aerius

Well, based on actual listening, the 20-bit PCM1702 in Biggie's CD player sounds better than the 18-bit PCM1700 in my modded Denon CDP, and the 24-bit PCM1704 in the Simaudio Eclipse sounds better yet.

The short answer is yes, it does help. The long answer involves a lot of math which I don't understand anymore, as I've been out of university too long and my Calculus is pretty damn rusty. The Long Answer (PDF File)

There's actually several that are nicer. Burr-Brown PCM63, PCM1702, PCM1704. I have the PCM1700 in my CD player, not quite as a good as it's only an 18-bit chip as opposed to the 20 & 24 bits of the others. Still pretty happy with it though.

Just for trose, we should call that combo the iTouch myself at night.

Regulars. I still can't afford them though, but there's probably enough clues lying around on various places for someone to make a reasonably close copy.

There's 3 things keeping from getting a K1000; price, not enough bass, and the fact that if I dozed off and rolled my head over while listening to them in bed I'm likely going to end up busting them. Price isn't that big of an issue, but the other 2 are. If it had more bass, I could see having one as a 2nd or 3rd headphone.

The only real difference is that the monoblocks have more power and a better output transformer. It ain't that special and it certainly ain't worth $35k. The M7000's are seriously not that great, the Wavelength Audio Cardinal X2 crushes them like a bug. I was present at a shoot-out between the Zanden & Cardinal on a set of Coincident Total Victory II speakers. Much to the disgust of the Zanden's owner, the Cardinal beat it in every respect with the possible exception of tonality, and it does so at less than half the price. For the cost of the Zanden, you could get the Wavelength Napoleon NCE which will give you MagneQuest transformers wound with fucking silver wire.

You don't. Get a bottle of insulating enamel and paint the silver wires, making them into insulated magnet wires. Then make them into these.

That's crazy! It takes me 4 days to work that many hours, and once lunch breaks and so forth are counted in it takes a bit under 5 days for me to rack that many actual work hours.

There are some things which are better off left unknown. This is one of them. As is Dolphinsex.

I'll take this as an admission that you had a Spice Girls poster in your room when you were in college.

On the bright side, I think I like the colour better. On the downside, holy christ does the wood & lettering ever look like shit.

From my experience, a gain of 2 is going to be rather troublesome with K340's especially if you listen at higher volumes. For me it's borderline, and I listen pretty quiet, I'd recommend a gain of about 4-5 or so with the K340 for people who listen at normal volumes.

Yup. Straight from the horse's mouth on diyAudio.

About $1000 for a non-oversampling DAC on a block of wood. Uh, no thanks. I'd much rather go for the K & K Audio DAC kit and get one of the DIY guys to assemble it and case it up for you if you can't build it yourself.

I learned this one from the owner of a local hi-fi store. If you want to play with wood blocks for vibration control, go to a toy store and get a box of Jenga blocks. Keep as many as you need, then sell off the rest on Audiogon or whatever with a description of "like Cardas golden cuboid blocks!!"

1) The speakers have to be bigger since you need to fit an amp in them 2) You will be limited in power & sound quality unless you build a fairly large speaker 3) You can rule out tube amps or Class A amps unless you want to set the speaker on fire 4) Related to 1), you can't optimize the shape of both the speaker & amp layout for best performance There's probably more, but those are the issues I can think of off the top of my head.

Ok, what the heck is this "Dragon" thing? As far as I can tell it's some sort of Singlepower tube amp, and doing a search for "Dragon" brings up a bunch of stuff on audio cables, but not amps of any sort. Any details on this thing?

Upgrades happen, might as well get ahead of the curve while you can...

The last time I checked, which admittedly was about 5 minutes ago, Head-case doesn't have any sponsors.

*aerius is lost, so he'll say something about boobs*

Now you know why I almost failed my typing class in high school.

Noooooo!!!!! Buy TheSloth's Adagios! linky

At my university, some of our music was like that too, usually the rarer stuff that's worth money or something. We could sign out most of the stuff they had, but I admit that some of our libraries required a rather large amount of paperwork before they let me take stuff out.

I use my local libraries. If you're in a larger college or university, you should be able to get access to more music than you can imagine from their libraries & archives. My university had countless thousands of classical LPs stashed away in various places.