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If the number of controls and interconnected combinations had you see red, relax. The two lefties—filter selection and oversampling—are very subtle. I bet in many systems certain changes between them won't be audible at all, period. Real relevance hits with the four righties of the crossfeed circuit - time delay, amplitude, wide/blended and tonal balance compensation. Unlike HeadRoom's crossfeed which I tried and barely registered, Jan Meier's struck me as very audible. On the right material. Simple girl-with-guitar fare barely benefits if at all. It's when things get more complex that the lateral expander action kicks in or the greater fill between the ears. Over all of my headphones, this was very obvious and I particularly enjoyed the wide setting.
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As a-priori confession, I'm not one to find standard headphone listening problematic. As live music is different from hifi playback, so headphones are different from speakers. On that front, I'm an equal opportunity consumer. I enjoy each on its own merit. That said, if the 'peculiar' soundstaging baseline of headphones could be shifted closer to speaker listening, I'd be all for it. Though I've got a big head—most hats I try just for fun don't fit—the subjective space between and beyond the ears could always be bigger. For headphones.
Just as stereo is an illusion of two fixed acoustic sources conjuring up a three-dimensional field with width and depth, so crossfeed is a trick to more closely approach that other illusionist's trick. Harry Houdini versus Chriss Angel? It's about sufficient suspension of disbelief to let you enjoy the program (even more).
Put differently, if your brain works less to accept the plainly fed lies—sounds isolated in each ear pretending to be real musicians in real space—you get more easily into the musical message and forget the corky delivery boy. If you've never had an issue, you can approach the crossfeed proposition as a playful audiophile. Surely you have experimented before with speaker positioning not just for best tonal balance and bass. You also manipulated soundstage aspects. If you want depth up the Yangtse, pull the speakers half-way or more into the room. That'll do the trick each time. Is it realistic that each recording suddenly sounds a lot more cavernous than before? Does it matter if you enjoy it? If you desire Great Plains width, a 12-foot speaker spread sharply toed in could be just the trick-it ticket.
The Corda DAC's tuning features belong into the same domain but go about it electronically. It's not about the absolute truth which some laboratory equipment might go after. This is a "magic box" for greater enjoyment and a more persuasive experience. It packs a bag of tricks that go beyond what's common. That alone makes the StageDAC interesting. It doesn't matter which combination one ultimately prefers to perhaps think the other options redundant (particularly if they seem to do precious little). Before I establish a baseline reference for the DAC performance via comparators, let's touch upon the StageDAC's unique stage tailoring tools and where they garner the most benefits.
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Act I - Desktop with speakers
This system comprised uncompressed iPod files fed digitally through the StageDAC's fixed outputs via Wadia's dock as intercessor. From there the now analog signal went into April Music's Stello Ai500 150/300wpc integrated amplifier which fed Amphion's Helium 510s with their ports open, i.e. not stuffed with the optional foam inserts. Spread wide and toed-in steeply, this speaker setup eliminates most but not all room interactions to already be closer to the headphone perspective in at least one regard.
Here even the theoretically most intense stage settings—max delay, max amplitude, wide—only had very minimal tonal balance effects. Spatial benefits were apparently zero. Not that you'd think speakers require crossfeed assistance. But the feature is sold as potentially useful. While this setup was still in place, I also compared converterage between Meier, RWA Isabellina (the fixed output option) and the DAC internal to the Stello amp, digital by Chris Sommovigo.
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Act II - Desktop DACs
StageDAC/HPA: Where'd the top-end air gone? That was my first reaction upon switching to Vinnie Rossi's unit. Things had grown more opaque. Immediately following was evidence that the transients too had stepped down in crispness. This remained true even when the Meier was set to no pre-ringing and minimal oversampling to approach Red Wine Audio's NOS scheme. In short, the Isabellina DAC was fuzzier, warmer, darker and relatedly, more relaxed, less exciting, subjectively less resolved and spatially less deliberate and sorted. In this context of lower levels—I find high sound pressures in the extreme nearfield uncomfortable—the American seemed in fact somewhat blurry and less convincing.
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StageDAC/Stello: This comparison was a tie, from the same 'modern' school of sound and not a deliberate attempt at wringing an analog aroma from the digital medium. Disregarding the fact that the Meier's filter and sampling options make it a moving target on paper—in practice those will require a very resolved system and high listener acuity to seem very relevant, frankly exceeding my ears and components here to not get much excited over—when set to equal but minimized pre/post ringing and highest oversampling (crossfeed in bypass of course), now the Stello took the lead in crispness and clarity, albeit by a much smaller margin than the Meier had over the RWA. Tonally, the Meier was a tad softer now, a skoch rounder of a proposition than the Stello's somewhat greater penetration power. Dynamically, the German made somewhat bigger waves on close-mike'd string instruments such as are fabulously recorded on Hector Zazou & Swara's In the House of Mirrors. In essence however, these converters were cut from quite the same cloth and hard to separate reliably.
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