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It hasn't been smooth sailing, that's for sure. I was actually very angry trying to figure out how to hook up my LED emitters to these units so I could run the remote since the units are in a cabinet. It turns out the sensors on the front panels of both the Transport and DAC are placed so high that you have to mount you LED emitters sideways for them to work. That only took 3 hours to figure out. Next, I was incredibly frustrated that I could never get the TX display to look as good as the DAC display. That's because the DAC display allows you to adjust both contrast and brightness, whereas the TX display only allows you to adjust brightness. A total goofball mistake from EMM, compounded that these are some of the worst displays I have ever seen (line streaks and uneven backgrounds). That's just the way it often is with Meitner. Sonics are their forte, not necessarily industrial design, so you really have to prepared to go through a little hell before you get to heaven. An iPod for $300 bucks runs rings around this gear in that regard, but this is the high end, so what do you expect when you pay for gear that costs as much as a car?
However, after 3 days of break-in, the heavens did indeed open up on the Meitner units last night. Stunning does not do it justice. It was a new level of reference performance, at least for me. I only stayed up to 3 am. (Glad today was a holiday). It's one of those rare listening moments that you know you've never seen (heard) anything like this before. It's frankly what we live to hear when we undertake this hobby, but if we experience it 6 times in our life, we will be lucky. A definite "you will always know where you were" when you heard it experienced. Very exciting stuff.
In a nutshell, these units provide a new level of resolution (aka articulation, aka definition in the classic ARC use of the term) over my XDS1v2. In particular, orchestral lines that I heard previously were just more for distinct and more easily sorted, particularly in the cellos and the bass. Female vocals and strings had added substantive changes as well. Dynamic improvements, both macro and micro were also enhanced substantially. I could go on but you get the point. 16X DSD means nothing to me. Knocking me out sonically regardless of source (Redbook CD, DSD, upsampled PCM, or hi res digital files) made me not give a rat's ass about the underlying technology. Frankly, I just didn't care.
But accolades get weary and even superlatives get boring and lose their meaning after a while. Have I ever read a great review that didn't use such terminology over the past 30 year or so? C'mon, its all BS after a while. We expect technology to evolve, we expect things to get better sonically with new products (and we also expect prices to get lower as a result of trickle down to more affordable levels). So describing how a new piece of gear sounds better compared to it predecessor does indeed get old after a while. If it didn't, you'd be a fool to buy it!
However, that it is better than its predecessor was not my "take away" thought as I was listening to this marvelous combination today and last night. Rather it was something much bigger, and for me, a new insight about reproduced music. When you have been serious about this hobby for a few decades, you realize the futility of trying to constantly get to new heights by incremental improvements. Sure, all the changes you have seen or heard or bought, or at least many of them, are really meaningful. But yet there is an annoying feeling that your efforts are like trying to get out of a room by moving half way towards to door each time. The incremental differences seem less each time. Yes, they are enjoyable but at some point in a audiophile's life, you realize you are never going to get to the point that it sounds like the Philadelphia Orchestra or the Count Basie Orchestra is in your room. (If you're smart, that occurs sooner rather than later!) And that's OK since that's both an unrealistic goal to begin with and secondly has little to do with enjoying reproduced music in your home. But the epiphany of the new Meitner gear was this. By analogy, I'll call it the reverse "Room" effect, named after the recent movie by that name. The telling scene was when Jacob Tremblay goes back to the room in which he was held in captivity with his mom for 5 years and asks "did room get smaller"? I don't know about you, but that resonated with me because I too, went back to some of the places I lived as a child and asked the very same question. The reverse "Room" effect that the Meitner had on me was undoing the notion that those steps of trying to get "halfway to the door" are in fact, not nearly as small as I thought previously. In fact it is the exact opposite. The "room" we are trying metaphorically to get out of is actually now bigger than I realized and the steps to get halfway out the door now seem larger than they did before. The Meitner has shown me that since so much more lies in those bits than I would have ever guessed, all bets are off on what the future will bring to music reproduced music in the home or elsewhere. When a piece of gear does that, it's not just a piece of audio gear anymore. It's a game changer.
However, after 3 days of break-in, the heavens did indeed open up on the Meitner units last night. Stunning does not do it justice. It was a new level of reference performance, at least for me. I only stayed up to 3 am. (Glad today was a holiday). It's one of those rare listening moments that you know you've never seen (heard) anything like this before. It's frankly what we live to hear when we undertake this hobby, but if we experience it 6 times in our life, we will be lucky. A definite "you will always know where you were" when you heard it experienced. Very exciting stuff.
In a nutshell, these units provide a new level of resolution (aka articulation, aka definition in the classic ARC use of the term) over my XDS1v2. In particular, orchestral lines that I heard previously were just more for distinct and more easily sorted, particularly in the cellos and the bass. Female vocals and strings had added substantive changes as well. Dynamic improvements, both macro and micro were also enhanced substantially. I could go on but you get the point. 16X DSD means nothing to me. Knocking me out sonically regardless of source (Redbook CD, DSD, upsampled PCM, or hi res digital files) made me not give a rat's ass about the underlying technology. Frankly, I just didn't care.
But accolades get weary and even superlatives get boring and lose their meaning after a while. Have I ever read a great review that didn't use such terminology over the past 30 year or so? C'mon, its all BS after a while. We expect technology to evolve, we expect things to get better sonically with new products (and we also expect prices to get lower as a result of trickle down to more affordable levels). So describing how a new piece of gear sounds better compared to it predecessor does indeed get old after a while. If it didn't, you'd be a fool to buy it!
However, that it is better than its predecessor was not my "take away" thought as I was listening to this marvelous combination today and last night. Rather it was something much bigger, and for me, a new insight about reproduced music. When you have been serious about this hobby for a few decades, you realize the futility of trying to constantly get to new heights by incremental improvements. Sure, all the changes you have seen or heard or bought, or at least many of them, are really meaningful. But yet there is an annoying feeling that your efforts are like trying to get out of a room by moving half way towards to door each time. The incremental differences seem less each time. Yes, they are enjoyable but at some point in a audiophile's life, you realize you are never going to get to the point that it sounds like the Philadelphia Orchestra or the Count Basie Orchestra is in your room. (If you're smart, that occurs sooner rather than later!) And that's OK since that's both an unrealistic goal to begin with and secondly has little to do with enjoying reproduced music in your home. But the epiphany of the new Meitner gear was this. By analogy, I'll call it the reverse "Room" effect, named after the recent movie by that name. The telling scene was when Jacob Tremblay goes back to the room in which he was held in captivity with his mom for 5 years and asks "did room get smaller"? I don't know about you, but that resonated with me because I too, went back to some of the places I lived as a child and asked the very same question. The reverse "Room" effect that the Meitner had on me was undoing the notion that those steps of trying to get "halfway to the door" are in fact, not nearly as small as I thought previously. In fact it is the exact opposite. The "room" we are trying metaphorically to get out of is actually now bigger than I realized and the steps to get halfway out the door now seem larger than they did before. The Meitner has shown me that since so much more lies in those bits than I would have ever guessed, all bets are off on what the future will bring to music reproduced music in the home or elsewhere. When a piece of gear does that, it's not just a piece of audio gear anymore. It's a game changer.
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