Raimei Templar

Interesting, sounds like the Hemp were a dry run for their new house sound?

Yeah I am pretty sure these are either the Hemp drivers or are certainly heavily based on them. They have 38 ohm impedance now and similar sensitivity to hemp. it is a smart move to have the Prestige series offer this kind of sound as its very friendly and will hook people on the brand.

The F pads make a big difference too!

J2 makes live albums sound more like studio albums, its a little TOO clear and vivid of a presentation. Incredible with actual studio stuff though, loads of detail, improved dynamics vs original, sharper/biter transients without the ear murder found from bad ESS dacs. Got some more slam to it too. Very fun dac, I like it a lot.

Any idea what was wrong/fixed?

Yeah mine was made with likely counterfeit power regulators. They have actually suspended sales after they realized that they had gotten burned by some fakes. They realized early so only a few bad ones in the wild. They are waiting a shipment of good ones which is why you can't buy one atm.

I’m not gonna say it’s better than Yggdrasil A2, but since the J2 went into the system, I haven’t been tempted to switch the source to Yggdrasil A2. I have a feeling A2 might be like stable, attractive wife material, and J2 might be the crazy hot chic.

Did anyone get one? $250 for the DAC without USB has me squarely in on the fence territory.

Me being insane, yes I ordered one. Will compare with the AKM version. Taking a while to ship out though, looks like it was very popular. 10 day wait or so.

I ordered one with USB just for the added flexibility. It will eventually get used with an old Mac Laptop. I’m sure the 10 day wait is because they assemble when the orders come in due to the variations in color, USB, etc.

These two might make good candidates for showing differences between amps, they both measure very well and use the same op amps by the same designer, yet they do not sound the same.

The Erish is clearly better from a technical standpoint but I must admit the Archel 2.5 is more charming, it has such a friendly sound signature, you can plug anything into it, listen to anything and have a nice experience. Erish is more unforgiving at least with the R70x. Needed to alter my eq quite a bit for use with the Erish, need less air boost and less 5k boost.

Congrat. Doubtlessly the best sounding chip-based head amp.

Guess I will have to get one whenever it comes out and compare to the AKM one as I am curious to hear a good Sabre dac as its been awhile since I did!

Surprisingly not so much, its primarily about speakers/ easy to drive IEMs here, loads of options for them. Teac,Fostex and others have some offerings but they are overpriced and unimpressive imo. Only small company I know of with a good rep is Amulech and that is for dacs. They got a nice Sabre 9038 dac but very weak amp in it.

Its one of the great mysteries of Japan honestly, I dont understand how so many people spend so much on speaker setups when most people live in apartments and cant actually use them without having the police called! The most popular headphones here are closed easy to drive ones like Sony MDr-1am etc because people use them on the train. Open backed hard to drive headphones for home use just arent as common.

This is a perfect example of the kind of offering you see from Japanese companies the Jade CASA found at https://www.orb.co.jp/audio/products/jade_casa.html

Its a headphone amp with a big fat blazing massive power output of....180mws into 32ohms. A bargain at 500 bucks!

Yeah it’s bad. The game is also super slow and just drab

Someone unpacked the game files and saw that all audio files were saved at a 24000hz sample rate. Still not fixed. Embarrassing. https://discussions.ubisoft.com/topic/78569/audio-issues-bitrate-dynamics-balance-muffled-sounds-stuttering-volume-etc-post-here/9?lang=en-US

You get $200 worth of Drop points so its..sort of $900 but would have been a bigger deal at just $900. Based on their description it seems to be a super HD800s, apparently has a new driver and everything, so it is still a strong value but isnt going to be as big a deal as the 6xx was.

Wow 9 months wait is like waiting for a baby

9 mths... drop being drop. More like Kickstarter.

At that kind of price, and new drivers to boot... I'll be more than happy to let others crowd fund them and wait to see what the finished product turns out to be.

Not sure if there is some magic synergy happening with the Geshelli stack, but these are lovely so far. I got one of the made in Japan ones, I wonder if the Taiwan ones are worse or if they had production issues early on. Dont hear the grain people are complaining of, at least not so far.

Had it quite a long ago. Sold because it didn't favor my big head.. oh well. And agreed with very well balanced tonality. I suspect it the most neutral among Audio Technica ever released.

Instant disillusionment...

"For now, only for those using Windows PCs as their music player."

Shit. Fuck them.

Yep it is Windows only ATM sadly, dont know if it will be ported or not.I havent heard it whisper sweet nothings about Topping in my ear so I think its safe :).

It has you do tests so if your hearing is real bad, the test result and resulting EQs will be based on it, so the hard of hearing could certainly benefit!

Its still a WIP imo, for one thing it goes nuts if you set the max frequencies around your hearing limit, like mine is around 17k but its got to be loud for me to hear it, so it was trying to put a 20db boost there which is insane and no sane person would do that.

Main complaint is that its going for Harmon-like curve, I would like to see more target curves in the future.

The PCM1798 is still in production. As well as PCM1794. Then there is the AD1955. Although yes, the market will likely be dominated by ESS and CS designs.

Nah this is a real thing. I first heard this with Verite and thought I just went crazy until I talked to more experienced folks.