snamreton

Joelha, I have the same experience. Probably due to bad and mostly overcompressed mixes. Squarebab has a point that a lot of modern music suffers from "the loudness war" and the fact that it is mixed and mastered for mediocre soundsystems. I recall watching a tutorial from IK Multimedia's plugin suite called T-Racks. Part of the software package is a Clipper which they used to make a recording even louder although it was already maxed out to 0 dB. Clipper as in deliberately clipping the audio. What about that? I seldom can listen to mainstream popmusic on my main rig. Quality is just not good enough for a revealing and unforgiving system. Greetings, Huub

Hi Germanboxers, "Is it possible that the neutrality and transparency of your ULN-2 has exposed a low level irritation (to your ears) somewhere else in the chain?" .. very interesting remark... Now, after opening this thread I have done some listening again. My wife and son were on-the-road and my daughter was studying upstairs. It was nice and quiet in the room and I really enjoyed the performances. Could it be that my wife and kids are the "low level irritation" you mention? Mmmmm.... maybe so. Come to think of it.... with my current setup soundstage is bigger, dynamics much greater and I play louder because the sound is totally non-fatigueing. But I can't stand any other sounds around me during listening. How is it that I seem to be more sensitive to this now? Do you guy's have similar experiences? Thanks, Huub

"My current DAC has discrete A-class pre-amplification, and is fully balanced. Dynamics are excellent, music is much more enjoiable." hi Matias, Which DAC are you enjoying so much? Thanks, Huub

Guys, thanks for your comments. Jud: I follow you.... being a musician I love "neutrality" where it means experiencing the music as being there live. My system is quite revealling and projects the sound into the room nicely. But.... it is totally different from what one hears/feels playing in a band. In my opinion no system can duplicate that feeling. What it can do (in my opinion) is to come as close to what you experience in front of a stage during a live concert as possible. That's what I am after. Barry: I already tried several character settings and it works better on lesser recordings, true. So I will keep doing that and also make some playlists in Amarra where I can than put the appropriate character setting in the playlist name. This would be an acceptable solution for the time being. Thanks. Greetings to both of you, Huub Oh yeah...... I am thinking of getting one of those nice OWC external enclosures and then replace the generic USB cable with an Audioquest cable. Should get me a bit more in the right direction too.....?

Hi Julf, Thanks for your input. Yeah, absolute neutrality is no goal I am after. Nice, when the recordings and the musician's both are superb but how often is that the case?

hi everybody, This would be my first contribution to the forum. Several month's ago I got a tip from a vinyl loving audiophile, who was also into computeraudio, that to his taste several high resolution studio master files he got were even better sounding than on vinyl. This drew my attention and we agreed to bring him a visit. He played FLAC's from a Windows notebook to his USB DAC. I was impressed. Now, I am a guitarplayer and already owned a small homestudio with Mac Pro and Metric Halo ULN-2 and 2882 firewire audio interfaces. At that time the front end of my hifi set was a modified Lindemann CD-1 cd-player which I liked very much although it seemed to lack some bass in my set. PRAT and placing of voices and solo instruments however was superb. Oke...... not long after my visit to this friend I brought my MacPro and Metric Halo ULN-2 to my livingroom and replaced the Lindemann cd-player by them. Wow, I was even more impressed. That same day I put the Lindemann player up for sale on Ebay. I was convinced that computeraudio was the way to go (for me). Now about the forum topic. Although I still like good recordings on my set (even some 16/44.1 flac's), I often find music sounding a bit too "technical". In a lot of my files I miss a certain "fun factor". I almost assume that it could be possible that my Metric Halo audiointerface is responsible for this impression. Mind you, a superb interface for recording ! But here the intention is to be as faithfull to the source as possible, isn't it? Question: has anyone of you fine people ever compared such a professional (recording) interface to any of the hifi-DAC's that are available nowedays?? I was thinking of trying a Lindemann Dac 24/192 with dedicated powersupply. I look forward to your recommendations. Greetings, Huub