gepardcv

The other bad thing about Focals (which I brought up years ago on this thread, but worth repeating for anyone considering it): the headband creates a hotspot. It's not flat along the skull line (unlike, say, the HD800 headband, or Stax-style suspension straps), but kind of cylindrical. For me at, least, the discomfort is immediate. One brand that I haven't seen discussed much here on HC is ZMF. Due to circumstances over the years, it's one of the few high-end headphone lines I have never had the opportunity to try out. If anyone has, opinions? (I already know if my 007 dies, I'll repair it or just get another one, but if my Audio Zenith PMx2 dies, there's no way to replace it with Oppo out of the business. So it'd be good to know what can live up to it. Focal is absolutely not a contender for me.)

Where are you moving the data from the old media?

In my understanding, setting a higher sample rate will cause the OS to digitally upsample or downsample the source material to match. I don’t know if it’s audible from an ABX test perspective, but it mucks with the signal. I suspect it doesn’t matter for upsamples of multiples of the original (like 44kHz to 88kHz or 48 to 96), but interpolation (44 to 96) might introduce artifacts. (I might be wrong about this.) A higher output bit depth than the source material should be fine: the extra bits will be set to 0, and that’s that. No information added, removed, or changed.

Audirvana switches bit rate without necessarily taking exclusive control of a DAC. Is there any advantage to exclusive control? I find it annoying — you can’t just pause music playback to l, e.g. watch a video in-browser, you have to fully stop and lose your place in a track or playlist. Oh, and Apple’s jukebox software still not switching rates automatically is just silly. C’mon.

I’m on the Qobuz trial, too. Playing through Audirvana, which gives 90 days. Enjoying the curated content, and it actually sounds better than Tidal to me. Too bad there’s no easy way to ABX, or I’d give it a shot.

There’s now a part 2, if you feel like spending some more time: There’s pure insanity going on surrounding this on various forums. The pro-MQA crowd is now engaged in trench-warfare trying to discredit the guy who posted these videos. Changed its tune to “well we never said it was lossless — it’s lossy but BETTER than lame old lossless!”. There’s an edit war going on in the Wikipedia MQA article.

@TMoney: Your battlestation photo is disturbingly lacking in headphones and a slick amplifier 😁 But I’m with you on this. I’ve been low-key trying to replace my Mac laptop with my iPad (and I don’t have one of the new ones, just an OG Pro from 2015) and an external keyboard. It’s close. I personally could probably jump ship if an upcoming version of iPadOS has (1) a Unix shell and (2) background processes. It seems like something Apple could bless us with. I’d also love external storage slots, but they’re not strictly necessary.

The recent outcry over the MQA scam, and Tidal’s complicity in it, probably should be mentioned on this thread. This video started it a couple of weeks ago.

Does anyone have 4CP-601 pots in 10k audio taper that you’d be willing to part with? I have now run out of my supply from this GB (my goodness, so long ago) and want to buy a couple more.

Bro, you just made my day. The HD800, a headphone that — when released — redefined pricing for non-exotics (i.e., not the R10, not the Orpheus, and not Stax) at a then-eyewatering 1400 USD, is now considered a beater, great for tossing in a backpack. 🤣

Not Bryan either, but IMO the Utopia sounds like an attempt to recreate the OG SR-009 with a dynamic driver and an uncomfortable headband. If you don't mind a hotspot on your head and like the 009 sound and don't want to deal with electrostatics, you'll enjoy the Utopia.

Looks neat. Looks like you didn't go for a balanced output on the Dynalo, any reason?

Interesting, my 20mA build doesn’t get anywhere hot enough to be described as “a furnace”, and I used smaller heatsinks. OTOH, I also used smaller mounting brackets, so the hot transistors sit closer to the sink fins, which should help somewhat. My on-board heatsink KGSSHV ran hotter than the Carbon, and my Dynahi ran hotter still.

Is the case as strange as it appears on photos?

Thanks for all the advice! Guess I’d better go learn to use a table saw.

That's a flat plane, as you surmised, showing a section cut through the threshold. I'm attaching a picture with perspective. Thank you for looking into it!

Image with dimensions attached. I figured it should be easy, and I only brought up CNC because it's a simple solution IME for turning CAD files into parts. Doesn't mean it's the right way to build this thing. That's a great tip to find someone through a makerspace, but they're all closed in my area because of covid-19.

Fusion file attached. What's a table table? (I don't know much about serious woodworking...) Threshold v1.f3d.zip

I need a custom threshold built for my kitchen. (Omitting the long and completely uninteresting story about why.) Preferably in a nice wood I can finish myself. Since I have no access to woodworking equipment, I instead made a model in Fusion360, exported an STL file, and started emailing it to random woodworking shops which advertise CNC services on their web sites. It's been a week, and... crickets. The only guy who wrote back says he's moving shop and can't do it. For anyone here with woodworking experience, is this a difficult request? STL attached. Also, if anyone has any contacts for shops which can make this part for me, I'd greatly appreciate it. Threshold v1.stl.zip

I used TAP106K035CCS and TAP476K035CCS, rated for 35V. They seem to work fine...

I built my Carbon with 680uF Mundorf/FT caps from this group buy from 2015. The 3.15A fuse I put in originally has never failed, after far more than 10-30 on-off cycles. No thermistors 🤷‍♂️. No problems after years of use. The 76mm height restriction was a bit annoying, but I made a fully-custom case slightly larger than 2U (100mm, using Fischer SK 56 100 SA heatsinks).

To be fair, the one time I heard it, the LL made the 009 sound oh so dreamy...

Anyone who doesn't want to be injured. That photo shows a device which is a hazard for (1) electrical shock, and (2) a fire.

(Rant warning. Also, I haven't been reading any of the Apple commentariat, so I'm sure this has been covered and perhaps refuted by other people in more detail.) I'm pessimistic about this move to "Apple Silicon". Remember all the "G5, the only desktop supercomputer" nonsense from the early 2000s? Where some cherry-picked works-in-the-lab-only benchmark showed it outperforming an Intel chip, but ran everything in the real world with all the speed of frozen molasses? I'm getting echoes of the same thing here. CPU design is a game of dollars spent on chip design and optimization. Intel makes fast CPUs because it has been dumping the largest sums of money into the problem for the longest period of time. Because of this, its (crappy) microarchitecture has outran and outperformed better designs like SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, Transmeta Crusoe, and (especially painful to me) the superb DEC Alpha. This means Intel is the only game in town for high performance. "Lightroom ran smoothly" — yeah, that's convincing. This move is going to be a huge pain in the ass. It'll be fine for Mac users who use nothing more sophisticated than Safari and Apple Mail (those who haven't already moved to an iPad for those tasks). For the minority of us who actually use Macs to do complex things? lol. Binary compatibility will suck (no vector instructions according to the article linked above). Updating all the open-source compilers will suck (will Apple contribute changes back to LLVM upstream? no clue). A bunch of libraries will probably stop being good (I expect low-level optimized linear algebra tools to have problems). I'm already holding on to 2015 MBP because I dislike the new hardware, and running Mojave because I want nothing to do with Catalina, and dread the day that machine stops working. I think this move is to make it easier to develop i(Pad)OS apps. That way apps are developed on nearly the same hardware that they will run on, and Apple really only needs the Mac as a development platform for its mobile devices.

@skullguise: How are you liking that Brooklyn Amp? I've been thinking about it for the (planned) living room system, the small footprint appeals to me.