zottel

That was meant to be a post on my profile but my eyes are crossing after 6 hrs of lab work each day, mostly iFi Diablo. And I'm very fortunate to have a wife that encourages me to listen to my music while she watches cooking videos.

what amazes me is how effective listening to music for an hour each night is at lowering my blood pressure. literally down 10-15 mm Hg, or more on some nights.

@yotacowboy : when I suffered from afib (before ablations) I found that calming music on stellar systems would help me to spontaneously self convert. Far better than going for a cardioversion. 400J blast to the body.

Just back from the listening party at Bandcamp, bought it right away. Now for some listening on a proper system. :)

playing right now!

This is most excellent!
Little Buddy Move has sounds below 10 Hz !!!

@Thad E Ginathom Sad to hear about your degrading hearing. Especially in this hobby, that’s not nice. I hope you will be able to enjoy music for a long time, anyway.

As to that Mimi rating: Activating the correction feature still adds lots of treble. So I guess this just means I’ll have no problem with my hearing in daily life. Or it’s relative to my age, but then the texts wouldn’t really make sense.

Thank you @zottel. I have given up on *hi-fi* as such, several years back and only hang around here for the folk --- and the occasional topic that tickles, sometimes controversially. Oh, and the porn, of course! ;)

Ok, seems as if a firmware update will be required. When Mimi is active, BT works without problems and the difference is easily recognisable. In DAC mode, however, either no sound is played at all, or sound without the adjustments.
There’s work to do, Focal!

This sounds like EQ + per-band volume control to me. I rated “Excellent” but obviously the highs need work. If you move the “intensity” past 70% it may sound like pure EQ to you (it does to me).

I like the sound, too, at 50%, though after a few hours, it became a little fatiguing. It’s of not much use to me, though, if it doesn’t work in DAC mode. In another forum, sb. wrote that it works for him on a MacBook, but not on an Android mobile. Will have to test that, too.

They’re better than anything else wireless I heard (which isn’t much), and I use them wireless for podcasts a lot. But for music, I’m just not really satisfied (with AAC from Apple). In DAC mode, though, they’re totally great.

While my Meier stack + Clear Mg is even better (except sub bass), I don’t miss anything when listening to the Bathys, I don’t keep thinking “Nice, but when can I go back to the great sound of my home rack?” as I did with mobile setups up to now.

And with iPhone supporting USB-C now… :-)

I'm definitely with you on the "Dynamic" setting. It takes all the Focal sound out of the headphone and just buries it.

House reminds me of the Clear MG which wasn't to my taste (I like the Clear OG much better). I did use that as a starting point and boosted the mid treble to wake it up. My head is weird and can't handle any of the thin headbands which are used in most ANC models. The ZMF Copilot is working but it doesn't stay on well, too flat. Looks like I need to buy the ZMF Crescent snap.

@loadexfa Yes, House reminds me of my Clear Mg, too, just a little bit brighter, which made me think it might be leaning towards Clear OG or Utopia 2022, but I haven’t heard the Clear OG, and the Utopia only shortly under meet conditions. So yes, it might well be that it’s closer to the Clear Mg than to other Focals.

FWiW I feed my Holo Spring 3 DSD64 from my HQPlayer. It sounds better to me than even more highly upsampled PCM

My DAC doesn’t support DSD. I tried a bunch of stuff with the RU6, but nothing was even remotely as good as the Daccord at 192 kHz, which maybe is to be expected. I guess I should try with the Helm Bolt, too, but I don’t expect wonders there, either; it seems that a decent DAC is required for HQPlayer to really work its magic.

Yeah, as expected: Daccord without HQPlayer easily trumps Bolt with HQPlayer by a large margin, much better resolution, heft, precision, detail. With HQPlayer, Daccord becomes another dimension. :)

Expect an FS post soon for quite a number of stuff that has become obsolete because Bathys.

While it’s not as dark (more low/mid treble) the family relations to the Clear Mg are immediately audible.

I've had them for a while and keep meaning to start a thread on them at some point. For Bluetooth, I really liked the end result, even if the implementation needs a touch of work.

After some 8h of use (not only music, also online meetings), resolution in DAC mode has become a lot better, nothing left of the slight smearing I heard at first, and a much more noticeable difference between DAC mode and BT.
I like the Bathys better and better! :)

I just tried the CFA trifecta and I’m brave enough to say I really liked it.

My ears just hurt with IEMs inside, very quickly. I finally accepted now that it is pointless to try new ones again and again.

Consider keeping an eye on shotgunshane's earbud adventures: https://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/earbuds-discussions.3026/page-12#post-408492 et seq.

The only ones that really left a “wow” impression were the ZMF Caldera and the Abyss Diana TC, both fed from a Feliks Envy. There were several others that sounded “not bad” to me, among them several ZMF and the Meze 109 pro, but compared to my own rig (Meier Daccord + Jazz + Clear Mg), they seemed like a sidegrade at best.

Ah, and I forgot the Susvara from a Feliks Envy that left no more than a “meh” impression on me. :-P

And a few Stax, which were too bright for my taste, and I was missing bass.

You will have a blast

And no Dynaudio or KEF, either? I wanted to listen to their streaming speakers! :-(

Rockna's showing off a Wavedream Sig Anniversary and the new Wavelight Server

Ah, right, Rockna, forgot about them. Thanks!

Little Richard grew up next to a train. He said the chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga of the trains at night were the basis for the opening to "Lucille." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hCPTLd3ZPX8

I used to dance to dot-matrix printers. Crazy rhythms!

Fifty years ago, a friend wrote a song to the rhythm of the printing machine he was working on.

45 minutes for free, then one Euro per hour. That’s more than ok. Of course, when I brought back the bike, I had 46 minutes on the clock. X-)

In NL the cargo bikes are becoming more popular: both the leg-powered and the battery-powered versions. Very versatile vehicles, just keep in mind that with those reinforced frames every accident at 15 to 20 miles an hour can result in someone breaking bones. Sometimes the cyclists on these cargo bikes forget that their bike is half the size of a small car.

@Gazny Thanks for the tip, but I want to use it with streaming, and on Linux. Plus, PGGB is even more expensive. :o)

With RU6 it’s nice, but not as awe-inspiring as with the Daccord by far. To my ears, with 96 kHz source material: RU6 NOS <= RU6 OS < RU6 NOS + Roon linear phase < RU6 NOS + Roon minimum phase < RU6 + HQP poly-sinc-gauss-hires-lp < Daccord = Daccord + Roon minimum phase <= Daccord + Roon linear phase << Daccord + HQP poly-sinc-gauss-hires-lp

Interesting that, to my ears, linear phase sounds marginally better on the Daccord, while I think that minimum phase sounds quite a bit better on the RU6.

I even quickly tried the two together when I got the Mini C, thought that something sounded off and never used them together since. I might have used the Pi4 as a source for that test, maybe that’s the difference?
Or I just hear differently today. *shrug*

It might be 24bit vs. 16bit. To my ears, the RU6 produces great results at 24bit, while most 16bit content sounds like shit.

Actually, I like detail a lot, which is why I love my Meier stuff so much, too: Perfect detail. :) Somehow, the Bolt and the Mini C just don’t seem to like each other, to my ears the top end air is missing completely, separation is meh, everything feels mushed together and muffled.

I guess it’s the top end. The Mini C doesn’t provide much of that, anyway, and the Bolt is “laid back” in the sense that it doesn’t provide much upper treble, either.

My only issue with the Mini C is that I'm hearing slightly too much elevation between 1 & 2k. It's completely fixed, however, with filters and/or crossfeed from dac2541 and/or Jazz ff. (I always play with those features to get the best out of a given record.) I've been using Jazz ff lately, because I'm too busy to futz around with Lyr+.

Funny artist name, btw: Mundharmonika is the German word for mouth organ. With that extra A, however, it becomes Mouth Hair Monica.
The rest of his work is not as good, IMHO, but I really love this song.

Ahh. I was parsing it Mundhaar-monika and being baffled.

Wait. Now I read your second line. Baffled again.

Yes, the original word is Mund-Harmonika, of course, but with that extra A, “automatic” parsing becomes as you first did it, Mundhaar-Monika. :)