New Members - Introduce Yourself

Hello all. I found my way here from ASR where they are currently discussing purr1n's DBT with the Schiit Magni 3+ / Magni Heresy. I found the discussions here to be funny and refreshing and most importantly, BALANCED which is why I decided to register on the spot.

I have been in this hobby for >30 years and I listen to music using any playback device possible. I have loudspeakers (Acapella) at home, headphones (Dan Clark Audio Stealth, Beyerdynamic T5p, Sennheiser HD600) and IEM's (too many to list, but my current are Noble Audio Khans) for travelling, bone conduction headphones for exercise, and a portable Bluetooth speaker (actually, a few). I only listen to classical music. I too am a middle ground objectivist-subjectivist and I find extremists on both types to be excessively dogmatic.

 

Heyo fooles, not really a new member cause I was here years ago but I was Pirakaphile.

Sold my Gungnir Multibit, Cavalli liquid crimson, and HE-500s to get a motorcycle and move to the west coast. Now I'm listening to the Koss ESP/95X, some CIEMs from Alclair, and the E-MU cheapos that I've superglued together and the pleather is disintegrating because of my nasty skin.

Now I gotta figure out what DAC to get (looks like the new modi) and what closed back headphone I should get to compliment the electrostats.

Hope everyone is frickin good

 

Hi been in the hobby a few years now, just looking to express my thoughts on my endgame gear

 

Hi everyone, I've registered here quite a while ago, but spent most of the time in read-only mode. In case I'll finally find a topic where I can add some value, I think it's time to make an introduction. I stumbled upon this forum while searching for info on Schiit gear and it was obvious that SNR here is significantly higher than in most other places. So I'm following discussions on the stuff interesting to me since. Currently I'm using Modi 3E -> Lyr 3 -> ETA Mini C as the HP rig, and Bifrost 2 -> Freya S -> Aegir -> Tannoy XT6F as the 2 ch one. For sources I was running Logitech Media Server infrastructure on Raspberry Pis with Allo and HiFiBerry HATs but later switched to iDevices as USB sources from Apple Music.

 

JayGee here. I'm a 58 year old male from the US Midwest and have been a lifelong fan of all things electronic, especially relating to audio.
I'm an EE who has had a long career on ASIC design teams for companies that include Cray Research, sgi, HPE as well as various other companies.
Looking forward to interacting with the fine folks here at Super Best Audio Friends.

 

Hi, my name's Brian and I'm a geolocation software engineer in the Seattle area. I've been lurking around here since the late Changstar days.

I started out in the hobby almost 20 years ago with a HR Total Bithead driving an HD580. I think I still have those somewhere in the closet but my current setup is Sonarworks > LIM > Starlett > HD800S, which I'm very content with.

Hope to get to talk to some of you soon.

 

I'd say so too! Welcome aboard!!

 

Gosh, I checked this thread for the first time in ages and am so impressed with the people signing up.

@bstern I'd love to understand more about how / why you use Sonarworks. User-controlled DSP is very under-appreciated in the hobby, and we could do with more discussion here. I mostly use Audirvana to access Waves NX, or Android apps like USB Audio Player for its DSP.

@JayGee I hope you can bring your ee knowledge to the forums. I feel we have a lot of discussion about how things sound without enough understanding of the why, and you're sure to have insights.

@Dionyssius Are you into tubes? I'm a huge fan of Soviet tubes that are mostly sold out of Ukraine on ebay etc. What do you use in your Lyr 3?

@CutieCappie I would love to hear about how you feel having transition from a high end traditional system (liquid crimson!) to electrostats.. was that dipping your toe in and are you tempted to upgrade in that direction?

@Amfibius There's certainly more diversity here than on ASR. I think the best of ASR is the recognition of flaws in human perception (suggestibility, Ikea effect, and the appetite for testing / measurement...) We could do with more of that here.

@TheRealAscii There are quite a few members here who make or tune their own headsets. I love my LTS v1's, and have recently been doing mods to my HE6se's. ETA's headphones are very popular here. I'm probably not the only friend who is curious about how these designs / mods were created and why they make so much impact. Maybe you could write a little about your experiences?

 

Hopefully I didn't mess up the formatting here,
I guess I just realized I wanted a motorcycle more than anything else at that point in my life! I think the only upgrade I'm going for from here on is a Modi and a hard hitting closed back to compliment the lectrostat. Maybe get some nicer pads for the Koss, everything is stock now, I just hate thinking about what could be upgraded when I'd rather just enjoy listening!

 

Hi everyone,

I'm from Toronto, Canada. I'm new to this addiction and found the reviews and information here quite informative and refreshing when compared to some of the extremes you find at other forums. I'm a fame of vinyl, it is the reason I decided to build a "real system" recently and being the addict that I am, I'm trying to learn as much as a I can to get the best sound quality out of my system.

 

We get a lot of loose use of psychoacoustics on forums.

Something like 'in our study, 20 college freshmen were statistically unable to differentiate between 5 second recordings that had different (whatever)' becomes 'Science concludes that no one can ever distinguish between that thing ever'. You'll have a lot of authority if you can be a bit more accurate and educational.

 

I'm not qualified, nor have enough knowledge or experience to perform a controlled test in this arena.
Very few people I know care about audio quality, so I don't really have anyone interested enough to work with me on a local study of any audio interests.

Several years ago when I was into op-amp swapping, I hacked a Digidesign 442 that would allow me to test two pairs of op-amps. (Beautifully laid out design by the way) The 442 analog section was modified to allow my pc's serial port to switch between two level matched op-amp pairs and would either write to my monitor when it switched (pseudo random number generator - may or may not have switched op-amps) and gave me 15 seconds to select either A or B from my keyboard. The switch wall clock time as well as the selected op-amp and my selection was written to a file after the test was shut down.

I was never able to do much better than random guessing, but it was fun and since my employer was purchasing TI digital chips, I was able to get lots and lots of free TI and BB analog samples without any objection.

 

Hello from NY, NY! Been in this game for a few years, though I started going down the audio rabbit hole during the pandemic... Have tried a lot of gear, mostly for HP playback. Currently using a wonderful Susvara with a Viva Egoista amp and an Esoteric N-05XD DAC. Had fun on the journey getting to where I am!

 

Hi to all enthusiast at SBAS!
New member from Helsinki (FIN).

Ended up here due to good info about headphones, modding and mostly to learn from more experience folks of the community.

 

My name’s Joe. Thanks for the opportunity to register and take part. I am fairly recently into hifi- I got into the Hobby in mid-2021. I’m a 65+ nearing-retirement physician/academic working in a health system in large Midwest US city, and after some pretty significant Pandemic burnout, I was looking for some cognitive-emotional distraction and succor. I started out with a pair of Sony WH-1000 XM4s, which sounded to me much fuller, smoother and impactful than the Apple earpods I’d been using for years- that was the tip of the spear. Next I added some IEMs (Final A4000s which are still my daily drivers b/c of their soundstage and impactful bass). Then came an iFi Zen stack, and pretty soon I’d set up a home system for Roon. I started reading and listening to all I could, then posting tentatively on Head-Fi, adding some other headphones, DAPs, DACs and amps and tried to become a more discerning listener. I’m pretty much of a bass-head but also greatly appreciated good detail, “texture” and soundstage (layering/imaging more than size), which is all challenging given that I am limited to headphone listening due to my home and office set up. I have pretty substantial high-frequency tinnitus, so try to avoid high volumes to baby my ears. I’m pretty eclectic in my musical tastes- EDM, jazz, modern classical esp anything by Hans Zimmer, ‘world music’, vocals especially good chorales eg Eric Whitacre. Most recently I acquired at a great price a pair of Susvaras which have pretty much ruined me with respect to my other mid-fi headphones and have been reading/thinking about improving my chain to get the best out of them. Schitt Yggdrasil has been near the top of my list, but I had a lot of difficulty finding good A/B comparisons to comparable gear until I stumbled across the SBAF “Yggdrasil LIM impressions Only Thread”, started by @rhythmdevils, where I found the most informative and helpful head-to-head collection of well-done user impressions on this topic I had discovered anywhere on the web (IMHO). This has greatly helped me in making up my mind about my next DAC- now I just need to sell some of what I have already to help finance it! I especially appreciate the direct, no-nonsense approach here on SBAF – I too have found the amount of gear shilling and (OTOH) intolerance of criticism on some of the HF threads not very conducive to meaningful conversation. I continue to ‘lurk’ on the SBAF threads to learn as much as I can- I’m not sure I have a thick enough skin to be a regularly contributing member here (though I hope I might grow some by doing so), but at least wanted to say how much I appreciate and admire what you are doing.

 

Hi, I am in the hobby basically my since I am young. I like to collect and restore vintage gear (I know I need help) since forever. Lacking "new" projects I became interested in DIY which is how I stumbled upon SBAF.
Not looking for the perfect system but getting the best out of stuff I can get my hands on while remaining patient with parts. My last project was restoring a SE-A3 and took me 18 months. Now I probably overloaded on DIY Amplifiers to build since I have ordered parts for 3 Tube and 3 Solid State amps. But that's part of the hobby isn't it.

I am happy to engage here and while reading through countless threads I really like the culture here. ASR isn't for me, diyaudio moves to fast, the german hifi forum got weird in the last 10 years. Hope to learn a lot.

 

Like @JayGee I'm an engineer in the ASIC and semiconductor field. I'm just getting into this as a hobby as a result of putting together a two-channel system for my home office. It's been all kinds of entertaining to read the endless debates online between the audophiles who claim to count angels dancing on pinheads and the ones whose arrogance and claimed authority are only matched by the paucity of their knowledge. On that note, earlier today I finally succumbed to my worst instincts and replied to a thread on the audio scientology forum, so I figured that an appropriate penance would be to register here.

I also play the piano (currently a Roland FP-90X) and dabble with the saxophone. On the RF side of things, I've been a ham for almost 30 years, though I don't find much time to operate these days.

 

Hi @JayGee There seems to be a really interesting difference between the EE's who think of amplifiers as an abstract 'wire with gain' and then want a real product to behave like that (audio scientology) and audio engineers who think of amplifiers as a stage of transforming a signal into audio, implicitly suggesting the signal is incomplete if only gain is applied. I'd love to read your EE-hobbyist perspective.

 

Guessing this was meant for me. "Wire with gain" is indeed an abstract model but reality is never so simple. As with any abstract model the applicability will vary. Reality adds all sorts of complications: class AB or D, feedback, varying impedance, phase, capacitive load, temperature, power supply ripple and droop under instantaneous load, et cetera. Running a class A amp into planars is probably the best case for the model, but how many of us are doing that? There's a reason why RF is commonly called a black art and audio isn't much different. It's all RF right up until the speaker transforms it into audio. Is that "incomplete"? No, but if amps only had to apply gain and didn't have to source current they'd be a lot cheaper, smaller, cooler, and the engineering would be a lot simpler too.

What makes the scientology forum frustrating is a lack of understanding that measurements are single point samples out of a multidimensional space that's too complex to fully characterize. SINAD at 1KHz into a dummy load reflects the performance of exactly one signal into exactly one load. If that measurement is crap then it's likely that there are real audible problems, but if that measurement is good it doesn't tell you anything about how the amp is going to behave when you take into account all those other variables listed above including time-domain effects. At some point you're going to have to use your ears to determine whether your setup synergizes or not.

On the other hand the thread I couldn't resist replying to consisted of a bunch of people suggesting that a gajillion-watt amplifier will provide significantly more bass output than a lower-wattage amp all other things being equal, which the "wire with gain" model absolutely can address. The only consistent thing I can see going on over there is a belief that more is better, whether it's watts or imaginary tenths of a dB of SINAD that are dwarfed by the error bars (if any such things were provided). The only difference between this mindset and that of the purely-subjective audiophile is that the latter are measuring in dollars instead of watts or decibels.