Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Soundstage aka Holy Crap !

One more update...

Over the last month or so I had been becoming more and more unimpressed with one aspect of the sound I was hearing. The imaging for "normal" albums (where "normal" in this case means "most of the recorded sounds are between the speakers rather than being manipulated to be far outside the speakers") just wasn't as good as I remembered it being in the past.

It's hard to describe what was missing - instruments & vocals still appeared at different points across the soundstage as they should - but the imaging wasn't as "sharp" as I remembered.

In the end what I found was that switching from tube-out back to line-out on the TubeDAC pre-amp restored the imaging to what I expected. At that point I remembered that during earlier testing between line-out and tube-out I hadn't been sure which to go with, but ran out of time for experimenting and left it wired to use tube-out (which is basically line-out plus a unity-gain tube buffer).

So where this leaves me is that rather than using the TubeDAC to play with "tube sound" I am using it to get a better DAC than what I have in the CD carousel. So not what I planned but still good.