I can chip in here, having heard it I can confirm it improves the sound greatly, the gains initially are in space, eg. width, height, and depth all of which improve substantialy. That space makes a dramatic change to the ease of listening too. The blackness between notes is also better with the sound emenating from an almost inky black background, nice, really nice. Once your ears acustom to the additional space you can then focus on the dealination of notes, the way they form and shape, again gains can be heard here; It is such an improvement
I WANT ONE and represents cake after jam and bread. Lets all hope these are made available soon enough and in a variety of frequencies.
Pretty please Mr. T.
It should be noted that the equipment supporting the crystal was a Mario modified Marantz 94 cd player with I2s out, clock being fed by a 12v battery and two dueland caps were used, one across the pwr feed and not excatly sure where the second one was (i.e. down stream or upstream of the regulator) but boy did they bring something to the party. Damn they are expensive but I can do without Fags, Beer, food for a while to compensate (not that I am a smoker)! but you get the drift.
No special eqp supports, interconnects from crystal board to player being made in cat5.
Was there any downsides to it's insertion, nope, don't think so other than the current needed to power it's tempreature compensating oven, a tiny price to pay for such gains and only similar to devices run in class A which brings me easily to a direct comparison, it gives an improvement similar to that of going from a so and so class AB amp to one running pure class A, yup it's that good.
Checking around like a bloodhound for a whiff of what it likely price would be, well good crystals start at around 50AUD from the usual suspects (RS and Farnell) so factor in the board, components (change to flaovour to taste) labour and an honest profit and its likely to be at least 500 dollars, but boy, it will never be the same again.
I hope I have not gone too overboard in this comment, but I thnk you get the gist.
I LOVED IT and Mario has gone into rehab with withdrawl symptoms as he had to return it to its creator, another forum club member who you'll all know.
V
