Meridian Director USB DAC

That iFi is a nice unit! I simply don't need the headphone amp as I already have a Schiit Asgard 2. And I only really listen to 16/44.4 so the high rez stuff is lost on me.

So, the Meridian Director fit my bizarre aesthetic and needs. It's discontinued so they're selling them for $350. I think they originally went for $700 years ago.

afterburnt wrote: »

Why no Micro iDSD Black Label USB DAC and Headphone Amplifier?

There we go! That's more like it!

afterburnt wrote: »

Why no DSD!? Why no MQA!?

Yep.

Not my pic:

afterburnt wrote: »

320s ?

So, I have some more thoughts to share after listening for several hours.

When listening, I was experiencing a sensation in the sound, specifically the highs, that I can only describe as some sort of "phase shift". It wasn't pleasurable to me, and I felt like it was fatiguing to my ears.

I kept trying to figure out why it sounded like the staging of the upper midrange and highs was shifted up and out from where it was on the previous DAC.

I wasn't sure if this was due to the "apodizing filter" or the upsampling in this unit. I did a quick search for "apodizing filter" and found this post: https://mrapodizer.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/technical-analysis-of-the-meridian-apodizing-filter/

It's especially poignant, and almost exactly describes the sensation that I get when I listen with this DAC:

"The difference between the old and new filters is clearly not in the amplitude response, but in the phase behavior: the old filter is linear to 22kHz, but the new filter has a gradually increasing phase shift that increases with the frequency. This is caused by the minimal phase behavior of the filter. Although the resolution of the picture is not high enough to see, the phase shift starts already from the lowest frequency and increases more as the frequency goes up (logarithmic).

So the absence of the pre-echo comes at the cost of an increasing phase shift across the entire frequency range. People may argue that the shift is only small, and this may be good enough for normal audio applications, but for high-end it seems a serious issue. For one the human brain uses phase information of frequencies up to 3kHz for spacial localization. The inner ear itself has an amplification around 3kHz, which makes the ear most sensitive in the 2 to 5 kHz range (for human speech). And the most important one, instruments and voices are not just limited to a single frequency, they operate on a range. For instance drums even operate on the entire range from low to high. Every frequency component of the sound will get a different shift in time with this filter, it is like smearing the sound over the frequency range, with lows first and highs last. This might also explain why the lows are more pronounced."

If this is accurate in terms of the filter that Meridian is using, then perhaps this isn't the DAC for me. I did not like the sensation that I felt in my ears while listening! Interestingly, I asked my wife what she thought of the sound and she had nothing but positive things to say. She liked it very much and thought it sounded great.

Guess I'm just more sensitive to this particular aural sensation.

Alright, so after listening to the meridian again for a while, I just switched back to the onboard sound and played the same songs.

While the soundstage width and height shrunk, and the music sounded more localized to the actual speakers, I'm not getting that strange pressure sensation in my ears.

It's easier for me to listen to again - much more enjoyable.

Well, that was a quick audition, the Meridian will be getting returned.

"Making unhelpful, rude, uninformed posts in another's thread or detracting from the normally intelligent and civilized discourse is considered threadshitting."

@heiney9 did you miss the post up above where I said "Kindly move on then, don't critique my choice of source."?

The title of this thread isn't "Let's discuss mp3 vs. flac vs. wav". It's a DAC review.

Critiquing and criticizing my source of choice, and then implying that I'm mentally deranged, demented or insane meets the above listed definition as making posts that are unhelpful, rude, or uninformed.

stangman67 wrote: »

I don’t think his post meets any of that criteria. His point is true, typical audiophile equipment is not aimed to use with relativity poor sources. It shouldn’t be surprising when good equipment reacts poorly to bad source material