As well as the excellent-sounding Avalon NP2 speakers, the system I used to play back 24-bit AIF files from my laptop consisted of (from top to bottom): Metric Halo ULN-2 to convert the Firewire output of my Apple PowerBook to AES/EBU; Bel Canto DAC 3 (which I enthusiastically review in the forthcoming November issue), sitting on cylindrical wooden footers from a new company Waipuna Sound and connected to the Metric Halo box via a DH Labs AES/EBU link; Conrad-Johnson CT5 preamp and ET250S hybrid power amplifier; and Nordost Thor AC conditioner. Nordost Valhalla interconnects and speaker cables were used throughout. Equipment rack was the attractive and effective Stillpoints, which suspends the acrylic shelves from four steel cables.
I allowed listeners to compare the 24-bit, 88.2kHz-sampled master files for some of my
Stereophile recordings with Red Book (CD) versions and MP3s encoded at either 128kbps or 64kbps. Despite what you might have thought from having read in the
New York Times and other mainstream media, where MP3s are proclaimed as being of "CD quality," no-one had a problem hearing differences between the different versions of my recordings. And I was
well pleased with the sound the system produced from my high-rez masters, even in the bare-walled room.
