Lyander

Proprietary keyed MMCX connectors are a special sort of torture.

I used the balanced er4 cable. Stock ER2 cable kinda sucks.

@M3NTAL
No gross changes to the tonality? I'm not much exaggerating when I say that while I do find the ER2XR muted in the treble in stock form, the aftermarket one I got (the only one local that could fit) just made things all sorts of tizzy and hashy. I'd much rather get something close to stock sound but more durable.

Hot pulling tubes in unregulated power supplies like a guitar tube amp is not quite the same as hot unplugging on a regulated supply and likely fixed bias.

Ya, burned parts. Enough to mess anything up immediately - not always in something like a Vali 3. But I'd still get it fixed sooner than later. And me personally I would have 0 expectation that Schiit would cover this under warranty or even could cover it - i.e. maybe it's as much to fix as a new amp.

@Azimuth thanks for the insight, neglected to consider that. Yeah no I think it was a case of "familiar enough to be dangerous" here like if I'd suddenly try messing with DAC internals. Recipe for disaster

@penguins I'd be shocked if they did TBH. Best case scenario is that sure maybe it was some impurities around the socket like joch said but hopefully it doesn't blow the guy's headphones or ears up randomly now.

I just love how mad audio gear can get. I'm giggling.

https://www.psaudio.com/blogs/copper/the-once-and-future-tweeter

Seems someone even tried making a replica, but the sound test is no bueno: https://www.plasmaspeaker.de/ionovac-replica.html

I've heard the Lansche big bois at a couple shows and that particular technology is convincing. the treble response is super effortless. a bit disjointed sounding with the rest of the speaker being a bunch of paper woofers, but nothing horribad.

@yotacowboy nearly zero mass diaphragm, one would think that it'd sound effortless. Kinda makes sense unfortunately that it'd be disjointed but man I'm wondering whether woofers might be able to catch up somehow. Something tells me this ain't ever working for personal audio cuz... plasma.

To my knowledge, major differences over conventional measures include (1) score-based, (2) multiple quality dimensions, (3) binaural recording-based. But not much material publicly available (more feels like MFR-oriented).

lol for a few seconds
I thought maybe MQA rebooted;)

@Bill-P doesn't seem to be around anymore, but he had all the raw data (spreadsheets).

Here are the .pdf files, my own "compensated" files and some other stuff from his site: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SjExAs5SPWop6Q_Gk6m-grXdI48aVGR5?usp=sharing

EDIT: woops, wrong folder

@Serious nice! Requested access to the files.

Got a couple audio related folders in one folder and I clicked the wrong one. Added you to the right one.
I don't think I ever finished digitizing all the plots, but there are .txt files compatible with REW with my compensated graphs for many of the graphs IIRC, which should be interesting for @purr1n aswell.

If you don’t need the processing power, maybe a fanless system is the way to go. The case still gets mighty warm though.

@Wilewarer Passive is great if you are OK with working within limits and undervolting to massage performance. I went passive on my first APU build a bit over a decade ago and didn't go back to fans until Ryzen and Polaris won me over. An interesting side effect of removing fan noise from a system is being able to hear your CPU and GPU registers chattering away under load! Freaky cool!

I don't game (or video edit, or....) anymore, so I have purchased my last Komputer with a fan anything. There is just no reason for the significant noise

Being immortalized by Patrick Nagel is not a bad thing, and to be associated with Duran Duran, it’s actually quite an honor. There are few iconic album covers I can think of and this is definitely one of the best.

"I do feel a bit bad for the guy cuz he obviously wasn't in a position to greenlight that album cover..." I don't feel bad for him at all, well excepting a bit of pity for him being a grifter. Did not know about Matchbox album cover guy...grifter as well in all likelyhood.

Yeah I have a hard time feeling bad for the Nirvana dude...he capitalized off of it, even going so far as getting a tattoo "Nevermind"...on his chest.

Measurements are nothing if the physical processes that cause them aren't understood.

Grateful for this space where whinging about audio nerdisms is met with considerate discourse LMAO

I’m still wondering if maybe everything might be HIDDEN somewhere within FR. Like the squiggles of an impulse response are frequencies, too, e.g.. I just don’t think such stuff is easily visible in an FR plot or can be used to just EQ a different resolution or sth like that.

https://i.imgur.com/8Rx5p2e.png

i got banners along the top

Nothing on mobile, just the bottom banners when on desktop site. Should likely point out I whitelisted SBAF on both devices lmao.

Edit: never mind, got one on top while on mobile.

In an age of less sophistication, when I was a todler, my parents changed the knobs/locks on all the kitchen cupboards. Instead of turning, you had to press a button. Apparently I worked it out in seconds. As I lived with them up to age 15, I remember them well, and would not expect them to pose much of a challenge to any child.

DEFINITELY not looking forward to that cuz my joints are already on the noisy side.

Re: child locks, my one cousin keeps her son from opening cabinets up by... adding an adhesive mounted latch that he's too short to reach. Simple but effective.

The "push down to engage screw" things seems more effective on a sleepy me than actual kids though.

I take a certain pleasure in destroying child locks. For push down to unscrew caps, on the underside of the cap, use a thin wedge (e.g., flathead screwdriver) to separate the threaded piece inside the cap from the outer cover. That threaded piece works fine as a cap, and it doesn’t lock.

You read my mind. Hopefully the BOT didn't.

Well @Jinxy245 if you forget to turn on the firewall on your neuralink or even worse forget to update regularly all bets are off.

Six or seven posts in half an hour. As mentioned, most on old threads.

Has to have been a bot or a spammer. Or else... an advertiser: profile mentioned a website (I didn't look) and sig said AWS developer.

Has it/she been, ahem... terminated?

Edit: looks like it.

I don't need one but I want one. Stop atomic Bob.

Sold my MJ3 but have one on order. Missed it too much. No tube nervosa. Just good audio.

FWIW, I have been using the same tubes in my diy tube amp for past seven years, still going strong. OTOH, I have had to replace some components in that period on my s s equipment.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt

They don’t care. All they see is dollar signs now.

Linux without any bitperfect is better sounding than W machine with fancy player IDK why.

It *might* be. Back in the day, I was coming from a Windows setup which had developed huge latency troubles. I mean the real, unlistenable kind, where the machine stops to do something else.

I still had to work hard to get it working well, especially with JACK/Firewire. I settled on a studio distro with realtime kernel.

Realtime kernels don't seem to be necessary any longer. I still use JACK and the KXStudio apps.

And I still need to reboot before playing music, sometimes.

All of that is better than everyday Windows. I'm just too old for that stuff!

Going to repeat 2 things I've said here before:
1. I suspect there's "other" information in a reconstructed signal that plots like THD+N, FR or CSD plots, or other commonly used plots don't fully capture or illustrate. Different DACs most likely handle this "other" differently, whether intentionally or inadvertently,

... Aaaaaand it's this "x factor" plankton sort of thing that makes it easy for others who have less context for things to look at discussions about the same from a distance and think it's bunk and hogwash. Gotta hear it first to believe it, and not everyone's got that opportunity.

I can see WHY pseudo-objectivism is as appealing a school of thought as it is. It's exasperating, but it's no surprise it's caught on.

2. There's also the question of how each individual hears and processes sound information (ie psychoacoustics). Not just the individual FR of our ears, or musical theory stuff like perfect pitch or rhythm, but also some audiophile things like sibilance, staging, timbre, etc.

Combined with 1, I can believe that some people will hear differences and others won't. And it can change each time.

What temperature do you keep inside the house?

We have 26-28. My wife likes cooler, I like warmer.

I think our city's record is 43.something. Probably some corners might have been more. I doubt that our ACs would be effective at 47! And I hope it doesn't get tested.

I know some machines are rated up to 50.

@Thad E Ginathom forgot to reply, got distracted! My parents go for 16C and I target 24C, or 22C when it's much hotter out and I'm miserable from ambient temps. I had a chat with my parents recently about how setting too low a target and having the unit run in many short spurts actually ends up costing more in the long run. Our bill's been wth lately.

Can't understand people who set the AC to 16-18C at night... and then sleep under a thick duvet!

@Ardacer They don't believe that any of that matters. It's why, as much as I have no shortage of respect for the work Crinacle and Resolve and all the others have done insofar as building a library of useful FR traces go, that's the extent of the respect I have. Maybe we're all wrong and getting /better/ FR traces will render CSDs, burst decays, impulse responses all useless after all. Who knows.

I highly doubt that. Fr+phase/ir is enough to perfectly model a minimum phase system, and you can extrapolate csd from that, for example, but good luck trying to see those effects which are easily seen on csd/bursts on fr plot. Also, thd/imd being useless is quite the opinion fo have...

@Ardacer to be very fair to folks, I believe that the sentiment is more phrased "distortion doesn't matter so long as it's below a certain level which would render it inaudible". As for CSDs, I have firsthand experience with how they can very easily make up for shortfalls in FR (of which there are many), but again hey maybe dunking thousands of USD into a measurement rig will "fix" my FR woes (shrug).

Sonova to Sennheiser as McDonnell Douglas to Boeing?

It's a shame to see Sennheiser's decline. But they've not released anything good since 2009 (if you don't count HD 800 S), Alex Grell left 5 years ago, and they could have had winners, e.g. a new version of the HE 60. Were it not for JAR they'd be moribund.

HAH, "moribund'''s not a word I'd heard in a very long time but yeah, that tracks. Seems like, at best, they're able to come close to matching past endeavours, but I do feel like things've taken a turn for the worse with their modern direction.

The Massdrop HD6XX is a steal. But after the HD800 it went downhill. Maybe some decent IEM releases over the years but that's it.

Yuck

I know its not the same, but the cable that came with my CFA Fathom is a 4-wire ribbon style cable that I thought I'd hate because weird design, and SPC, but the ergonomics are actually quite nice. Sound wise it's more even than the CFA pure silver super litz.

I saw those. Time Stream cables I think they're called by Campfire? Not heard those ones specifically but while I cannot make any hard calls just yet because my sinuses are flooded... I forget how much more cables seem to matter for IEMs than headphones.