Ok, um. Wow. Got my other amp today and all of my balanced interconnects, tore out all my equipment and rebuilt a Lexicon based 7.1 system up from the ground floor so to speak. Holy hell does my L4/L5 want to kill me. Morphine pump on high, color draining, neorustimulator on max, Scotty dammit I need impulse drive or were dead....
The M-8 is older, but it’s sound is absolutely refined. It passes up a $4k Pioneer flagship with ease. I’ve heard that changes in your receiver/amps won’t have much change on sound. If your running RBH T2/R stacks, you’ll notice. The low end quality is so striking. No wonder rich people buy this kind of stuff.
I went through the massive manual, went through a few more configuration, added two new amps to the mix, both are 500 watt into 4ohm. That’s a total of five high current powering my experiment. My input is lossless files played through a media tank that’s using a ESS Saber 9023 dac. It has an excellent two channel analog.
I read up in the Lexicon’s two channel bypass. So it was enabled, I selected Peter Hurford’s “Bach J.S. Organ Works” first track, the Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor.....then we wait
The sound produced was unlike anything I have ever heard. It had a quality with frequency delivery that allows you to easy focus on specific pipes, it was so strange. The deepest pedal notes had an amazing depth and weight to it, not over bearing...perfect balance. The clarity, phase, what ever you can call it. Was so real and present, I was sitting in the pews. It was shocking to hear, to feel. There were no speakers used, it was just an organ with tremendous reverb in the space.
Dan Dzuban from UltraHighEndReview stated:
The MC-8 is an exceptional analog preamp. Its superiority to my Parasound became clear nearly immediately; within just a few minutes of warm up, I could hear that this is no preamp to be trifled with. My system got an immediate bump up in clarity, along with more space between sounds, as well as a sense of "blacker" space between sounds. Good deal. But what that did was allow more phase information to come through in each recording. As sound emanated from instruments, I could better hear the individual radiation pattern of each sound, and how those individual patterns radiated throughout the soundstage. "Baby, Now that I Found You," from Alison Krauss'
Now That I Found You: Collection (Rounder: 1995) is an excellent recording to show off this phenomenon. The recording contains lots of plucked, struck, strummed, and bowed instruments along with Krauss' voice and the voices of her background singers. There were lots of different sounds with lots of different textures, lots of different "bloom" and lots of different decay. I keep saying that I hate country music, but this song (and album) is simply a joy to listen to for anyone who really loves music. And the Lexicon made it sound even better.
If you have the opportunity and the amps to drive, you’ll never be the same.
