God I hope you didn't eat that whole thing! I bet you took home 7 pounds of cake, which is only half of it. Maybe if you stuff some of into your ears next time?
I agree with you 100% Shane, about the Ushers and the power quality. The Equitech was here last time. It hummed so I returned it to Carl. I will be getting balanced power conditioner again whe it rises in priority. As for dedicated line, I already have one in there, need to move it to the fireplace wall. A SINGLE run of JPS power wire would be very cool too. All in good time. Last time we had the Snappers, but sadly they had to go for tube reliability and lack of bass control compared to SS.
The room is by far the biggest problem now. And after a year of incessant negotiations, my wife has finally given in and said do whatever you want, so I am going forward. I have 200 sq ft of bass trap, 100 ft of corner reflection treatment, and 500 sq feet of midrange absorbtion/diffusion in the garage ready to install. I was hoping to get some of it in this g2g, but it couldn't happen. It will take a while to build it to living room standards and install it so it can be easily retracted for non audio social events. But it will be worth it.
Bryan nailed it, the Spectron / Usher synergy was not good. Too much of a good thing. Even the Grover wires too, they would be much more welcome in a system needing some brightening. For my classical music the spectron has OK synergy with Ushers, but I have to listen around the high freq "attitude" that drives Shane to flee. With my music the Mac is too boring on the Ushers, too much harmonic detail is missing and high freq tone is distorted. On Carl's Piegas it seems a lot more lively, maybe because the mac is much higher up into its power band.
I don't hear bat frequencies like you Shane but we are grateful to have you as canary in a coal mine to guard against high freq trash. I will never buy an amp that makes you or any of the other bats, Sol, Henry and Ken think twice about coming over. Thankfully I don't have that problem. Like RichardS I can listen past that, but it is slightly annoying over a long time. On a slower speaker I think it would be less of a problem. Like you said, the Ushers will reveal the recording but also, every weakness of the electronics. In that sense, the speaker is a little out of my league, I knew it would require a whole new system and I'm working at it, but I'd hoped to be caught up with it by now. The problem is there aren't many SS amps with the power, detail and finesse that I want for the money I have. This is why audiophiles seeking absolute tone for classical music on a budget (<$5k) use tubes. If you need more power like the Usher's bass demands, then tubes are out and you are into truly high end SS amps, like Monads, Pass XA.5, Bolder, to get the unmolested tone of tubes plus the unlimited current of SS. ClassD is so appealling here with no crossover distortion and unlimted current, and there are still more to try, but I don't hold out much hope now for class D after the Spectron didn't gel. Maybe the new NAD. I love the Ushers and I'm committed to finding a path through but it is a challenge. You gotta give me credit for starting to try new things, not just blablabla forever. It will take a few tries.
Thanks to Steve, I have the DAC and new Sonos burning away on SE and Balanced outputs now with frybaby track on repeat. I'll try again in a week. I did some comparing of DACs/transports on my own yesterday. At the moment my best source is Sansui tuner. Next best is the Altmann DAC fed by Samsung CDP. The toy servers are just not happening. Sol sees many possible mods in the stock Sonos but that's a project yet to be prioritized. I'm still not a fan of modding. I think it's cheaper to buy the product designed from the beginning to do what you want. But the DL3 has a big advantage over the Altmann if the highs will smooth out as Steve's did. If not I might ditch the toy server for CDP. I wish I had tried the Sonos player into the Oracle DAC, to see how well it deals with really bad jitter. That DAC is awesome.