GUTB

Well, it's sad that technology is taking a step back, but ultimately as an audiophile it's acceptable as long as I can get access to the hi-res versions of the huge amount of MQA albums. Will Tidal's new owners be dumping hi-res altogether? Will the labels at least sell their existing MQA libraries via other channels? If Tidal no longer offers hi-res then I'll have to bid them farewell. Thankfully I didn't heavily use Tidal's playlists and I feel sorry for those who curated large MQA playlists. If Tidal can offer all (or most) of the titles in hi-res than I'll stay. But, the main value of the technology to the industry was to deliver hi-res quality in a much lower bandwidth package; if Tidal Master was not financially viable I don't know how delivering FLACs at much higher bandwidth would make sense financially. This is a definite area of concern. The vast majority of modern music is hyper-boosted, compressed garbage anyway regardless of MQA or being hi-res so I shouldn't go off the deep-end here. But still, there were plenty of quality albums being produced NOT from audiophile labels. Even if 96kHz master copies aren't that much better vs 44.1, as audiophiles that small improvement is still desirable.

I've had great results from the Paul Pang v3, a basic USB controller with a fat custom OCXO plugged in. It can take external power and I have used it with a large 60000mAh USB battery pack for years now which provided the best quality audio. Checking on PP's website it doesn't look like he's selling USB cards any longer.

I hadn't heard. Certainly interesting I'll be sure to follow developments on that. I'd definitely be interested in testing MQA vs lossless hi-res directly from Tidal.

I don't think anyone can tell the difference between bitrate; the important part is frequency bandwidth. But, if anyone CAN differentiate between 16 and 24 bit I'd be definitely interested in hearing about it.

ASR is as far away from science as I am from the Moon. Also, it appears that MQA is here to stay. I don't know how Tidal's finances work but they've survived all these years so far. It's become easy to find audiophile albums encoded in MQA. All the big Chinese manufacturers support MQA now. Many of the big Western names -- maybe around half? -- also supports MQA. The biggest DS chip manufacturer, ESS, also have products with MQA built in (ie, 9068, 9280). A big part of MQA's success has to be the Tidal and major publisher deals along with those automated MQA encoding tools. I read that the newer tools utilize AI for automatic encoding.

Very interesting fully balanced unit. For "only" 4k Euros actually not bad for German hi-fi. I sent them an email.

Consider balanced isolation transformers from AliExpress. A few hundred for a 500VA unit, double for a 1000VA and goes up from there. Euro models seem to be cheaper for some reason. I have two, one for my headphone setup here at the PC and another for my listening room (DAC and preamp). They don't have any surge protection feature but in theory you could plug one into a cheapo surge protector and the isolation transformer will keep most of the noise junk away. These DO add a nominal amount of noise to the output but I've found the benefit clearly outweighs this cost.

I should have mentioned I have one already. A Freya though, second-handed. I've been curious to try the +. Maybe I'll pick one up, Schiit is low-risk thanks to the return policy.

Does anyone know of a fully tubed preamp (tube rectifier is optional) which is also fully balanced? Meaning a discrete line amp on all four phases, NOT simply a stereo signal going through a transformer into balanced signals? Finding non-tubed fully balanced products is easy but I'm struggling to identify tubed systems with such technology.

This could very well be the case. In my testing of CD vs MQA-CD (which, on top of being MQA, utilizes UHQCD tech) I found the quality to be a step down from streaming MQA.

I can recommend Audio Sensibility. More reasonably-priced OCC copper cables with dampening, quality connectors, Teflon and advanced geometry. I own a pair of Testaments and are a clear sonic upgrade compared to basic speaker cables. I also tried Blue Jeans cables and the Testaments CRUSHED it. Very audible difference. I was actually surprised that the difference would be that severe. Yes the Blue Jeans' got plenty of burn-in. After putting them to service for PC audio I've compared them a few times since -- just to make sure the improvement wasn't just faulty memory.

Actually I double-checked and yes the R26 uses discrete output circuits. I seemed to have confused it with the X16 which does use a hybrid output.

Has anyone actually compared OSs for sound quality? I vaguely remember something from that giant audio server thread who found Windows best (or no different)? I can't imagine putting myself through the torture of once again messing around with Linux. Meanwhile my Windows 10 + Fidelizer Pro has been close to flawless in terms of ease of use and reliability.

I learned about these topics over the years from various high-quality sources (including Mishka and others on this forum). LPF (Low Pass Filter) may be done by a discrete circuit, but the signal amping is (probably, see: "hybrid") done with opamps. Why do they use opamps when discrete sounds better? In my opinion it's because these companies don't want to spend the engineering budget to put together a high-quality amp circuit. Additionally, companies who serve the budget end of the hobby / lifestyle know their customers aren't audiophiles to begin with and like to consume marketing based on measurements. A good opamp should measure better than a discrete circuit.

My first experience with a Holo DAC was several years ago with the Cyan DSD. I found it to be flat and lifeless. I was excited to try out this DSD-only ladder DAC and ended up in disappointment. And yes I gave it a lot of burn-in. So, the question is -- has Holo improved over the years of putting out more and more expensive products? My main concern is dynamic performance. Holo seems to have improved on digital circuits, but...what about the analogue circuits?