by CarlSeibert on Thu Oct 20, 2011 5:00 pm
I had a chance to hear the Neko D100 at last year's CanJam and was well impressed. So I was thrilled to hear that Wes was doing a traveling loaner program and I could give it a good listen in my own system. Thank you, Wes!
All standard amateur review disclaimers apply here. Don't blame me if it turns out you don't agree with me. We all hear differently. We all value different things and we all, to varying degrees, do a more or less inadequate job of expressing ourselves. With that said, here goes:
The lamest DAC cliche is that a DAC is "analog-sounding", whatever that might mean.
The Neko D100 is analog-sounding.
Oh my. Does that mean you should sell your turntable and buy three of them?
I'd hold off on that. (Although Wes might enjoy the notion) But we'll return to the thought later.
So what's up with this "analog-y" business?
As we all by now know, the D100 lacks an active I/V stage. So in anticipation, I expected to hear something - something bad, or electronic, or obstructive, presumably - missing from the Neko's sound.
And that was exactly my impression on first listen. You could think in terms of great clarity or terrific micro dynamics or some positive thing that was there, I suppose. But I had been preconditioned to think about what wasn't there. And what wasn't there was an electronic haze or glare or complication. With the metaphor set firm in my mind, I could fairly hear the signal path being simplified, compared to what I was used to from digital. I could say that there was a "mechanical" element to musical reproduction that had been swept away, but given that record players actually are mechanical devices, I feel a little weird saying it that way.
I listened to the Neko in four systems during my loan period. First up was my headphone rig, which features a Squeezebox 3, a Woo Audio WA6SE and, lately, HiFiman HE-500 headphones. In this system the DAC in residence is a Musical Fidelity X-DAC v8. The X-DAC v8 has been a very satisfying performer. Before it was discontinued, it was priced similarly to the Neko.
With the Musical Fidelity as a reference, the Neko immediately impressed with its top-of-the-passband to bottom resolution. We're talking oodles of detail and nuance here - and its lack of electronic edge. The Musical Fidelity is no slouch when it comes to midrange palpability and resolution, but the D100 bested it in the midrange and carried on doing good work at the top and bottom as well. The Neko's "sound" was coherent and consistent throughout the band. All the parts of the music seemed of one piece. I should stress that when I say "resolution", I mean just that. We're not talking about the false detail or etch that sometimes passes as "revealing". Real detail and nuance lets the music communicate better and makes listening less fatiguing. The false kind does just the opposite.
Music came from a background that was blacker than the black velvet of that painting the Reverend Billy C Wirtz sings about. (the one of Jesus, John Wayne and Hank Sr. all walking together through the gates of heaven) Suffice to say, the Neko was stunningly quiet in this system.
I suspect the lack of noise had something to do with the Neko's fine sense of dynamics, particularly micro dynamics. That, and its quickness and lack of grunge, maybe. Whatever the reason, the result was impressive. Attack and decay of notes, tremolo in human voices and subtle rhythmic meanings were all rendered with a veracity that made me want to listen and listen. On the 24/88.2 file of "Zoot Sims and the Gershwin Brothers", I was struck by how each note from Sims' horn told its own story, with a beginning, middle and end, instead of blending into one long undulating sound. It was quite intoxicating.
Soundstage with headphones is an odd thing. Images on the stage the Neko drew in my head through the HE-500s were a little bigger than from the Musical Fidelity, but they didn't feel quite as solid. (Images from the HE-500s in any case are so rock solid one might worry that they'll require surgical removal, by the way.)
Compared to the Musical Fidelity, the Neko was a tad darker, maybe tending a bit towards warmth. I have come to think of the X-DAC v8 as being very even-handed, tonally. The Neko seemed to me to roll off a little at the very top. I mean a little here, not dead above the neck up or anything like that.
I never know what to make of my own opinions about tonal balance. I'm kind of schizophrenic about it. I claim on the one hand that I don't really care and then I complain vociferously about a couple of dB off the straight and narrow or my own opinion of the straight and narrow.
In any case, through the Neko, it was a slightly different Margo Timmins in Jeff Byrd's project studio doing the wonderful covers on "Margo's Corner - Ty Tyrfu Sessions, Volume One" (download from the Cowboy Junkies clubhouse website). A slightly huskier, maybe sexier Margo, perhaps? By the way, through this very high-res iteration of my already pretty high-res system, it was even more apparent that the vocal microphone used on that album just wasn't right for Margo's voice, at least in my humble opinion.
All too often quantity and quality get confused when it comes to treble. That's a pity because there's little that's worse than bad but plentiful top end. I'd rather drill through my skull with a hammer drill than listen to some products where "lots" gets confused with "lots better".
That's not the case here. The Neko's treble was wonderful. It had the same easy but detailed quality that the rest of the band possessed. There was just a wee bit less of it.
There was a sense of rightness about harmonics, particularly from upper midrange and treble content with the Neko that was exemplary. It reminded me of, ah, analog. High res recordings were a joy (The Zoot Sims, for example) and Red Book material was far less likely to scream "where the bloody heck did the harmonics go?!!" than it often might.
Overall, the Neko was a joy to listen to. Music was imbued with all the subtle little cues that make you forget you're listening to electronics. There was a wonderful ease that suggested real, live sound.
The Neko's output jacks are XLRs and both my systems have single-ended inputs. Wes was kind enough to include XLR-to-RCA interconnects in the box with the loaner D100. I did find myself looking at those interconnects and wondering if or how much different the Neko would sound in this system with my own solid-silver ICs. I probably should have re-terminated a pair and checked it out, but, alas, I didn't.
If there's a trade-off, I think it's the slight roll-off in the top octave. I think it means the Neko might not fit every system and every taste. There has to be some reason why all the DACs in the world are not Neko D100s. This thing is only $1,500. You have to give up something, apart from a half inch thick front panel, to get such a reasonable price. In the wrong system, the Neko could be just wrong. In the right system, though.... very right.
All summed up, I preferred the Neko to my Musical Fidelity in this system.
Next up was the speaker rig in the living room: another Squeezebox, the fabulous original Jeff Rowland Coherence One, a pair of Aragon 4004s, and Apogee Caliper Signatures. I usually play records in this system. The DAC is the long-discontinued Musical Fidelity "DAC PACK" - the X-DAC v3, with X-PSU and X-10 tube buffer.
That DAC is a tad cool-sounding, so I fretted that the Neko would be too warm or dull-sounding in this system. I needn't have worried. The Neko slaughtered this Musical Fidelity, pretty much across the board. The X-Dac v3 is getting pretty long in the tooth, I guess. The Apogees roll off in the top octave themselves, so the relatively small deviation of the Neko turned out to be a non-issue. The Neko threw images that were both bigger and more palpable than the Musical Fidelity, on a soundstage that was bigger and more fleshed out. It's excellent speed, resolution and micro dynamics yielded an involving listen. It proved to be an excellent match in this system, which emphasizes nuance, resolution and intimacy over scale and slam.
With two rounds decided in the Neko's favor, I packed it up in my red "The Economist" gym bag and set off to my friend Alan's house.
Alan is an accomplished audiophile, with technical competence and excellent ears. While everybody's system involves compromises and decisions made to price points of some sort, Alan's main system has been over time the most musically satisfying and "compromise-free", at least to my humble frame of reference, of any system I have heard. Bar none. Infinity IRS Betas are driven by pairs of VTL Wotans in triode mode and Wyred 4 Sound class D amps, fed from a Cary SLP 05 preamp. The DAC is a PS Audio Perfect Wave, driven by the matching transport or a Squeezebox Touch. Alan's system does scale convincingly from singer-songwriter all the way through orchestra-in-a-big-hall and "plays tunes" from sub-20-Hertz to highs that only my cats could properly appreciate.
(Betcha didn't know that cats have better high frequency hearing than dogs. Google it. About 20KHz more. And "Neko" means......"cat", by the way.)
In this system, the PS Audio started off on a better foot. Images were bigger and more convincing than they were from the Neko. And bigness mattered a lot in that setting. Air and presence were better from the PS Audio, presumably due to the Neko's slightly rolled off top octave.
Interestingly and contrary to my preconceived expectations, the Neko outperformed the PS Audio in the lowest octaves. How many systems are good enough, low enough, to appreciate this is an open question, but the the Neko was quick, tuneful and perfectly integrated with the rest of the musical spectrum down past the point where the PS Audio started to get muddy. I was impressed.
But wait! As listening went on, the question of which was better, the more than twice as expensive Perfect Wave or the D100, became increasingly tied to musical content or recordings. Big orchestras or the Dave Matthews band, PS Audio for the win. Jennifer Warnes or Chris Rea and the tables turned. Mark Knoffler's guitar sounded better through the PS Audio, but it made Jennifer Warnes' version of "Famous Blue Raincoat" from the twentieth anniversary release of that classic album painfully "digital". Through the Neko, the aching, conflicted emotion behind the story cut through to the bone. The PS Audio's rendering started a conversation about why there has never been a satisfying CD release of the album. Ouch. Chalk that one up in the Neko's column.
We were able to match levels almost exactly between the two DACs, feed them simultaneously, and use two of the Cary's inputs to switch back and forth. After a while, we gave up "listening" and just sat around enjoying music. Every now and then, Alan would switch between the DACs at random. There wasn't any "blindness" to this exercise, nor was there any point. It was pretty obvious when the DACs were swapped and which was which. The Neko was a tad darker. After a few minutes, though, I would forget about whether the last switch was from lighter to darker or vice versa, and forget which DAC was playing altogether. In that context, some songs sounded better than others, just like they do when I listen to my own music through my own gear. We had to stop and think to decide which DAC was doing what. As Alan put it, both devices sounded "pretty wonderful". He allowed that he could live with either. Given the context, that's prettty high praise.
On balance, I think the PS Audio was a better fit for Alan's system. But the Neko held its own in comparison with a far more expensive unit, and moreover, a device that was chosen in the first place because it fit the needs of the system.
Next up, Alan, the D100 and I all convened at my friend Jim's system. Jim's system lives in a tiny, home office-sized room. It's Quads and Jeff Rowland electronics and a bunch of room treatment and Jim wrings about as much goodness out of the tiny room as is possible to do. (Jim knows what he's doing: he's a former high-end shop owner.) As you might expect, this system is high, high-res. It casts images that are drawn with a fine pen. It does big better than my speaker rig but not like Alan's does big. Jim's DAC is the Wyred 4 Sound DAC-1, which is in the D100's price class.
It turns out Jim's Wyred 4 Sound and Alan's PS Audio are cousins. They are both the work of Rick Cullen.
Jim has an impressive cable collection so we were able to use really excellent interconnects (in balanced mode) and digital cables. We were able to make a highly unreliable comparison between the D100's RCA and TOSLINK inputs, too. But more of that later.
In Jim's room, the theme of the day was different program material favored one or the other DAC. The wonderful acoustic guitar on a live recording of Shawn Colvin doing "Killing the Blues" was a win for the Wyred for Sound, but the next thing we listened to (Jack McDuff, if I remember correctly) tilted the other way. Plucked strings and drums went one way, it seemed, bowed strings the other. "Air" and hall sound seemed to belong to the Wyred 4 Sound. On horns, I generally liked the Neko better. Voices were a toss up. And so it went.
Eventually, Jim, who has an uncanny ability to size up audio components quickly and decisively, announced: "OK. Here's the deal. The Neko sounds better on good to not-so-good recordings. The Wyred for Sound sounds better on good to excellent recordings." On his system, he felt the Neko was the better choice if you liked electric instruments or if your recordings were close miked. Acoustic stringed instruments or more distantly miked recordings favored the Wyred 4 Sound. Put another way, he opined that his DAC ranged "from great to strident", while the Neko ranged from "great to dark", depending on the recording.
Better and worse recordings are a relative thing. We only listened to pretty decent recordings. It could be argued - endlessly, I suppose - whether the variation between different at-least-pretty-good recordings was bigger or smaller than the difference between the these two, or any given two DACs.
Oftentimes, when people talk about a component being forgiving of hard recordings, the word "polite" comes up. In the audiophile language, "polite" is not the good thing that is is in normal life. It's usually a euphemism for "slow and poor dynamics". It should be noted that that's not the Neko's case at all. It's faster than all get out and its dynamics, both macro and micro, are first rate. If there's a cost at all to the Neko's hospitality toward less than stellar recordings, it's that less than in your face top octave tonal balance.
We all agreed that both DACs were terrific performers in their price range, or beyond it for that matter, and choosing between them was a matter of system matching and your judgement of how much of your music collection would favor one or the other.
Frankly, we all felt it was a little strange thinking about how well this DAC or that one matched this album or that one. Where would this lead? Multiple DACS and switching between them? I said I couldn't imagine that (although I'm sure some people do that, and even crazier things). "Isn't the real comparison between your own DAC and your own turntable, which live together all the time in your system?", I asked. Hmmm. Double hmmm.
About those digital inputs - In Jim's system, with Jim's top of the line RCA cable and my just barely fancy enough to have glass conductors TOSLINK cable, with the two digital outs on Jim's Squeezebox Touch, the D100's RCA input was significantly better than its optical one. However, since we were changing a bunch of variables at once, this finding means exactly nothing. Except that, if you have the choice in your own setup, you should experiment to see which input works best with your digital source, your cables, your room and the beverage of your choice.
During our session at Jim's house, he played a high-res file that featured Roy Hargrove's trumpet. The room was more clearly defined in the Wyred 4 Sound's presentation than the Neko's, but "Oh that horn", I said. "You could reach out and touch it through the Neko".
"I've heard Hargrove live a bunch of times", Jim replied. "His horn's tone has a real bite to it." Harrumph. So there.
As it happens, a few days later, we went to hear Ira Sullivan at a little jazz bar. Sometimes Sullivan would step away from the tragic PA mic and just blow. From about fifteen feet away, his tone way w-a-y on the mellow side of the Neko's presentation of Hargrove's. We're talking about two different musicians, two different horns, and two different rooms, of course. (and live vs Memorex) For me, accuracy not withstanding, I'd rather hear a trumpet sound like Sullivan's. But what really struck me was the difference rooms can make. The difference in the top couple of octaves between that bar and a studio or a concert hall or some other venue is an order of magnitude greater than the difference between any two examples of audio electronics. That put some perspective on this exercise. Compared to the real world, we are really splitting hairs.
By the way, have you ever noticed how few studio recording feature same clown at the next table waxing on how how he used to "be a wheel and all them business deals"? Still somehow, live performance manages to be more compelling than what we can ever do with our systems. Little annoyances like blabbering zipperheads or maybe a harsh-sounding horn just don't matter as much live as they do in reproduced sound.
Just as I packed up the Neko to send it on its way, my own words started nagging at me. Isn't it really all about how a DAC compares to your own turntable, with which it has to cohabitate, than how it compares, no matter how favorably, with others of its own kind? Following that train of thought, it's not how it compares to the turntable in terms of which is "better" so much as it is how harmoniously it gets along with the turntable.
So I unpacked the Neko, arranged it next to the turntable and grabbed a Scott Hamilton quartet album. I didn't have that same album on my music server, but I have several other Hamilton quartet outings on Concord, so close enough would do.
It says something that the LP I picked up was bought used and was kind of worn. That was stupid from a comparison point of view, but I think it meant something about my hierarchy of musical values. What I happen to feel like listening to carries a ton more weight than whether or not it's a great recording. Hmmm. Let's feed THAT back through the "strengths and weaknesses of this component versus the strengths and weaknesses of some other component" algorithm and see what we get.
Back to the plot. I played Scott Hamilton through my den system's turntable (a modified Rega with a Benz Ace) and the Neko. And in some significant categories, the Neko smoked the 'table. There was that blacker than black quietness, of course. And the Neko produced even better midrange resolution, or seemed to at least.
What did I just say? That can't be.
Harmonic "rightness" was damn good. I'd give the edge to the table, but the DAC wasn't embarrassed.
I'd give the edge to the table overall, actually, but it's no landslide. On a given day, I could prefer the Neko. What's more, the difference wasn't jarring. I got the feeling the two devices could live happily together. I didn't have time to test the notion, but I imagined myself playing something on the analog front end and the next thing on the Neko straight away. I don't generally do that. Mixing analog and digital usually sets me on edge.
There's a thought for you. Analog and digital living together, like in a soda commercial. I don't know if that justifies the horrible cliche 3,000 words ago, but I think it's what I meant by it. I do know I'd highly recommend the Neko. If it fits your musical priorities and your system and you don't want to spend really stupid money I don't see how you could go wrong.
I want one.
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