I finally had some time to just listen. This time the Cascade DACs were not involved but it’s wonderful preamp along with its impedance perfect connection to the M500s were. A McIntosh MP1l00 preamp (using the tube output) was connected to one of the Cascade inputs.
The album was Grant Green’s Blue Note “I Want To Hold Your Hand”. Hearing Larry Young on the Hammond Organ (not keyboard! Not that there is anything wrong with keyboards ) was great.
Of course Grant was great. Elvin Jones has some great solo’s too.
Hank Mobly tenor sax was sweet. A number of people who come over to listen don’t like the sound of the sax, except on my system.
Sonics were really good. Larry and Hank were right in the middle. Hank was just a little to the left of the left speaker and Elvin was just a smidge to the left of the right speaker. Not bad for a recording that was made in 1966 by Rudy Van Gelder that depended on the channel separation you can get on vinyl…
Thanks @Dan for sharing this with us.
Just allow me a curiosity: once you hooked the McIntosh pre as analog input on the Cascade, who and how was controlling the volume of the track ?
The MP1100 is just a phono pre-amp (though it can do some switching of line inputs) and produces. audio line-out, no volume control. The Cascade controls the volume.
I don’t think you would want to MP1100 to control volume because it would have to reduce the line audio voltage to do that, and that would reduce the signal/noise ratio on the line. In general you want the line voltage to be as high as possible, without clipping, and do the volume control at the last link in the audio processing chain, the link that drives the power amp.
My streamer, a Nucleus, had the ability to do “digital” volume control but I have that disabled for the same reason the MP1100 does not control the volume. I want the full, digital, dynamic range to go to the Cascade, and then use the Cascade’s analog volume control to set the volume.
One of the really cool things about using the MSB Renderer is that you can do volume level from the Roon app, but it does that level control by changing the level on the Cascade, not by changing the bits. You can see the level change in the Cascade display and hear the little “clicks” when change the volume in Roon.
That’s one reason I prefer the Renders over the ProUSB interface. I don’t notice a quality difference between the Renderer and the ProUSB interface. Also using the MSB remote I can start and stop the Roon stream and move back and forth through Roon tracks from the MSB Remote. MSB had done a great job of supporting Roon.
Thanks Dan,
I didn’t check the MP1100 on the McIntosh website, otherwise I had never made my question. What seemed a lot strange to me was to use to preamp one afther the other, since it will be a mess for the signal and so for the oveall quality of the reproduction.
My fault, I’m sorry.
) was great.
