Q Acoustics BT3 Review

[Green Bow]

BT3 are mine now. Date for change of mind passed yesterday. No plans to change them.

I think if I had any regret it's just not stopping to decide more. Like when drummerman suggested ADM 5 I think. However I had spent months deciding and went ahead with what I had narrowed down to. Whereas the purpose of the thread I suppose was discussing where I had got to in my decisions. Naturally people were going to make other suggestions. Maybe my bad for not being patient a little longer, but I think I was fed up.

I also recall drummerman saying that Q Acoustics have a good pedigree though and I agree too.

By the way do you folks have email notification set up when posts get added to threads you contributed to. I look for that setting but I can't find it.

What I really must do is get some Chord Clearway for the BT3.

 

[Green Bow]

The AVI ADM 9.1 were this one reviewed by What Hi-Fi. http://www.whathifi.com/avi/adm91/review

I had not considered they might not work on desktop. They are a bit deeper than the BT3. I would have just sat them on desktop and listened to them as I do the BT3. Like while typing here and now, or listening at a distance.

I think what made me choose BT3 was, if I bought the AVI I would not have bought the Mojo. I would have fed an optical signal from my PC, made asynchronous through the MEridian Explorer, into the AVI. The AVI ADM 9.1 DAC is meant to be brilliant. Whereas I wanted the brilliant DAC to be independant for headphones.

Am right now thiking should I get a pair of speaker cables and use only one. Or just buy one for the BT3. I will need a metre to re-cable inside the active speaker.

Anyway drummerman I should tell you since you were looking, the Mojo has issues. I was assured by Rob Watts of Chord that it only mutes the first second of music when changing sampling frequency. I told him all my music was on CD and FLAC rip and got assurance from him it would be OK. However I foud the opposite. Using 44.1KHz music all the time still causes the Mojo to mute 'sometimes'. If you skip tracks it can happen. The reason given by Rob Watts was that the Mojo sees a break as 0KHz music. Then when you start playing again like a new album it triggers the mute.

Basically the Mojo mutes to allow for hardware synchronisation. Whereas the Meridian Explorer (and proper DACs) simply pauses playback when it sees a sampling frequency change. It pauses for about a second or two then plays the music. When the Meridian Explorer plays CD FLAC all the time there is no pause or any issue. It performs flawlessly. Still love my ME.

The fix for the Mojo is buy JRiver or work out Foobar. You can manually insert a second of silence which fixes it perfectly. It works. It;s not all bad because the Mojo doesn't see gpas between tracks as a problem. Only sometimes new albums trigger it, or track skips.

 

[drummerman]

Thanks for the feed back Green Bow.

I am slightly curious as to why no other Mojo users on this forum have reported those specific problems?

 

[Green Bow]

Thanks for the feed back Green Bow.

I am slightly curious as to why no other Mojo users on this forum have reported those specific problems?

You're welcome indeed. I would be curious too. In fact given the lack of mentioning of it anywhere I would be borderline worried I was misleading you. However I am not. I will post the link and post and page numbers of the discussion I followed on it.

It had come up before this thread, but this was the first time the Mojo designer Rob Watts answered it. See post #6822 on page 455 http://www.head-fi.org/t/784602/chord-mojo-the-official-thread-please-read-the-3rd-post/6810#post_12159983

Post 6811 on page 655 is where I pick up the probelm with muting on 44.1KHz an no sample rate change. I didn't see anyone pick up on it before and I read the whole thread.

Then post #9870 on page 658. Someone picks up my recent post and adds that they have a second mute with no sample rate change.

Followed by someone writing to me in post 9881 on page 659 saying the same.

Then waht happened next was Rob Watts PM me. He explained that even if there is no sample rate change the Mojo sees one when music is halted. He didn't explain this openly in the thread. It was left to me to explain it. I could only quote the PM that Rob Watts sent me. It's all in Post 10011, page 668.

I hope this works to make you happy and realise I was not being dishonest.

 

[Green Bow]

I bought some Chord Clearway to connect the slave speaker to the master.

It should make a little improvement. However inside the master speaker probably needs looking at. I think I will a metre of Clearway and re-wire it later. I am concerned for now that I will lose my warranty on the BT3 if I open them. Altering them is going to void warranty.

I am thinking though that since they have been going OK for nearly three months, they are OK. I think the general idea is that if something major is going to fail, it will happen early on. I think that's more to do with cars and mechanical objects like washing machines though.

Anyway if they sound better I will be able to report on it.

It might seem odd that improving the signal in only one side will make a change. It could work though. This upgrade might fail because the signal from master to slave passes thought the inside of the master. If that is all wired in cheap cable, it might negate an upgrade in the connection from master to slave. Anyway here goes.