Any Digital Impressions of the Caiman yet?

[StanleyB]

Great write up there mate. I am especially pleased that it was money well spent. I have always been worried by the excessive amounts some DACs costs. However, there is now a new trend appearing where designers are bumping up the price by adding all sorts of additional features. Hopefully the Caiman range can remain true to the ideal with few frills as possible that have no impact on the 'money well spent' principle.

[webby]

...considering I have to date been using my computer Itunes abd the basic the Appleloss less format which has its limitations any way.

Sorry, but what limitations does the Apple Lossless format have?

[Labarum]

Sorry, but what limitations does the Apple Lossless format have?

I use FLAC, but one lossless format is as good as another. It's just a "zip" file - the data should unzip cleanly and pass to the DAC.

Some formats manage marginally greater compression than others, but sonically they ought to be indistinguishable. The same cannot be said for lossy formats like MP3, AAC or OGG. They can perform quite differently at the same bitrates.

Lossless formats might be limited for reasons other than audio quality - the tagging (referencing data) may not be handled as well, or the format may limit your choice of hardware and/or software.

[Stratmangler]

Sorry, but what limitations does the Apple Lossless format have?

The only one I can think of is that the file type is not dealt with natively in many cases.

Squeezebox cannot play ALAC without transcoding.

Sony (among others) portable players do not handle ALAC at all.

You'll never find the limitation if you simply use Apple product.

I'm playing ALAC files currently from my laptop using Foobar into my Caiman USB input, and cannot actually tell the difference soundwise between these and the FLAC files on my main Squeezebox Server machine.

The only difference I can see as far as playback is concerned is that FLAC files appear to be CBR, whereas ALAC appear to be VBR.

Chris

[webby]

Fair enough, and I knew about those limitations anyway. I thought there was an implication that it was limited sonically, hence why I asked.

Cheers

[nightyy]

Hi,

did anyone have the opportunity to test the Caiman (or stock 7520) with Klipsch RF-7 as speakers?

I am asking because with my old 7510 Mark V the sound was quite a bit too harsh, and I am happy with the Mark VI/4.
I read the Caiman is supposed to be 'brighter'?

Dell D830 (Sigmatel ST9205) SPDIF-coax > Beresford TC-7510 VI/4 > Kingrex T20U+PSU > Klipsch RF-7

[MartinT]

The Caiman is certainly not harsh or bright but it is very transparent. On hearing Klipsch speakers at last year's hi-fi show in London I thought they were bright speakers so partnering equipment would need to be carefully matched.

[Shanedudddy2]

I personally think the stock caiman sounds a bit harsh and bright, just my opinion so don't flame me for it. :P

[technobear]

I personally think the stock caiman sounds a bit harsh and bright, just my opinion so don't flame me for it. :P

The Caiman is not immune to transport quality.

Mine sounds much better fed from the Transporter than it does fed from the Myryad CD player.

What are you feeding it with?

And on which input?

[leo]

I agree with Chris, lately I've been playing about with a couple of 24/192 USB to spdif converters, using the stock Musiland USD to provide spdif to the Caiman the sound was quite sharp , swapping over from the Musiland to the Hiface things was more natural, I've had same differences using various CD based transports.
I found using co-axial input the quality of the transport had quite an influence on the sound no matter which of my dacs I use, even the ES9018 Sabre based dac with its Time Domain Jitter Eliminator