Quote:
Originally Posted by BillK
Lots of Rossini-ing going around.
I finally heard something that exceeded the quality of my beloved Wadia S7i, and it was the Rossini Player with the Rossini Clock.
The thing is, without the clock, the Rossini Player… didn't. It sounded good, but it didn't beat the Wadia.
The clock made all the difference, and it wasn't minor; with the clock shut off, the room behind performers just disappeared and they were singing in a sound booth; with the clock turned back on, suddenly the entire studio space materialized. The mild harshness of pianos common to most DACs, where it sounds like the felt has been partially removed from the hammers - goes away (as it always has with Wadia DACs since the Digimaster X32) with the clock enabled.
Seriously, if you aren't going to add the clock, get another DAC because there are many out there that sound just as good as the Rossini without the clock for much less money; the ARC Ref CD 9, Ayre QX-5 Twenty or Moon 780Dv2 are three excellent alternatives.
But the Rossini with the clock? dCS shouldn't allow you to buy a Rossini Player or DAC without one.
Not to be snobby, but coming from a Wadia DAC it reminds me of when I started going to RMAF and listening to speakers after owning Apogees for a decade; so many "Class A" speakers were actually horribly colored by their enclosures, but if all you had listened to were "cones in a box" speakers you didn't know any differently. Having owned Apogees, I instantly tuned into the only two or three speakers I heard that weren't colored by their enclosures.
That's what it was like hearing the Rossini without the clock compared to it with the clock connected and turned on. Night and day.
It's not at all subtle; the folks in the store along with me all agreed you could pull random members of the public off the street and they'd hear the difference, plainly, and be amazed by it.
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I will second this ... I originally got the Rossini Player without the clock and was floored by the sound but after adding the clock, I was surprised the difference it made.. My only wish is that there was some sort of universal way to connect the clock to my non-dCS transport (McIntosh) so that when I play CD via SPDIF into the Rossini, I can use the clock rather than the one in the MCD600... But that violates rule #1 that dCS talk about in their owners manual..
I've heard of other brands that have a clock input but very few do... in either case, the clarity of the music is as good as analogue or maybe better due to the lower noise floor.