Modest system upgrade opinions please :-)

[ecwl]

Re-reading what @NWDave is looking for in his system, given the budget, I only have two advice.

I suspect both are counter-intuitive to you. But would give you that extra realism in soundstage and sound in general.

1) Hire somebody to build a convolution filter for you so you can run it in Roon. Mitch Barrett has a good service at accuratesound.ca. You will need a laptop and USB microphone probably though.

2) Buy a Chord Hugo 2, feed it with a cheap Toslink cable from your Cambridge Audio 851N and use the Hugo 2 as your battery powered DAC/preamp.

 

#1 is counterintuitive because you already feel you’re getting enough bass from the bookshelf speakers. But sometimes, the sound is not just about the frequency response but also the step response and overall resonance in the room. This is not something a simple parametric EQ can correct and it can take months to really understand how to get more out of building your own convolution filters whose software is expensive so it’s probably cheaper to hire somebody to do it. The problem is it sounds like you did the room acoustics and speaker setup all by yourself so it’s hard to overcome the loss of control over your system. Because it feels like this DSP filter is at the mercy of somebody else. I mean, you can buy Audiolense or Acourate and learn to optimize the filter yourself but I ended up spending months tweaking in Acourate before I fully understood what I’m really doing.

 

#2 is counterintuitive because you’re essentially keeping the Cambridge Audio 851N as a Ethernet streamer via Toslink and bypassing the DAC/preamp of the Cambridge Audio 851N. And the Chord Hugo 2 is supposed to be a portable battery-powered DAC. The problem is Chord doesn’t make anything like the 851N nor in 851N’s price range. The other problem is that Hugo 2 is very high resolution but any weird noise that gets into it can potentially worsen its performance so I don’t recommend charging it or having it plugged in all the time when playing music or feeding it with USB or S/PDIF which means you’re stuck with Toslink. If you really like the sound, i guess you can sell the 851N and get a Chord 2Go to replace it. 

 

For #1, you really have no way to know whether you’ll like it or not without simply spending the money. For #2, I guess you could always just order a Hugo 2 online and if you don’t like it, you can return it (perhaps after re-stocking fee). 

 

Btw, I have listened to my own Hugo 2 connected to a Parasound A21 driving PSB Imagine T3 at a friend’s place. So this is not some hypothetical dream system/combo I’m randomly recommending.

 

 

[ecwl]

6 hours ago, NWDave said:

Sorry for the late response, but this is really helpful. Thank you, and I'll let you know if I pursue the Chord option; oddly enough, I was thinking of doing the exact same thing you recommend except with the Qutest.

Unfortunately, Qutest does not have digital volume/digital preamp functionality.

So you would either have to add an analog preamp with Qutest and it is very difficult to get an analog preamp with sufficient resolution to ensure you don’t lose the soundstage (or transparency). My friend has a nice Parasound preamp for his vinyl but I bypassed that with the Hugo 2 as I can clearly hear the degradation from the preamp.

Alternatively, you can feed Qutest with a music signal that has already been digitally attenuated in volume. However, I am not sure Cambridge 851N can do that. I’m aware Bluesound devices can. The problem with that solution is that digital volume attenuation is not implemented the same way across devices and computers and some algorithms preserve soundstage (and transparency) better than others. This is why I recommended Hugo 2 instead of Qutest to try.