Stereolab42

The best thing about being exclusively a headphone listener is that SET amps are viable and affordable for all of the best headphones, and for all types of music. (Rocking a Woo WA5 and Abyss headphones at the moment, with a number of different 300B pairs to switch between...) Of course, now your average person would say a $6k amp is pure insanity, but by the standards of traditional audiophiles, just peanuts.

From a comment: Whaaaaaaaaaaat? NOS cabling is a thing now? Good grief. I can understand NOS tubes because there are few competent modern makers of tubes, but... cables?

Best political idea I've heard all year. Let's also make the border fence out of expensive power cables; think of the electricity saved every time somebody gets electrocuted because of reduced transmission loss...

Both removed blog posts are still available on Google cache for the time being... I suggest anyone interested in them right-click and download to their local PC before the cache updates: Nordost and AXPONA Demo Questions | Real HD-Audio Nordost Demo Mysteries…Solved! Part II | Real HD-Audio Sad.

Yeah. I'm sure either company would be delighted by the opportunity to eat a guaranteed 15% loss on one or more open-box returns of expensive items to make a single sale.

If there's a more perfect example of why independent retailers are going out of business than this guy I don't know what it could be. Please do be aware, though, that once they're all gone and Amazon is the only option, you can indeed get banned by them for pulling the "order a bunch of expensive items and return all but one" trick. Then you'll have nowhere left to go.

No, but I'm sure you'll have a problem with abusing the return policy of one of these two independent retailers who are trying to survive against Amazon after I email them a link to this thread. Have a nice day...

There are some plugins which can half-ass dynamic range expansion: the music disease

Too bad the forum ignore function isn't smart enough to also hide posts that quote the ignored.

(Wisely resisting the temptation to make a religious joke about "poping audio"...)

Woo Audio WA-234 headphone amp: $16k Sophia Electric RP 300B pair: $1.2k NOS/NIB United Electric 596 rectifier pair plus adapters: $400 NOS/NIB Tung-Sol round-plate VT-231 pair: $1k Abyss AB-1266 open heaphones: $5k Audeze LCD-3F open headphones: $2k MrSpeakers ETHER open heaphones: $1.5k MrSpeakers ETHER-C closed heaphones: $1.5k Zu Audio Omen bookshelf speakers: $1.4k MSB Diamond DAC V: $35k PS Audio P10 Power Plant: $10k AudioQuest non-headphone cabling: $10k Norne Audio headphone cabling: $1k Fast gaming/audio PC hand-built by myself: $3k Misc (software, fuses, etc.): $2k Total: $91k

Isn't that what Lampizator does?

The FAQ claims that the ENOB ("effective number of bits", learned a new acronym today) for "32-bit DACs" is 19.5, yet here there is a claim it's actually 22.5 on the ESS Sabre: Schiit Yggdrasil Impressions thread - Page 53 Assuming that poster's method of deriving it from the datasheet SNR is accurate.

So for decades nobody else has thought of publishing or even implementing a sample-preserving/phase-shift-minimizing upsampling algorithm for PCM? Again, seems hard to believe. Is there nobody out there with the necessary knowledge willing to examine these claims critically?

Hmm. You'd think this would actually be easier to do mathematically -- that is, keep the original samples and just interpolate between them for the extra samples. So it is puzzling why "everybody" doesn't just do it that way. But I am undoubtedly vastly underestimating the difficulty of doing so... The other thing to address is that the Yggy, being a true ladder DAC, is advertised as only being able to express at most 21 bits of depth. I know the traditional defense for that is "you can't hear the lost bits anyways above the noise floor", but that is kind of a lame defense IMHO; it's exactly the argument that opponents of HiRes audio throw at it in the first place. I wonder if the best PDM DACs are equally unable to express the equivalent of that bit depth. If not, then the deficiency is shared, but if so, then that could be a point against the Yggy.