veryoldcat
Ex Member
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Hey zbox fans,
My zbox is supposed to arrive this coming Thursday (pretty exciting). I'll likely give it a week before making too many comments, and I'll attempt to make the impression as honest as possible.
If there IS a noticeable improvement, I'm likely to be very affected, as even the best cd's in a quality system have always had a bottom line of listener fatigue, for my ears. Perhaps this is due to the sheer amount of music I repeatedly listen to that is lengthy and challenging to the ear (ie, classical music and a good amount of 20th century classical music, at that). Add that to 25+ years of hearing vinyl prior to the advent of cd's.
From your comments, Lon, the zbox and dec685 flourish with Mullard 12ax7's which I think I have a few of those floating around. I haven't gotten around to trying them in the dec685, and only have the stock ruby 12au7 in it as a reference during its break in, which is now pretty well done. The Decware/Sony 685 is a mighty musical sounding box, even for vinyl-trained ears.
Yes, indeed, Lon. The CSP/se84cs combination did wonders for digital playback in my system, absolutely no doubt about it. I wasn't trying to over-sell it. It was just such a drastic improvement over going straight into the zen.
The gain of the CSP was necessary in my system, as my phono pre is JUST BARELY enough gain for the se84cs with the volume all the way up, but the se84cs definitely sounds its most musical with the volume backed off, for me, to around 80% or so, and the gain increased as needed from the pre.
I've come to greatly trust Steve Deckert's ears, and a short phone discussion convinced me the Zbox was worth a try to further relax the sound of redbook cd's, even if a Zbox-CSP-Zen chain is a slightly more complicated setup.
At the moment I'm into a major listening binge of Carloz Chavez's music. There is a lot of texture in his music that can really test one's tolerance for digital playback, even with superb quality recordings, as cd's go. If the zbox sprays a little more wd-40 on my redbook cd's, it'll be killer worth it! I don't expect it to be a magic bullet, necessarily, but any improvements to redbook playback will be very very welcome.
More comments later. For those interested, I'll start a new thread.
Karl
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