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RE: So what "magic" accounts for the phenomenon?

The other Toppings I heard had flat soundstage compared to better sounding DACs, therefore, when a couple of reviewers say the soundstage is relatively flat I am inclined to believe them because of my experience with other models in their lineup and the similarity of design concept.

As I mentioned in other posts the flatness of a soundstage seems to be a function of high frequency content. If there is distortion or accentuation (some reviewers thought he D90se could be considered a bit "bright"). Loudness cues affect the perception of depth. Louder things are closer and high frequency content also drops with distance. If that is accentuated then that can truncate the soundstage and make images sound flat.

I once had a preamp for test that was a tube/mosfet hybrid. I owned an amp from this company that was also a hybrid, which had very good soundstage depth/width and solid 3d imaging (it was a very good hybrid in fact...one of the best of that type I know). The preamp, however, was FLAT, FLAT and FLAT sounding. Remove the preamp and replace it with basically anything else I had (they were all tube preamps) on hand and the depth and 3d imaging returned. The weird thing was that it sounded pretty good otherwise, but the soundstage flatness was disconcerting as it was so obvious. Finally, I concluded that there was something in the treble that was accentuating loudness (and therefore distance) cues that resulted in the unfortunate outcome. Did it have a lot more or less distortion than the other products? Probably not...but it seemed to have something in the range that regulates this perception.


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  • RE: So what "magic" accounts for the phenomenon? - morricab 06:05:38 03/04/24 (0)

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