to go back there. 

 

NOS DACs come with their own strengths and problems, we don't need that debate again. If you can afford the Cantata then you can buy one and compare it to the CD, let us know what you find if you do. But to sit there and rely on a single post on a forum is a waste of time, just like reading mine. If you have 3-4 people who have changed the Cantata to a Sparkler-nice, buy one, might be indeed good. I sold the DAVE and I am happy with the 3.0.