NITSCH Sound Pietus Maximus Optimus Prime Review - The Touch

If you use this, https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...-u3-review-the-douk-of-wishful-thinking.13953, Modius E will have funky digititis in the top octave.

There's still vestiges of ESS no matter what. Get the right (or wrong) gear, and it's easier to hear. Still better than the Modius AKM, where the top octave weirdness was even more evident and just kind of sprayed all over the place.

Pretty much. MMB2 is almost always on NOS unless I am running a dark amp/headphone. MMB1 with all the incremental improvements was a unique, special piece. This made MMB2 disappointing coming at it from a certain way. The treble issues that some people have been having with the Bifrost 2/64 are well documented.

 

The MMB or more correctly the Multibit Card with Unison has a sound more alike the MMB1 than MMB2.

• ZMF Caldera: Really nice. Much better tonally and technically compared to Magni+, Piety, etc.
• Audeze LCD-X: Fantastic. The upper-mids on Pietus can be a bit forward. Laid back upper mids of Audeze really gel well.
• Modded T50RP (the old revision which could be modded to be neutralish): Not bad, but could be better. Unknowst to many an audiophile, the T50RP trades efficiency for neutrality. People talk about certain orthos needing the most powerful amps on the planet, the modded T50RP is one of them. The modded T50RP can be mushy on the wrong amp. It's super mushy on the likes of Piety. It's decent here, although I'd like more "grip" and stronger attack.

 

There are many reasons to think a headphone that works well on Piety (existing system) wouldn't work well on Pietus. Despite same family / topology of Piety, Pietus is different sounding. Different tonality. Small Piety is U-shaped relative to Pietus Maximus, which is mid-centric or even a bit upper-mid forward. Small Piety is coarse whereas Pietus is silky. The only shared aspect may be the mid bloom, but Pietus even handles this aspect differently because it has much more clarity.

It comes down to the system. With my standard rotation of headphones, Pietus with MIB didn't work as well as Pietus with LIM. So it's not just the headphone. It could still work with the same headphones, but a different source, cables, whatever tweaks may be needed. Still Pietus is different sounding from Piety.

DSHA-3F still sets the standard with respect to having few sins of commission.

 

The Asgard 3 can fit in a few places, but now that Magnius is no longer, it sits at the bottom of the lineup. It's got decent power, works with drier sounding planars, brightish dynamics, but it's kind of warm and soft. Can someone else help me out here?

This is a tricky one that I wouldn't dare predict without seeing how it goes. I can see this going really well with Elex or Clear. Focals can be overly dynamic, something Tyll back in day the noted. Certain traits of the Pietus would have a calming affect without killing the fast transient response of Focals. I think it would be complimentary because the Pietus is hardly slow or plodding - the opposite in fact - it's just the tips that are rounded.

OG Utopia can be lean with an upper-mid emphasis on the wrong combination of gear and I would be concerned this could be one of them.

 

The Pietus is definitely the more refined, the more mature sounding one. The Lyr+ isn't as technically capable, a tiny bit less resolving, a tiny bit less shades of volume gradations. However the Lyr+ seems to be easier to pair with a variety of sources. The tonal signature of Lyr+ almost seems to be the opposite of the Pietus. It's got a robust full bodied sound, at the expense of blurrier lows. The high-end is more rolled than the Pietus. The upper-mid presentations of these amps are opposite, Pietus having a tendency to be upper mid forward, Lyr+ laid back.

Modius E just works with almost everything. It's downsides are very minor: it's slightly on the soft side, it has a sheen of murkiness. This is especially true with the single-ended outputs. These are easily outlooked given its price. And if you handy with a soldering iron, they can be ameliorated somewhat (better clarity, less soft, more slam) with the Cinemag CLMI15 line level transformers for XLR->SE.

The DACs I'd really run with the Lyr+ would be the Gungnir A2 or Burl B2 (tuned to be less vintagey) because they are aggressive or energetic, or maybe the DAC2541 for a calmer presentation than the former two. However, the different form factors of these DACs make it a clunky stack. Now that I think of it, think the Modi Multibit 2 would work well with the Lyr+. Also keep in mind there are a ton of 6SN7s to tweak the sound signature, although a wide variety is good condition is getting harder to find because of bastards like me who have been slowly collecting them in the past ten years.

 

No, I don't own them all - but it will be a LONG good week or two of listening to TOTL SS amps of various sizes:

 

Get it with the built-in DAC so you have an AIO without having to fuss with crap. Multibit or ESS. Both provide good synergy with the amp, but take different approaches. I will have a writeup on the built-in DACs.