Will tube preamp add?

[bluesman]

8 hours ago, andrewinukm said:

You can sell off the Pi, DAC, and amp...and use LS50W as Roon endpoint.

Roon 1.3 will now recognize the LS50W as an endpoint.  This is new - earlier versions did not.  They won’t play DSD or DoP, if that’s a problem for you. But they do handle up to 24/192 and sound mighty fine.
 

I think there’s a KEF app that lets you stream your files up to 192k directly to the Ws, but I don’t know anything about it.

[bluesman]

31 minutes ago, andrewinukm said:

The LS50 Wireless is really really excellent for the price....Someone mentioned iFi. The iDSD Black Label is a very good sounding DAC, lots of clarity. Definitely worth auditioning.

Your D50S (which, as you describe it, is the model you have despite andrewinukm's reference to the earlier - and different - D50) is a wonderful DAC and your amplifiers are equally fine.  This is a great pair to drive LS50s and Roon Bridge on a Pi 4 is an excellent endpoint.  You can now play files of any practical resolution and format with wonderful sound quality.  Swapping for the suggested alternatives in this thread may alter your SQ a little bit, but this is purely a matter of personal preference - none of these is "better" than the rest, although some may be more pleasing to one of us than to another.

 

I currently have and listen regularly to multiple systems that include variants of most of the equipment discussed above, including a Prima Luna amplifier, an iFi DSD, an SMSL SU-8 balanced DAC, JBL and Edifier powered speaker systems, Rogers LS3/5a, 7 Raspberry Pi 3B+s and 4s, a NUC running ROCK, a Parasound preamp, a Nuforce preamp, a Wadia digital amp, etc.  Everything we're talking about in this thread is as good as or better than most alternatives anywhere near the price range, as good as most of the rest, and almost as good as "the best".  How big a gap is defined by "almost" is also purely personal preference, and the width of that gap lends itself well and often to semantic manipulation.

 

I strongly suggest that you enjoy what you have for an extended period of time while trying potential improvements in room treatment, DSP, DAC filters, etc.  Give each change enough listening time to really get to know if and how it affects SQ.  Switch back and forth.  Try many different source programs.  It can be very revealing to compare different versions and formats of the same program material to see what differences you can and can't hear and to compare what you hear to reputable published reviews, e.g. original vs remastered, stereo pair vs multimiked recordings of the same ensembles, and so forth.  Your system is a great platform for learning - why not take advantage of it?  You'll become a better educated, more experienced audiophile while enjoying a lot of music.

[bluesman]

2 hours ago, al2813 said:

I like the sound of my setup a lot but as I said it sounds much deeper and layered with more acoustic music. When the music is more electric the separation is not as good. It’s like the music is not as layered.

This is a perfect example of the educational value of just listening.  Dollars to donuts, what you're describing is more the result of the way the recording was made than how it's played back.  Virtually all "electric" music (pop, rock, commercial et al - and even a lot of jazz) is recorded as individual parts or small units, by acoustically isolating the players and their mics and/or having them lay down their parts individually while listening to backing or other timing tracks.  These are then assembled into a simulation of ensemble performance by engineers and producers in post-production.  

 

The performers are placed in space electronically by balancing left to right and using DSP to create the spatial image desired by the engineers and producers.  The result is simply not as natural and 3 dimensional as it is when the ensemble is recorded live with good microphone use in a good setting.  You can and should hear these differences on any decent playback system.  This is not at all important to most non-classical artists and engineers, who are concerned with how perfectly they achieved their concept of the recording and its overall effect on potential buyers.  The genres don't demand a natural sound stage, which is largely because there is no such thing for 99+% of studio recordings of pop / rock / etc - the performers never actually play together at any stage of recording.

 

I think it's worth any audiophile's time to research the making of at least a few of the albums they listen to a lot, to learn how recording methodology translates to playback.  Read, listen, repeat.  There's an amazing amount of technical info about many well known recordings, both in print and on the web, if you look for it. And you should be able to correlate what was done in recording with what you hear in playback.  A little web searching + a lot of listening will teach you a lot, e.g. here's a description of how Steely Dan recorded:

 

"The stories of Fagen and Becker's 'obsession' are legion. For instance, when working on their second album, Countdown To Ecstasy (1973), they ran an eight-bar loop of two-inch tape to an idler wheel outside the control room in an attempt to achieve drum machine-like precision in the rhythm section. Steely's web site, www.steelydan.com, proclaims with some pride that because of a faulty tape machine used on the recording of Katy Lied (1975), the band refused to listen to the final album. When working on Gaucho (1980), they pioneered the use of engineer Roger Nichols' freshly developed Wendel sampling drum machine and audio sampler (12.5kHz/12-bit) for drums and percussion. An indication of the amount of overdubbing, splicing, and re-recording that went into their quest for perfection was that Nichols and Scheiner used up 360 rolls of tape recording Gaucho [bolding added by me]."

 

[The perfect timing of the rhythm section in Steely Dan recordings is actually unnatural.  Even human metronomes like David Garibaldi, Kenny Aronoff and Steve Gadd sound a bit more human than they do metronome. With any decent system, you can hear the unnatural perfection of a drum machine or timing-corrected sampler, as distinct from the natural subtle variance in live drumming.  Even the regular strokes on a ride cymbal or the classic syncopated high hat riff will show minor variation in both timing and tone on some hits.]

 

And there's a ton written about the recording sessions that created Miles' Kind of Blue, e.g. 

 

"instruments were left/center/right with the two track mix folding the center channel to both the left and right channels. As Marks reports, only the center channel microphones used by Davis and bassist Paul Chambers had 'send and return' lines to and from the 30th street studios concrete echo chamber but leakage from the other instruments into their microphones, (plus the converted church's natural reverb), probably accounts for the recording's spacious ambience and its overall coherent reverberant field."

 

[You can hear the slightly harsh and "physical" echo chamber effect of their makeshift reverb in the bass and trumpet as distinct from the overall "roominess" of the church on the original vinyl, but less so (at least, to my ears) on remasters.]

 

"The mono original (and reissue) provides a better overall instrumental balance, with greater emphasis on the piano and more solid imaging. Yes, its not as ethereally spacious, but it better layers and balances the instruments in my opinion and if you remain unconvinced that mono can produce three-dimensionality, this record will convince you."

 

[There's a CD out now with both versions - mono and stereo - on it.  It's well worth the price.]

 

"[T]he 'magic' on the original pressing cannot be fully duplicated elsewhere in terms of the air and space available when the tape was fresh—even with the 3-2 mixdown and that's taking into account the high frequency 'bump' produced when the tape was played 1.25% fast on side one's recorded tracks. The cymbal decay that seems to go on forever on the original isn't there to the same degree on any of the reissues. Drummer Jimmy Cobb is famously quoted as having said about the KOB recording '...you clearly hear the wood of the drumstick against the cymbal.' And while you can on all versions, it's best presented on the original. On the other hand, the original is, as Calbi notes, 'bright' as was the style of the day."

 

And the following info about player placement is critical to knowing whether you're hearing what was on the original recording.  It also helps you understand differences among the multiple remastered versions now available:

• "Because Kind of Blue was recorded in multitrack mono, without the use of any real stereophonic microphone techniques, the instruments appear in fairly constricted left, center, and right locations."
• "The center image, Davis' trumpet plus Paul Chambers' bass, was solid as a rock—so shockingly solid that at first I thought the center speaker was on. It wasn't." "Between the first recording session, which accounts for the album's first three tracks, and the second, which accounts for the last two, the sax players swap track assignments. For the first three numbers, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane is on the left and alto saxophonist Julian "Cannonball" Adderley is on the right; for the last two, Adderley is on the left and Coltrane on the right."

Moral:  save that money for music, and "read, listen, repeat."  

 

[bluesman]

15 minutes ago, Blake said:

So I am probably in the minority in not wanting to know how the cake was made.

I want to know if there’s a difference between 30 minutes in a 325 degree oven and 45 minutes in a 275 degree oven........and if there is, am I able to taste it?  
 

I’m more than a little surprised to find audiophiles who don’t want to know if what they think they hear is there, how it got there if it is, and if it is but they don’t hear it - why not?  I can’t imagine that such knowledge and interest could interfere with the enjoyment of music.
 

Chacun à son goût.

[bluesman]

2 hours ago, al2813 said:

I need to understand why DSOTM sounds so great in my setup and Love over gold does not.

 

On 6/29/2020 at 1:56 PM, al2813 said:

I believe my setup is doing well when the music is acoustic - when it׳s more electric going  to more rock, I like it less

 

From your earlier post, I would have expected you to say that Love over Gold sounds much better than DSOTM on your system.  So now I'm more than a little confused. 

 

DSOTM is certainly one of my favorite albums ever - but it's rock.  I actually drove (or as she erroneously recalls it, "dragged") my wife from Philly to DC (a 3 hour drive) to buy the original British vinyl when it was first released (and extremely hard to find in the US) because a record store on Dupont Circle had and held for me their one copy when I called them.  But it's about as electric and engineered as they come.  It was recorded in pieces on a 16 track machine with multiple synthesizers and some serious electronic manipulation.  Then it was manipulated even more, mixed and mastered to maximize its dramatic sonics and spatial presentation in both stereo and quadriphonic versions. 

 

Love over Gold, on the other hand, is a much lower key production that features Mark Knopfler's playing of several wonderful acoustic guitars.  He plays multiple 6 string acoustic guitars on it, both nylon and steel strung, plus a 12 string and his old National resonator guitar.  You don't need to know which is which to recognize that you're hearing different guitars, as the distinctly different sounds of each should be apparent on any decent system (of which yours is absolutely one).   The acoustic beauty of his instruments and playing is a large part of the sonic appeal of this album and can be heard delicately but clearly among the other instruments and vocals.  In fact, the entire album is much more delicate and much less "electric" than DSOTM.

 

This is why I recommend learning about the recordings you're hearing, so you can understand your own likes and dislikes in equipment well enough to find what you want and avoid what you don't.

[bluesman]

1 hour ago, Summit said:

I consider Love over Gold to sound better than DSOTM.

I can’t make that kind of judgment between them.  Both are very well crafted, multi-tracked recordings of outstanding musicianship - they’re just very different in everything from concept to final presentation.  As a musician, I much prefer listening to Dire Straits.  Between the fine playing and the variety of guitars on LoG, I find fresh inspiration each time I hear even one track.

 

When facing the OP’s dilemma, each album has a role to play. The problem with using DS as an evaluation tool is that there’s no reference standard against which to compare it when played through alternative systems.  We can’t know how it’s supposed to sound because it’s not a recorded performance - recording it was the performance.  The album is its own and only reference standard.  Their live performances of tunes from it were meant to sound as much as possible like the record (which they could only approximate), rather than the usual effort to make the record sound like the band.  Sure, many touring bands want their concerts to be perfect covers of their recordings - but DSOTM used studio tricks that go far beyond most recordings and set a new bar.

Dire Straits could and did play all 5 tunes from LoG pretty much exactly as recorded.  Knopfler’s National resonator guitar has a known sound, so it’s easy to say how accurately it’s being reproduced.  There are several different guitars on it, and each sounds different from the rest - if they don’t, you need a better system.  Knopfler’s hand is in every aspect of that album, and he clearly made sure its sound was captured well and properly. He’s playing a single cone National on one track, and its sound is easily distinguished from a National tricone (like the one sitting next to me right now).  His 12 string sounds like a 12 string, not a processed 6.  Nylon strings are clearly different from metal strings.  The entire album is a great snapshot of the live sound of the band despite its multitracked methodology. This makes it an excellent reference to help inform the OP’s decision.

 

I listen to Dire Straits a lot more than I do to PF because I prefer the music.  But “better” doesn’t really apply, the way I see it.