Calling Ben Jonson

Jonson loved thieves’ cant, market slang and any other mini-lects he could pick up by walking around London. The Web would fry his circuits.

For the past month my nearfield desktop system has been rather simple by audiophile standards. All AC power goes through the PS Audio Quintet power device, which I’ll write about in detail later in the column. Input sources include an EAD 8000 Pro CD/DVD player, Pioneer MJ-D707 minidisk player, and i-Tunes via my Intel MacPro quad computer. The EAD and Pioneer digital signals go through a Monarchy Audio DIP box so that I can switch between the Pioneer’s Toslink and EAD’s coaxial feeds and convert them to an AES/EBU digital output. The Mac’s USB feed goes into a Trends USB audio dac UD-10 that converts the USB feed to a Toslink output. The Trends also supplies an analog output for my Stax headphone system. The AES/EBU and Toslink digital feeds then go into a Meridian 518 which upsamples the 16-bit digital signal to 20 bits and feeds a Meridian 561 via digital coaxial. The Meridian’s main single-ended analog output is split via a Monster L-connector into two single ended outputs which go to both the Bel Canto S-300 amplifier and Earthquake Supernova Mark IV 10″ subwoofer. The Bel Canto drives a pair of ATC SCM-7 loudspeakers. As I said, it’s simple by audiophile standards.

The product under review is a class T amp retailing for around US$150.