Reviving an old thread. I just got a demo unit Vivaldi + upsampler and was playing with all the settings. I left my black special edition k-01x plugged in so I could compare the improvements. The k-01x is great, but at 3x the retail price the Vivaldi duo should show some improvements. Well, it does, mostly in the vocals being cleaner and more realistic (relatively, both are good). So I decided to mess with some upsampling settings and even fed the esoteric with the dcs upsampler instead of the on-board upsampling. That got things a little closer, but by coax the max coming in was 192 or DSDx1. Then I remembered the Roon nucleus can upsample to 384 to my opticalRendu and see what happens. Long story short things got again a little closer. Hardware upsampling left at 4x and Filter was spldy2, then I set the filter to off which I liked better for unrolled off highs (I think). I’m not sure if I ever did an a/b with Roon up sampling before but if I did maybe I thought esoteric’s alone was fuller and kept with it? Or the filter off with my older cables was harsher? In any case, I thought I had reached the limits of the esoteric. Try Roon up sampling and then hardware upsampling combos, you might be surprised.
|