A biased Solo UL review?

Here I'm going to do something I believe I should not do. I'm going to review my own Solo Ultra-Linear. Not in glowing terms but in layman's language. The reason why is because it seems some people don't understand the Ultra-Linear really does work without fuss and without some ridiculous source driving it.

It's simple! If you go down Satan's road of having your CDP or DAC clocked or fitted with some incredibly stupid capacitors - which many do - nothing good is going to sound right!

However, a simple HP computer sound card via the front panel headphone mini-jack will give you a source that'll easily show you how open-sounding the Solo Ultra-Linear is! If you cripple the signal source how can you expect the UL to do its business?

So that's where I'm starting my review - from the cans output of my HP Compaq PC. I'm playing CD's using Nero Showtime set FLAT - that's "pass through" set in the options menu. I am also using a dirt cheap mini jack to phono cable I bought from CPC.

What to expect? No matter what the signal source there is no way headphones can project the drummer down the bottom of the garden or the lead guitarist (or viols) into the street outside like some speaker set-ups can do. Some of you may dream this is possible with headphones but I've been in this profession a long time and even a live band cannot do that! In fact, live monitoring on headphones is far flatter compared with listening to cans from a recording - the mixer and its effects makes most recordings larger than reality, and with added sparkle. If your source cannot output that then you have been conned! My HP Compaq can!

My first review CD cost nothing. It was given away with the "Daily Mail on Sunday". It is by the artist Seal and it is from a live gig somewhere. The Solo UL has around 500+ hours on the "clock". I am using my favourite HD250II headphones. My test track is "Crazy", a favourite of mine. I have the volume set to sound realistic as if I was there - not too loud however. The image is a proper one, not mono or a particular shape, but Seal is centre stage with a backing band/orchestra layered behind and either side but not veiled. Bass with such a backing is mainly bass guitar and kick drum. Combine the two and you get the thump in the chest type of driving bass. Using the HD250II it wasn't overpowering. This being a live recording you will not get great instrumental separation - it is recorded from the PA desk output which is a combination of all the miked voices, instruments and the crowd. It depends on the separation and open-ness of the mixing desk, but even then there isn't the necessary isolation because close-miking does also pick up other sounds on the stage. Even so, I found it sounding quite realistic. Swapping to the K701 it sounded a little smoothed over and false at the same volume setting. Lifting the volume it continued to sound false but lost the smoothness - too much in yer face (or side of the head). With the HD600 the venue sounded smaller - the size of a working mens club concert room but a thousand times better produced, but with the crowd on mike it sounded more like a city hall. Swapping for the little Grado SR60 it sounded like somebody had switched off Seal's mike and he was being picked up on the ambiance and other mikes. The production sounded quite good if not a little synthetic. Blowing the dust off the ATH A700 the rendition took on a truly real sounding but more close up performance in places and then became a stadium or arena - probably the A700 getting up to speed. With the ATH A900 I was back with the lush performance of the HD250II - the likenesses are very close indeed. Perhaps the bass is a bit less plodding with the A900. In fact, the A900 gave me the pseudo vibration through my desk as I rested my arms on it whilst typing. With both the HD250II and A900 the image was correctly spread out with instruments being heard in their own positions in a sound stage that extended hard left to hard right, with height and depth. Musicality was never compromised by this simple "unknown" source and "inferior" interconnect.

My next CD is Michael Buble "It's Time". Playing "Last Dance" I'd settled on the ATH A900 and HD250II. This is the antipathy to shut in and to be honest it's artificially larger than life, it's so open. This CD's production is obviously geared to the mediocre system. Played on the Solo UL is a waste of Solo UL in my opinion. If your source gives you shut in with this CD you've been well and truly leg-lifted - you must have had **** written all over your forehead and the storekeeper, or more likely a satanic tweaker, "saw you coming"! I have listened to bands playing dance music for the Cha Cha Cha and this rendition is simply over the top. The dancers would be able to follow every beat and timing on a clock radio set to the "sleep" position!

Now for some Genesis: Selling England By The Pound. My choice here is "Cinema Show" which captures all the bands talents, but first the opening of "Dancing with the Moonlight Night": this is so open that if it got more open the reverb would shatter like shards of icicles in an antarctic ice cavern! OK, back to "Cinema Show" near the opening there is the slide of a finger along the frets of a guitar string which goes hard right and squeals with reverb, but not raucously painful - in fact just right as in naturally right. The short flute and 12 string acoustic guitar solo is truly 3D, as if you were in a forest glade with gurgling stream (in my mind...) rather than stuck in front of this screen with headphones clamped to my head. Timing recognition should be as easy as pie with this track as it ebbs and flows from 7/8 to 4/4 signatures and back again. Here is a track that throws the sound nearly out in the street (I said previously headphones cannot...) - Bank's keys are somewhere else - they are not in my head - they are in some form of Greek mythology structure. Bass is reverberant and melodious with the electric bass strings easily depicted. Collin's drumming is melodious too - how can drum bashing be melodious? I don't know but Collin's manages it. Cymbals and their species are easily heard above Rutherford's power-bass line.

So that's the digital bit over... Was it my musical hearing's ability to hear through a nondescript digital source? Was it heckers-like! Like mine, your hearing needs to be de-bullsh*tted, if it isn't already: A DAC is a DAC - it simply decodes a digital stream into an audio one, if done rightly! Computer manufacturers have no need to bullsh*t, but some audio manufacturers, or most likely, back-street audio meddlers with flash "come in and let's rob you" websites need to.

I'm with competitor Antony Michaelson on this one - Quote: (http://www.musicalfidelity.com/technical-and-sonic-overview.asp) "There are many self-appointed... "experts" who offer modifications. Let’s get one thing straight: none of these people have a proper technical background; they are service engineers trying to scratch a living by offering to tinker with... equipment. We have seen many examples of their work... The results of their work on CD players are shocking. In all cases the original excellent jitter performance has been dramatically reduced by a factor of about 10 times. Noise ratio has also been affected and reduced by 8dB to 10dB. With CD players and DACs the slightest change to anything in the power supply or clock will have far reaching repercussions on the technical performance. You need good quality, state-of-the-art equipment to measure the results of any changes you’ve made. This equipment is only possessed by manufacturers it’s too expensive for anybody else really. So if you’ve had your DAC or CD player tinkered with by one of these self-appointed experts, it may sound different but that’s because its technical performance has been degraded." Unquote.

OK, the interconnect cable could have been better but all the way from the soundcard and not just the bit from the socket to the Solo UL. Today's DACs are voltage output - all the work has been done by the chip maker. As far as I'm concerned, the sound I'm getting from this HP Compaq is very similar to most untinkered-with CDP outputs. If you can get better then it's a current output DAC and they're as rare as RHS.

Next post: my findings with a vinyl source...


Edited by Graham Slee - 05 Sep 2011 at 2:25pm

To be quite honest mal4mac I don't have a clue what the sound-card is. I am guilty of ignorance here but I will try and check. It is a HP Compaq PC supplied via PC World so I'm assuming it was built by HP. I'm no computer expert so I would find it difficult to take the machine apart to get the details, but I will try and remember to ask John who ordered it in the first place.

Graham Slee wrote: To be quite honest mal4mac I don't have a clue what the sound-card is. I am guilty of ignorance here but I will try and check. It is a HP Compaq PC supplied via PC World so I'm assuming it was built by HP. I'm no computer expert so I would find it difficult to take the machine apart to get the details, but I will try and remember to ask John who ordered it in the first place.

Is it a seperate card? if so and you have bought it recently then I guess it is a step up from the normal onboard sound cards which I have found to be a bit noisy. As a backup to this there is a company that sells Voice Stress analysis software that feeds fromt the sound card and they found that the onboard sound card was often of such poor quality that it interfered with the analysis so that they insisted on external sound cards. When I had dealings with them they made you install Soundblaster 16 cards before they would warranty their software.

I think they said  the issue was probably implementation in that the analogue circuitry was usually badly done using crap components where as the Soundblaster stuff was of reasonable quality.

The HP Compaq is model no. DX2420. The sound card is on the mother board. The headphone and line out jacks are in parallel so do both.

Other info...

Realtek:
Audio Driver Version: 5.10.0.5527
DirectX version: DirectX 9.0c
Audio controller: HD Audio
Audio Codec: ALC662

Optical device: TSSTcorpCDDVDW TS-H6532

I just set the output from Audio to Digital (and rebooted) whatever that does for me in real terms??? I cannot tell a difference... yet.

Nero Showtime is set to "pass through"

Sounds and audio devices are set to...

Speakers: no speakers
Performance: Hardware Acceleration full; Sample rate conversion quality best

Hope this throws some light?