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

I mentioned in another thread that I had picked up a Grant Fidelity TubeDAC pre-amp a while back and finally gotten around to hooking it up. It meant I could use the S/PDIF output from CD player rather than analog, and the TubeDAC replaced the pre-amp stage from HK 3270 receiver which I had been using previously.

I was on a customer call until ~1AM last night and having trouble getting to sleep, so figured I would listen to some music and read some technical documentation (guaranteed zzz). Listening to a Pink Floyd live album (Pulse I think), "What do you want from me".

The song started normally, but when the organ started I sat bolt-upright... the sound came from not just beside me but a little bit behind. I had noticed earlier that something seemed different about the soundstage / imaging after switching hardware, but my first impression was "maybe a bit less tight for point sources"

I hadn't heard anything like this for >20 years (better audio equipment, not better drugs).

After some component swapping I found the following:

- going from M3 to M5HP made a big difference - imaging on the M5's seems comparable to the Sierra-1's, which in turn had the best imaging of any speaker I had heard recently

- switching between line-out and tube-out on the preamp made a smaller difference - from "beside and slightly behind" to "beside and slightly ahead"

- there was a bigger difference between "analog CD going through HK3270" and "SPDIF CD going through TubeDAC line out"

Each step seemed to add a small improvement. The overall result though was pretty impressive - decently tight imaging of point sources like higher pitched drums but the kind of "sound all around" that you would normally only get with surround speakers.

One of my early thoughts was that the tube output might have put the channels out of phase, but I didn't hear the usual "sounds appear just outside the speakers and your ears feel stressed" effect... plus normal recordings still had normal soundstage.