The All Purpose Advice Thread

I assume you mean DACs. For turntables it makes a ton of sense because there's a huge difference in cheap and expensive turntables.

Basically your DAC can get to 90% potential at a lower price then an amp but when you are reaching that final 1% you get way more circuits complexity in a DAC then an amp does in that final 1%. All that extra complexity cost a lot of money. Just look at some pictures of the insides and you'll see what I mean.

Also I don't know about other people here but I can't justify a DAC over $1k that is only for a HP setup. Whatever DAC I have will mainly be for speakers and headphones are just in addition to that. The Modi MB is about as high as I go for dedicated headphone use.

 

Yeah, my bad, i should have specified DAC. I'm afraid to get into vinyl and wind up like selling bodyparts for carts so I just pretend it doesn't exist sometimes

Speaker setup is definitely the real endgame for me, but at this point in my life with the whole "moving at least once a year" dealio it's probably a project best tabled for a while

 

I had it in my head that you were talking about getting the Vali 2.

Valhalla 2 seems like a great choice as well. Forget about the tube recommendation comment though:

 

@Lasollor, Thanks for the feedback! What tubes did you use in your AT-HA22Tube if you don't mind asking?
I think I'll probably end up getting a Vali or a Valhalla eventually but for now I'll stick the AT-HA22Tube.

One thing that's a bit annoying about schiit gear for someone like me who spends half of the time in EU and half of the time in Japan is that they don't support dual voltage...

 

I split my time between the US and France. I have the Schiit Magni 2U with different wall warts to take care of the different voltages until I get something more permanent. Next will be a Modi MB which also uses wallwarts.

 

Oh, I had never noticed that I could get separate wall warts at different voltage for some of their gear. They even have it for the Vali.

 

Although...

A pair of 6CG7 might also be a good choice for the Valhalla 2. The 6CG7 looks not too differently electrically from the 6N1P tubes the Val2 is designed for. I might investigate this!

 

General question that isn't audio advice but doesn't quite merit a thread.

How does sharing IEMs work at meets or with loaners? Are you suppose to get your own tips? Do you share tips and is there a cleaning protocol that I don't know about? Mainly asking because I have some Flare Audio Isolates that I'd like to put on the loaner program if enough people are interested.

 

Do you remember @sepinho ?

He is an IEM tip-rolling fanatic. You clean the tips or provide spares.

 

Just read the FAQ page for Comply tips and they say you can just clean them with a damp cloth. Should have started there first.

 

Could be wrong, but I recall reading somewhere that the 6CG7 would work in the Vali 2 circuit but not Valhalla 2. Might want to check with @schiit

 

Yep, I even made the mistake of listening to the Chord fanboy chorus. The lesson that "loud is not the name as driven properly" was well-learned. The sad thing is that the meme that you can drive things like the HD650 with a Mojo persists, and is pushed to people on limited budgets looking for help.

On the upside, when I plugged the 650s into better amps it was a revelation, preventing many mid-fi sidegrades.

 

Valhalla 2 and Jotun comes down to personal preference but the Jotun is better in technicalities and more versatile. The V2 itself is cheaper and you don't have to go out of your way to reterminate your cable or buy a balanced cable to use with the Jotun.

There's a couple of reasons why I (and probably others) chose to use more expensive dacs with cheaper amps.

1. A dac upg is an upg for all my systems. I use my dac for my headphone amp, IEM amp, and speaker amp. So it just made more sense for me to get the best dac available and not have to ever worry about dac upgrades. It's especially true with Schiit's dacs because of their upgradeability.
   
2. Schiit's dac line is more complete than their headphone amp. There's a clearly defined low, mid, and high end multibit dac in their lineup. Going up their dac line is pretty much a guaranteed upgrade, although some may prefer the slightly warmer tone of the Gungnir Multibit over Yggdrasil. With Schiit's amp line, some of their cheaper amps do things better than their more expensive amps. Just see Marv's Schiit amp compendium to get an idea of what I mean by this. Schiit has also yet to release a true end-game headphone amp.
   
3. Garbage in, garbage out. You won't truly know how good (or bad) your headphone or amp is until your dac is on-par or better.
   
4. Headphones have different amping requirements. In most cases, an amp that's very good for high impedance headphones won't work well for orthos. I wasn't completely sure what headphone I was going to stick with for the long run, so it was better for me to stick with a cheaper amp until I knew. I used the hd600s with the V2 and Yggdrasil before I got myself a modded hd650 and now also have a modded hd800.
   
5. At $1000+, the headphone amp realm belongs to the boutique amp makers. You either pay up a lot of money to order a new amp and wait months for it to be built, or you wait for a used deal to come up. Then you'll also have to figure out what kind of sound you want out of your amp once you figure out which headphones you want to use. The big amp makers have different house sounds and ideology, and then there's differences within their amp line as well. The valhalla 2 was basically a stop gap for me until I figured out which high end amp I wanted to get, and to wait for a good used deal. A great Sonett 2 deal came up for me, so I went for it.

Anyways! The Modi Multibit, V2, and hd650s will be a great start. Be sure to mod your hd650s cause it's a pretty significant difference.

 

Just found these pair of magnepans that need work for $125.
What kind of work/how hard would it be?
http://rochester.craigslist.org/ele/5900013275.html

 

If the seller is using the correct terms for what needs to be replaced, that would be arduous. The voice coils on magnepans are f'ing huge. Also, I found this DIY after a simple search: http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/MUG/messages/80705.html ; and this service ad for similar work: http://www.indiespinzone.com/mag/mag6.html

 

Hmm. I guess I'll pass on them then.

 

Wow, thanks for the awesome reply!
That helps explain things a lot better, I'd entirely forgotten that my way of trying to get the best sounding setup for my $ is gonna be different from other people who can knock out two or three birds with the same stone after a DAC upgrade

I'm definitely looking forward to modding the 650s, the only time I ever really checked HF regularly for an extended period of time was that t50rp thread. I had tons of fun messing with my pairs. But I am kinda worried that some people have said they made them less forgiving, I've started finding a lot of new music via Google play streaming lately.

 

Np! If you're worried about fatigue, just hold off on doing the quarter mod. That one contributes most to treble presence.

 

Awesome, quarter mods have always kind of been the death of me anyway. I always wondered up ordering like four pairs of new pads to go back and redo it with a slightly smaller hole...

 

I have some heavily modified headphones I'd like to take measurements of and I have two desk mics available (link one,, link two) along with many inline IEM mics. Anyone know if or how I could make a rig to take reliable measurements of these headphones?