Audiophilepure

As my biggest complaint about digital playback is its potential to be more tonally “barren” and considerably less dimensionally accurate or representative, what I was hearing with the Baltic 3 had me encouraged with this unpretentious and more affordable LampizatOr offering. Once the unit was in place and had about one hundred hours of run-in, it had become clear that I was being treated to the lion’s share of the naturalness and space that had won me over with both the Golden Gate and Pacific.

Making full use of Qualcomm’s latest four-core QCC5100 Bluetooth processing chip, every current high-definition Bluetooth audio format is supported, including aptX Adaptive and aptX HD, LDAC and HWA/LHDC. Other codecs covered include regular aptX and aptX Low Latency, AAC and SBC (the ‘plain vanilla’ Bluetooth codec). This means that every possible source device is handled at the highest audio resolution its Bluetooth specification allows.

The ZEN One Signature is Bluetooth v5.1-compliant, ensuring the best possible range, stability and performance. Up to eight paired Bluetooth source devices can be stored in memory, making it easy to switch from one device to another.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/gramophone-dreams-55-mola-mola-tambaqui-da-processor

The next day, wearing a smirk, I hooked the Tambaqui directly to the Parasound Halo A21+ amplifier driving the Falcons. This time I chose balanced AudioQuest Mackenzie XLR interconnects because the solid-core Mackenzies sound cooler and more transparent than the braided-wire Cardas Clear Cygnuses. I wanted this Mola Mola–to–Parasound audition to deliver maximum force and clarity. It did much more than that.

This Mola Mola–Parasound combo made recordings sound bold, solid, and blue-sky clear but never cold or hard. It put fingers-on-strings tangibility into my current streaming obsession: The Art of Segovia (24/96 FLAC DG/ Qobuz). The Tambaqui-Halo matchup made Andrés Segovia sound direct, unfettered, and unmitigated, like a direct-to-disc LP.

https://www.soundandvision.com/content/bluesound-node-streaming-dac-review

I started out my listening session with the Node by streaming “Lambent Rag” (24-bit/44.1kHz FLAC, Tidal) by electronic musician/producer Clark. The piano here had a full quality, while the song’s percussive elements (presumably the close-miked string hammers in the instrument’s interior) had a dynamic, driving sound. At the track’s climax, the whole thing starts to sound like a Philip Glass composition tossed into a blender, and its presentation with the Node handling decoding duties was impressively wide and enveloping.

Having recently compared the Atmos mix of Steven Wilson’s track “King Ghost” from his album The Future Bites (24/96 FLAC, Qobuz) with the plain-vanilla stereo version, I was impressed by how spacious the stereo track sounded in my home theater. Listened to now on my music-only system with the Node plugged in, I heard clear delineation between the various vocal strains, including Wilson’s near-spoken-word delivery, a soaring falsetto during the chorus, and sampled dialogue. Synthesizers also had a rich, pulsing quality, and the dense, tall, IMAX-like sonic presentation I heard in my theater was retained.

I tend to find that ESS based DACs have a sound that I describe closer to etching than to painting when it comes to how they present the sound stage. The Cipher is not an exception to this. It etches the sound stage in front of you, with incredible detail, space, and depth. While the Mytek Brooklyn does this as well, I find that the Mytek is drier and more forward in its presentation. This creates too much of a good thing depending on the recording. Said a different way, give the Brooklyn the wrong material in the wrong signal chain and it can sound overly sharp and bright to my ears.

Unlike the Brooklyn, the Cipher never sounded overly harsh or dry to my ears. I assume that a big part of the reason why is Jeff’s output stage. I found that every recording has a minimum amount of body or weight. This weight when combined with the extremely detail of the ESS chipset balanced the sound and created something really special.