Theta CB III HD in the house (with my ADA Mach IV)!

Well... The talk is over.. I have a CB III HD with Extreme DACs up front and Superior II DACs in the back loaded in my rack for an extended stay.

I placed it close to my ADA Mach IV B for easy swapping of XLRs.

I'll spend the few days setting up, balancing the channels, setting crossovers and A/B testing vs my own SSP. I also want to see how reliable it is, too. Let's see what you get for $26,000!

I've been wanting to do thus for some time and finally this piece fell into my lap.

More to come. I just got this today.

A couple of reasons.

Dirac is still vaporware and I want to know what the sonics of this piece are like before the signal is manipulated.

I can put in my favorite, dynamic Blu ray movie tracks and concert discs in at full reference and see who keeps up with whom.

Any differences between the pieces I imagine will be nuance but the speed of the processing and 7.1 effects of the ADA might be tough to beat. We'll see. When you're asking $26,000 for an SSP, you gotta be super! I've said any SSP over $10K is a waste, so I'm excited to see if my theory holds.

Likely once all is set up, I'll have over a few AVS guys for a blind / double blind test.

Anyone have an 8 ch XLR switcher????

It'll be fun for sure!

Evaluation. I hope to have it for 2-3 weeks so I can really get to know it.

It's not that I hate Theta, I just have never understood the over the top gushing of it by its owners and dismissing of all other SSPs. Well, now I have it in an ideal room and I can really see what this 'magic' is...

Actually, if you go back and read my posts, you'll see my biggest issue with the Theta (and its owners) was that there was no way this piece was as good as a full HDMI processor (Halcro) where all processing was done with the great Halcro DACs whereas the those still using the Theta and BLu Ray had to use BD player DACs and bypass the Theta all together!

As was expected, once the Theta CBIIIs rolled out, the sound of the new HDMI enabled CBIII was more 'open, dynamic and just plain better than the old 6Shooter, analog combo. The 6Shooter was the greatest thing and made the Theta better than any other HDMI processor many said but now, as I predicted, the 6Shooters are dead and essentially unusable if you want reference sound - even Craig has lamented such.

It'll be as good of a comparison as anyone on AVS has done with SSPs. And fair. I'll get 8-10 AVS guys over to sample things..

Would love that. But, this set up is already complicating enough. I can'
t speak to SACD. I am evaluating soley on Blu Ray move soundtracks and concerts. I do not have any sort of 2 channel set up (as a Microperf is not a positive for that!!).

But it should be fun. My weekend reading will be the Theta manual!!

Dirac Live will be a plus but ultimately the SSP has to sound good on its own. The Dirac will improve it but it easier to evaluate pre-Dirac (one less variable).

I hope to 7.1 vs 7.1. Is there a reason the CBIII can't do 7.1 in certain configurations?

I'm simply going to set up and balance the CB III as my sole SSP and use it for a couple weeks and get to understand it. Then plan a day and do some A/B stuff.

I did take a rear photo. Here it is. Not a great photo but when I zoom it, I think I can see 10 XLRs ( and 5 single ended inputs).

No PEQ in ADA.

Using QSC DSPs which I can bypass. But I will try CBIII vs ADA with and without EQ.