lejonklou wrote:Have you compared the platters yet, Thomas?
We want part 2! :D
Unfortunately not yet. I am hoping to be able to do that this weekend - last weekend was just too busy. To make sure I am hearing the actual change from the platter itself I feel it is time I come to grips with platter orientation to make sure it does not contribute to what I hear.
But I do have a report that I know some have been waiting for. I have finally had an opportunity to compare a Radikal in AV chassis vs. a Radikal in Klimax chassis. I'm sorry to say that I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the Radikal in machined aluminum actually is more musical than the Radikal in the standard casework. The bad news is also that the Radikal in machined aluminum actually is more musical than the Radikal in the standard casework. :(
I need to qualify this by saying that this was not as even a test as I would like to have done. The Radikal MA (Machined Aluminum) was new out of the box and I was only able to have it powered on for four days, most of that time only idling, before I did the comparison. The Radikal AV I used was my own which does have at least a couple of weeks warm up on the replacement controller board and much longer on the PSU board. Also my Radikal AV was sited on a single Quadraspire Q4 midi shelf on spikes and skeets and the Radikal MA was sitting on top of it with a towel in between. My feeling is that any advantage from this should go to the Radikal AV but it is hard to say for sure.
What I found is that the Radikal MA is just slightly more musical than the Radikal AV under these conditions. The difference is quite small, certainly several orders of magnitude less than the improvement from a Trampolin2 over a 1, but it is undeniably there. It wasn't so much that the music was easier to follow as it was that it sounded like a little bit better pianist playing a little better piano recorded with a bit better microphones. I did have to listen pretty closely but the improvement was there and it was consistent in several back and forth comparisons. Whether the difference is small enough that it would be swamped by putting the lesser unit on a better rack, as one dealer suggested, I can't say, but my experience is that the rack a unit sits on, while it can make a definite improvement, does not precede the item that sits upon it in the hierarchy. (Who knows, with the Mimers Fredrik may want to contradict me on this.)
While it is less of an improvement than I would like to hear considering the expense involved, since Linn claim that the difference is strictly cosmetic I cannot fault them for that. And I can confirm that they are the same internal components mounted in the same fashion. So to sum up, an small improvement, but an improvement none the less.