New Members - Introduce Yourself

Hi, New member here. I have been going through a lot of threads here to understand the culture, mannerisms and what not to do. I have been in the audio hobby for a very long time. Started with an all in one dad had, Pioneer cassette player with fm and all, the double decker thing that had speakers attached (1980s).

Moved on to a Sony walkman, portable tape player when I left home to explore the world, late 90s. Here I am today trying to understand the technicalities and how to build a headphone system that has good synergy. Still a lot to learn, thank you for allowing me here.

 

Hi all,

I am mostly PC gamer - home theatre during day, headphones during night.

I am usually listening to EDM, but I am opened listen to what is recommended just for experience. I enjoy mostly stuff like Orbital, Future Sound of London, Deadmouse etc. but from time to time I enjoy Vangelis or Yosi Horikawa... In car I am lsitening to classical music. There is some jazz in my favorite playlist too. Only thing I am shutting down immediately is reggeton.

I have build my first stereo speakers 25 years ago and have them till today. I have bought from bazar home theatre Denon AVR-2113 with Acoustis Energy Aegis Evo One, Centre and Three. But those speakers sound honestly bad, but for 600$ it was ok. I am using them for 7.1 for movies and mainly PC gaming - fronts are builded one.

First better headphones I had was Koss Porta Pro 2 (too much bass), Koss HVpro (those was ok, I should keep them), Koss PRO/3AA (plastic crap). vJays till today in work.

I have listened to headphones like Clear, Stellia, Sennheiser HD800s, and few more from lower price point.

I have experience with Mytek DAC+, Matrix Element X..

I have now Denon ah-d9200. I bought recently Topping d90SE and I have no idea what is so special about it. Small soundstage, almost no sound separation and no dynamic. With A90 Discreet its boring. My motherboard Aorus z390 sounds much better in that regards. Its fun but sound quality could be better, so I am looking for something like that. Mytek DAC+ was fairly near that experience, but it was just too close to me and with too much meat imo.

I have come here due review from different users of those Toppings and I agree with those. I am looking to learn more about Headpohne amp and DAC to use and witch to buy. Hopefully I will be able also to contribute is some way sooner or later.

Have a nice day

 

Hi there
i have been lurking around and forgot to introduce myself, sorry!

i usually listen to vocals and pretty much anything from youtube. my home setup includes Dali spektor and an old Marantz 8200. currently im trying to setup my home office with more emphasis on my headphone setup. Am using a HD800 now, and am looking for a good amp to go with it.

hope to one day share more of my experiences. take care!

 

Long time lurker first time poster. I remember getting a second hand Sony soundbar for my TV 10 or 15 years ago and was blown away at how much better it sounded. This started my totally reasonable and not obsessive at all quest to improve the sound experience all around me. Beyond the speakers and components I've also come to appreciate how ease of use has a large impact of how I enjoy listening to music. Looking forward to participating rather than lurking.

 

I think my intro from 2018 was lost in the wind, so I guess I will reintroduce myself after a long hiatus.

Born near Philadelphia, moved to Dallas for school (long time ago), stayed in Texas for all but a 5 year stint in Boston.

Went to school for music (I'm a flutist). Plan was to be a symphony player. Kept coming in 2nd in auditions, so I started teaching and freelancing in the Houston area(still, long time ago). Was picked up by one of the music manufacturers as an artist. Had a knack for it, and ended up as a product manager for the oldest handmade flute company in the US. Did some regional manufacturing sales work for the company as well as well as high end instrument sales (think symphony players). Good times.

Fired my boss (long story), then was involved starting a company that manufacted and wholesailed orchestral string instruments to music stores. My customers were everone from the local mom and pop to Guitar Center. Lots of NAMM shows later, I ended up VP of sales, and we grew the company in a decade to the 2nd largest in North America.

Not leaving my flute roots, all the while I was importing a german handmade flute line)

(hope I'm not sharing too much... as I'm sure anyone in the nerdy classical side of things will figure out who I am

Then, Covid. The arts, and the institutions we all leaned on, broke.

I left my position, and am doing a couple of things now:
--I'm the national sales manger and artist relations manager for another string company
--I'm planning some big moves in Texas to not only help people get the gear they need, but also help each other become better business people. Well... to those of us in the arts who didn't go into real estate
-

Ok. now the fun audio stuff.

Once of my college roomates was a dyed in the wool "audiophile". Lots of speakers, but back them, modded Adcom stuff and AR turnables were the best college students could afford. I had an interest in recording, but didn't do more than a couple of courses and a campus job doing recordings for the music school.

But... as people go, I like to think I have a good pair of ears, and lots of training about how classical music should sound.

Gear wise, I'm pretty pragmatic. "Realism" in audio is about like looking at a movie and saying "yeah! that's how it looked when the filmed it ". All recorded music is electro acoustic, and has been for 100 years.

But... it won't stop my telling you that I like one thing more than another.

Hope that is enough

 

Hello, Earl here

I am a long time headphone enthusiast. I have been a member for months but could never get the confirmation email to work so I could participate. Somehow I got it to work today.

I was sacdlover on head-fi. But have not been on there much in years.
I am the one that did the first tube socket adapters way back in 2007.
Interestingly, my whole purpose was to find cheap substitutes for expensive 6SN7's. I did with a perfect electrical equivalent the 7N7/ 7AF7 loctals. I laugh like you when these people spend more on tubes and adapters than the amp they bought.

Love this forum. I have learned so much just lurking.

I have discovered the R2R dac's through SBAF. Bought a Modi multibit and tried some cheap Chines NOS dac's and I really like all of them. I have a Sunrise 3 I learned about on here. And some DIY tube headphone amps 6L6 SE.

I got divorced in 2009 and suddenly had a house by myself and could use speakers all I want. I spent ten years rebuilding old speakers .... refoam's and rebuilding the crossovers with way better caps and resistors. So, headphones fell to the wayside.

My dogs ran over me in the dog park in 2020 and shattered my lower left leg and destroyed my knee ligaments .... no ACL and no PCL now so being 66 I have a hard time trying to work on speakers anymore.

Furthermore, this group of dogs are bothered by the speakers. My last group of four would sit on the couch with me while I listened. So that is why I moved back towards headphone again.

My favorite poster is rhytmdevils.

 

Hey all, I'm new to the forum, but have lurked on and off over a few years. I'm a Head-Fi user but I've been told not to participate in any conversations about headphones since I'm a "Member of the Trade" now (not launched yet, but very soon), and headphones would constitute competition. My whole audio journey is my wife's fault; when I turned 35 she got me a pressing of the Labyrinth soundtrack. I did not have a turntable.

So, I went on a long and expensive journey. Bought new, bought vintage, learned how to repair vintage, learned how to solder, learned how to mod, then when the pandemic hit I was suddenly sharing a home office with her, so blasting through my ADS L1290s was not an option.

Headphones became the thing. Again, went vintage, went new, studied, modded, spent, traded, sold... at some point I decided to get a 3D printer and try to make my own with some Aliexpress drivers. The experiment went reasonably well, and I learned a TON from that first design. Threw myself into learning, testing, cursing, learning some more, testing some more, cursing some more, etc. Taught myself how to do 3D modeling with Fusion360, learned 3D printing, learned how to print with resin, fought with resin, finally dialed in my favorite resin with proper settings, and set about starting a business.

Right now, it's a pre-launch side project that I'm hoping to expand over time. I took some inspiration from John Masseria over on Head-Fi and his use of stacked fiberglass mesh between the driver and the ear, and created what I'm calling the "Lithium Tuning System," basically a complex 3D-printed geometric stack of concentric shapes that blows soundstage out the rear.

I'm planning on getting my site live and taking orders this week. I'm also sending out a batch of test units to folks who signed up mostly from the headphones.com forum to hopefully get some feedback on what people like and don't like.

My setup is as follows:

MAIN SPEAKER SETUP:
Luxman R-117
Luxman TP-117
Sony PS-X600
KEF 103.2

SPEAKERS BEING WOEFULLY UNDERUTILIZED BY MY TV:
ADS L1290

OTHER TURNTABLES I ROTATE IN AND OUT:
Thorens TD-125 MkII
Dual 1019

MAIN HEADPHONES SETUP:
Ampsandsound Mogwai SE
Bottlehead Crack w/Speedball
Burson Timekeeper 3ir
Woo Audio WEE (I know, I know)

BEDSIDE SETUP:
Burson Conductor 3XP
Quicksilver Headphone Amp

HEADPHONES:
ZMF Auteur
ZMF Verite Closed
ZMF Auteur
Focal Clear OG
Hifiman Susvara
Hifiman HE6SEv2
Kennerton Rognir
Sennheiser HD8XX
AKG K240 Sextett LP
Stax SR-L700 Mk2

(Honestly, I started making my own to pay for the stuff I've bought)

Nice to meet y'all, looking forward to participating.

 

Hi I am Ahmed, Glad to join this community

 

Hi, my name's Vince. I have lurked for a long time and tried creating a profile twice but got stuck in the confirmation email verification process and gave up twice. This time I had help, thanks CEE TEE. Anyway, I live in the Bay Area and have been in the hobby since around 2014 though I've been involved in car audio since I've been a kid thanks to my Dad. Nice to meet you all.

 

Hello, I'm a long lurking rando whose initial introduction from a few years ago disappeared. So to be safe I'm posting another on the off chance I delurk. Combing the posts here has been helpful on my journey from clueless new audio nerd in 2016 who barely managed to cobble together a stock Bottlehead Crack, to my set up today.

 

You deserve a like for that vintage AKG K240 Sextett LP alone. When fanboys on HF used to bicker Grado or Sennheiser, or F.O.T.M.B.S. I would put on my AKG K240 DF and just let the world be.

AKG madness brought some sweet sound to this world. If you can find a mint K500/K501, add some K601 ear pads and enjoy. AKG was ahead of the curve.

 

I've been reading SBAF content for quite a few years now to the point where a personality can be associated with an avatar. I have many of you to blame for my current headphone rig, LOL: a HD600 driven by an SPL Phonitor e. It's giving me a lot of joy at the moment.

I'm joining for the selfish reason of seeking advice, which I'll circle around to at some point. I'm afraid I don't have much useful to offer in return, but at least I can continue to read, listen, learn and laugh.

Cheers!

 

Hi, I'm Paul! (hoping someone got that reference).

Anyway, I'm not super active in the audiophile community, mostly just browse forums and do a lot of buying/selling on them.
Have gone through tons of equipment over the years, just counted close to 200 unique iems and headphones, oof.

Glad to join the sbaf community though!

 

This is looking like good advice ZD. The more I research standmount speakers the more I make my own head spin!

The Devil versus Skippy, go to 1:46

 

We all start here. Add a Koss PortaPro for your own sanity.

Take it easy and if you can, go to some audio meets.

 

Ooops I forgot to do the introduction and I've been here for years. Sorry. I'm Dave and been into audio and sound since my teens. And a bit of a headphone fanatic since I bought a Yamaha HP-1 when I discovered I cared about sound, around the same time.

I've been around the block but I'm still here to learn.

 

Hello everyone,

I’ve been lurking here on and off for a year or two and finally decided to join and attempt to participate. As you can probably guess from my handle I’m an engineer who does “cloud stuff” which means I spend most of the day at my desk, and on a good day (no meetings) have a set of headphones on. For a long time that was just a pair of akg k7xx’s plugged in to an O2 until the headband broke and I ended up falling into the rabbit hole looking for a replacement. That ended up leading me to the Elex and an Asgard + modi multibit and then a ton of other gear (mostly headphones).

Because of my professional background I’m inherently skeptical of some audiophile claims (for instance, I’ll never be able to believe there’s a difference between 2 ethernet cables that both meet spec) but I’m also open to the idea that some things I initially didn’t believe could matter may have some impact (for example there USB implementations, especially after realizing how electrically noisy some USB ports and hubs are).

Finally, I’ve also started toying around with the idea of creating some FOSS audio player software for the mac after being frustrated at the apparent lack of good open source options. That’s a free-time project that may or may not come to anything given how limited I am on that particular resource between job/wife/young children, but I hope it will be possible to get some feedback on those efforts if/when I get something that’s releasable (if that’s not permitted I completely understand and won’t clutter the forum).

 

Hello Hello!

I've come here after primarily spending the better part of two years in the audio-focused channel of a tech discord server. I'm seeking a community where I can relax, talk more about gear and get advice, coming from one where I handed out basic advice to people without much knowledge. I'm a bit green when it comes to both audio and this forum- I only started to get into the audio hobby about three years ago, and while I've seen these forums before, I've only taken a look beyond the surface level in the past few weeks. Regardless, I'm here to listen, learn, chat about whatever tickles my fancy, and have a little fun

Preferences/about:

I'm not a super discerning listener. I listen to jam out typically, and I don't critically listen much. My gear is definitely on the inexpensive side of things.

I like my bass. For headphones and iems, I prefer a slightly less extreme version of their respective Harman targets (reductions in both bass and treble energy), and for speakers, I prefer a boost in the bass under 150hz or so (rolling up perhaps 6, 8dB), and a slight reduction in energy around 2k, all else roughly neutral. I listen to my speakers in the nearfield (around 80dB, mid-80 dB peaks @0.5m), and my headphones, a little louder than that If I'm really jamming out. I prefer my speakers out of all my devices, just for their sense of scale and for being able to feel bass hits in my chest.

Main Gear and my thoughts for reference:
-Hifiman Ananda (non-stealth) headphones: Sounds quite neutral to me, a little bass shy so I like to use eq for it. I generally like a more exciting showing.
- Truthear zero iems: Closely tuned to the Harman iem target, this definitely has a lot more kick. Too spicy in the upper mids and treble for me, still enjoy it.
- JBL studio 530 speakers: I like it. It's Upper-treble shy, don't particularly mind that, can't say much else as my room is untreated, haven't measured/corrected them, my placement isn't great, etc.
-RSL speedwoofer 10s mkii sub: I like it. Can't say much else (see above).
-Ifi zendac: Sounds fine to me, developed several minor issues in the two years that I've had it. I lack points of comparison for dacs, not much else to say.
-BasX a2 poweramp: Plenty of power, lack points of comparison and I don't believe much in amps significantly changing the sound of my speakers (Notice: My). Sounds fine.

Gear that I have owned:
-Akg k361 headphone: Roughly Harman-tuned, I find it a little too spicy as well. A little funky, don't particularly enjoy it.
Sennheiser hd560s: Pretty neutral, I enjoyed it.
Moondrop chu iem: Bass shy, a little too spicy in the treble for me. Thought It was pretty okay.
-Topping pa5 integrated amp: Sounded fine to me.
-Sabaj a10a integrated amp: Sounded fine to me.
-2022 corsair hs80 headset: Quite dark. Not terrible.
-Roccat syn pro air headset: Roughly neutral for the most part. Not bad.

 

Hello SBAF,

I'm excited to be a new Rando but perhaps to graduate at some point.

Current gear -
Sources: LIM Yggdrasil, Bifrost 2
Amps: Euforia, Soloist, Crack + Speedball
Headphones: Utopia, LCD-X, Atticus, 6xx, 600

I have access to EQ but choose not to use it.

I'm in the process of climbing the mountain and figuring out what I really like.
I'm thinking of getting a SET amp and upgrading my 600 to the JAR 600.

Thank you for all your contributions.