The Mola Mola Tambaqui DAC

[fas42]

1 hour ago, PYP said:

All the reviewers agree that the Tambaqui is a special DAC.  It is interesting how differently they describe its qualities:   organic/natural, bright, muscular.   It makes me wonder if the Tambaqui is "just" very transparent/neutral and that what is being described is the sound of the other components in the reviewer's system.   If true, to me, that would be a good thing.

 

 

 

Yes, it's 'transparent' ... but what is being described is the sound of the recordings - the point is not to expose the sound of "other components", but the qualities of what's on the track. The closer you get to this, the more anonymous is the rig; the ideal is for it to have zero personality - and then every album is like listening to a completely different system, from the previous one.

 

The more the signature of the setup dominates, the less its accuracy - if one wants the same makeup on everything one listens to, that's OK; but it's not getting you closer to what the recording is all about ...

 

[fas42]

17 hours ago, hopkins said:

 

How do you know that? 

 

What I'm personally interested in, is hearing what's on the recording itself, rather than the rig's interpretation of that - my understanding of the word transparent is that you "see through" the method of accessing the content of a track, that is, the playback chain. So every component of the chain should be 'transparent' - you don't use a really clear pane of glass to see how good another pane of glass behind it is; the chain of panes of glass are a means of seeing the landscape beyond - if they really do the job well, you can fool people into thinking that there is nothing but a hole in the wall, 🙂.

 

If one gets a system working really well, that is, "transparent", then you discover that essentially all recordings are "organic/natural, bright, muscular" - I started getting this over 30 years ago, and nothing in between has made me think otherwise.

[fas42]

1 hour ago, hopkins said:

 

My question related specifically to your opinion about the Tambaqi's transparency, and how you established that. 

 

From the description of the sound - if part of an audio chain is not "transparent" then it becomes a weak link, most likely the weakest - if every part of the chain is '100% transparent', except the DAC, which is '50% transparent' - then no matter what you throw at the rest of the chain, it's doomed to always be only at the 50% mark ... so then, ignore everything else, and 'fix the DAC', 😉

 

IME, the D to A conversion area is the most important, the most subject to loss of the critical subjective SQ - get that part right, and losses elsewhere are nowhere near as important as far as long term listening satisfaction is concerned.

 

Edit: Just noted in a recent review, https://www.lbtechreviews.com/test/hi-fi/mola-mola-tambaqui

 

Quote

The differences are that while Hegelen sounds both colorless and detailed, it is as if the starry sky opens up behind the musicians when we switch over to Tambaqui. Cymbals shine more, there is better separation between the instruments, and even with metal with noisy cymbals, you hear the space between the cymbals much clearer when Tambaqui is allowed to conduct

 

That's a giveaway - you just, "hear more" ...

[fas42]

5 hours ago, PYP said:

 

For me, "transparency" = more real sounding/sounding more like a live event.  And while having seen performers in various live settings does not provide a perfect comparison to a recording, it does provide a good basis for what a voice or instrument of that artist typically sounds like.  Having seen a few (a dozen or so?) performers live, and now listening to their recordings, the tone and timbre I hear via the Tambaqui (and the rest of my system) is a very good match.  Of course, live sound can itself be less than optimal, depending on venue and the person at the console, but one hears through much of that.  With the Tambaqui, I also think folks who review it are reacting to what seems to me to be a very low noise floor.   Without the noise (jitter?), the ear/brain reacts positively to a natural, flowing sound.  

 

Yes, more real sounding is the key - as a good example, take vocals. The better the playback, the more voices on any genre of music, and energy level of a track always sound like the real thing. This means one can listen to a piece of opera, or a driving heavy metal frenzy - and the voices within always sound like they belong to a living, breathing person; who is just, there! The fact that they may be backed up by, say, heavily distorted guitars is irrelevant; a marker for good playback is that bizarrely contrasting sound elements within the mix retain their own personality, completely - exactly the same as how it works when listening to sounds in the real world, 😉.

 

5 hours ago, PYP said:

 

Lately, I've been thinking in terms of a lack of compression, not only to the macro but also the micro elements of music.  If one listens to a certain vintage of classical digital recordings, the lack of dynamic range is obvious.  In a much smaller sense, some DACs do the same thing with all music.  With the Tambaqui, you get to hear the whole note, so to speak, as it fades out into space.  That is very much like real music and can be thrilling with one's favorite (and newly discovered) music.  

 

The thrilling factor is very much evident with competent replay - the most unlikely recordings suddenly become immensely interesting, because everything happening in it now makes sense. This can be a great revelation - and one now understands that the musicians got a kick out of creating all the "little bits" within the whole.

[fas42]

3 hours ago, tarichar said:

Yes, you are right. My only point is that the sound of the Mola is all over the map, suggesting that the dac is transparent and letting the users hear their system and the synergy it creates.  But as another poster said, I wouldn't make my a decision on the dac based on a review, but on how it sounds in my own system.

 

The sound of a good DAC, and system is "all over the map" - that's because the recording is in control, not the system ... if one wants a uniform layer of makeup over everything, that's fine - but it means that the listening experience is relatively unchanging, recording to recording ... some people prefer to just hear what was captured, 🙂.

[fas42]

My experience has been that one can extract emotionally satisfying sound out of most finished DAC products, even if their implementation is technically poor - what one has to worry about is surrounding the electrical environment in which they work with a lot of cotton wool, so to speak; pampering the component with absolutely pristine, stable conditions - this minimises all the weaknesses that normally allow the SQ to easily degrade ... of course, the effort to do this may not be worth it; and it will easier and cheaper to simply buy a better engineered unit. However, it's an interesting exercise to prove the point - that in DACs, attention to detail is everything.

[fas42]

2 hours ago, PYP said:

 

 

I've lived with four DACs previously, all much less expensive than the Tambaqui.  I enjoyed them all, but it very clear to my ears that none came close to the level of the live sound experience that the Tambaqui provides.  And we have two users in my household (three, if you include the kitten, who prefers Jazz at reasonable volume).  Measurements don't mean anything to my wife.  She either enjoys the music or she doesn't.  She loves the Tambaqui as much as I do and we both listen to a lot more music since we got it.  

 

Yep. The sound is either right - or it ain't worth listening to ... no matter how spectacularly some special demo tracks might come across.

 

Someone who couldn't give a damn for all the audiophile nonsense is the ideal person to judge whether a system is working well or not - if the playback is 'effortless' to live with, then it's getting far more things right, than wrong.

[fas42]

4 hours ago, PYP said:

 

The MU1 (perhaps via the DDC function) does improve upon the Tambaqui.  The combo is very, very nice.  Sounds like music.  If the MU2 improves upon that (if nothing else it eliminates a meter of cable between server and DAC), it would be good to hear.   Given your setup, I can see how the Makua would be the preferred Mola Mola path.   Interested to read about your journey.  

 

Straight application of some technology is not the answer for getting a DAC to "sound like music"; IME, all the different techniques and circuit styles of digital converters can deliver convincing SQ; the bugbear is, has always been, combating noise interference factors - don't do enough in this area, and the results can be awful, no matter how much money has been thrown at everything else ... I can "still hear" the most expensive dCS combo at the time, 20 years ago, sounding like sh!te at an ultra high end audio show.

 

If the latest and greatest gets all the boxes ticked, then it will do the job - the mantra, "the devil is in the details", holds 100% for digital playback ...

[fas42]

8 hours ago, PYP said:

It is always "compared to what?" but I don't hear the Grimm as "lean, staccato, a little coarse, and tonally relatively gray."   I would describe the sound of my setup as ALIVE.  Not necessarily LIVE, since that isn't possible.  But, engaging, rich, textured and with the kind of timbre that includes the subtle characteristics of how the particular instrument moves the air around it.  

 

Am I imagining all of this?  Maybe.  That would be OK since placebos work.  But my wife has a lot of favorite new albums lately.    

 

Audiophiles always seem to have things back to front when trying to describe what dictates the character of a particular system - it's always the worst part of the chain that dictates any character; not, the best part. And that worst part could be, say, a particularly poor choice of RCA socket on one of the components - having "perfect" everything elsewhere won't compensate for that one lousy link in the setup; in fact, it makes it easier to hear the damage being done by the single flaw!

[fas42]

3 hours ago, barrows said:

The improvement was not subtle in an audiophile sense, and was immediately apparent, to my astonishment.  I still have no easily understandable, reliable, technical explanation for this, but the results of my own testing are irrefutable, so I have to accept them.

As such, I encourage those looking for better sound to try for themselves Ethernet distribution components which use better clocks, or allow for the application of better external clocking.

 

The answer is that noise affecting digital related componentry is pernicious. And invasive to the n'th degree. Constant experimentation currently is the only method to completely get these issues under control - it's equivalent to the efforts of builders in creating "green" homes, to make them so air tight that energy losses are minimised; the tiniest crack is enough to undo the value of all the other work.

 

I accept that anything can have an impact. Until I can prove to myself that it doesn't matter, I consider every part of the system and environment to be a potential source of SQ degradation ...

[fas42]

6 hours ago, PYP said:

 

The Tambaqui's output stage sounds very transparent to me.  Some say that digital attenuators don't sound good at lower volume levels, but it seems to me that the best volume is dictated by one's speakers (mine, for example, like some power before all is revealed) and that human's hear higher volume as better sound, regardless.  

 

 

I learned decades ago that a decent digital volume control had zero subjective impact on SQ; by contrast, the typical analogue potentiometer is a disaster, prone to injecting a dirtiness into the sound which is insidious - overall, its pot luck, pun intended , whether the analogue volume control is decently 'transparent', IME.