Bel Canto Amplication

[Silver Supra]

Originally Posted by Telstar

I read your review and that confirmed my choice easily. I'm gonna get the S300iu

Do you have some idea how may it sound with a pair of Linn AV5140?

I've got a spare pair of 5140's sitting here - maybe Andrew can send me his Bel Canto amps for me to try with them. I'll let you know how the combo sounds.

[Telstar]

Originally Posted by Silver Supra

I've got a spare pair of 5140's sitting here - maybe Andrew can send me his Bel Canto amps for me to try with them. I'll let you know how the combo sounds.

Oh that would be awesome!

[peteb]

Hi

I read the Bel Canto review, but you made no mention of the quality of the USB input. How does you Mac / USB setup compare with the CD Player / Analog ?

Pete

[Robinson_A]

With properly ripped music there was no decernable difference between my MAC products and my Denon universal player beyond the Denon having a slightly warmer sound by nature vs. my Mac's being a bit more neutral sounding. Surprisingly, a computer such as a Mac being fed straight into a system or even into an amplifier (no preamp) sounds fantastic provided your listening to well ripped music.

[Telstar]

Originally Posted by Robinson_A

With properly ripped music there was no decernable difference between my MAC products and my Denon universal player beyond the Denon having a slightly warmer sound by nature vs. my Mac's being a bit more neutral sounding.

Yesterday I tested the S300iu with a Rotel cdp and a XP notebook. The volume from the computer source was way too low. Did you experience any difference in gain respect the CDP?
I wrote to John about this. I hope it was the asio drivers that i used (XP sound is crap without asio). I will use a Vista PC without asio as my definitve source, but I need to do another test...

[Robinson_A]

I didn't have any issues when using my Mac as a source, however, I did control the volume via the S300iu. I don't know much about PC's anymore since being a Mac convert some years ago but Mac's have two places to adjust volume, one in iTunes or on the keyboard and another is in the system pref menus. Is it possible your PC has an overall system pref to control total volume output that is to low? With my Mac's volume set around 75% to 100% I had plenty of room to play with the S300iu's volume giving me all the room filling sound I needed. In terms of gain, the Denon was a bit louder out of the gate but I was able to match levels successfully with my computer.