Sherwood

Many albums this evening, but I spent the most mental attention on J Dilla Donuts Possibly the most influential album since 2000 for the kind of music I'm guaranteed to enjoy.

I recently replaced my beloved HD800 with the Raal SR1a. Everything the HD800 did brilliantly, the Raal does better. It's tough to go try a pair, but for me nothing shy of the Raal seemed a worthwhile upgrade to the HD800 and I've tried most every TOTL headphone in the decade since I bought them.

One of the virtues of headphones, I'm often told, is that you can easily change one pair out for another for a different sound. Many enthusiasts have preferred headphones for different musical genres, or even different artists. At the low end of the price spectrum, that's a sensible viewpoint. No inexpensive headphone has it all, but some can do some things very well. That needn't be true of all headphones, though, and invariably the models that stand the test of time do so because they refuse to compromise on sound quality. That is where the Raal/Requisite SR1A shines. I don't want to give anything up in order to get great bass, holographic voices, huge soundstage, or tonal accuracy. The entire purpose of critical listening is to get as close as possible to the sound in the control room when the mastering engineer steps away from the console. For almost a decade I've relied on the Sennheiser HD800, Stax SR-009, and Focal Utopia to get as close as I could to the sound on the recording, warts and all. I've owned most of their competition, from Audeze LCD4 up to Abyss TC, and not found much that could better those three for accuracy. I love them, and long felt they were end game for me. No longer. Put simply, I don't see myself returning to any of them if I could listen to the Raal instead. There is nothing any of those headphones do this one does not do better. Years ago I owned and loved AKG's venerable K1000, but I was always frustrated by the tradeoff between sound stage and bass quantity. The SR1a, while superficially similar, makes a tremendous leap in sound quality by simply including a small pad running along the entire height of the driver and conforming to your face while listening. This pad helps stabilize the headphone when moving your head around, sure, but it serves a more important function. By essentially coupling the driver to your head it dramatically increases the apparent baffle size for the driver, providing you excellent bass that falls off far less when opening the "wings" of the headphone wider. The Jotunheim R amp also includes a "baffle compensation" switch, essentially a bass boost, for use when the drivers are extended further away from the face. This is a nice feature but I'd rather do it in software, where possible. The the subjective part, how do they sound, how do they feel, how do they look? They sound unbelievable. An evolutionary leap from anything else I've heard. Obviously you're still playing the same music, but these headphones have an uncanny ability to put each song in its own world. By imparting so very little of their own character, they let each album and track speak for itself, just as it was recorded to do. Each voice and instrument is detailed beyond any other reference point I could name. Listening to headphones is always a very out-of-body experience, with voices appearing as if inside your mind rather than on a conventional "soundstage", but the SR1a brings you several steps closer. Live recordings have identiable height and depth, and studio recordings are immersive in the same kind of way binaural recordings are, with you turning your head at every noise and doubting whether that barking dog is in the song or across the street. It is a near-perfect facsimile of real life, and closer than any other headphone ever made. As to feel, it's stellar. They're extremely finnicky to adjust, and I would not be surprised if an eventual V2 of these headphones dispenses with the "handmade belt" height adjustment method they currently rely on, but the frame is extremely light for how bulletproof it feels and the materials are extremely luxurious. Everything that touches your head is beautifully finished leather, and the rest of it is either flawless stainless steel, aluminum, or striking carbon fiber. The only plastic on the headphone itself is the open-cell foam inside the leather head pads, and it's the perfect tool for that job. The look is frankly ridiculous, and to anyone else in the room with you they sound as loud as a speakerphone conversation, but you're not wearing these things on the train. Raal has been a going concern manufacturing ribbon drivers and loudspeakers since 1995, and I'm confident this will only grow their acclaim. If you have any concerns about buying from a small manufacturer, don't. The Sr1a are bulletproof, you can buy any needed replacement parts directly from the (very responsive) company, and they sound so much better than their competition it's silly. This is the top of the mountain.

That's disappointing if true. Kitsune's site says the SU-1 can do DSD512, which was a deciding factor in my (inebriated) purchase.

Trying to get my Holo and SU-1 set up optimally. Sound great now, but I can only get DSD 256 out of them over i2s. I suspect this has a lot to do with DoP, but my HQPlayer settings don't include an option for "direct", just "DoP" or "none". When I choose "none" I get all my DSD material resampled to PCM. Any thoughts? Here's my settings window:

Pretty tough talk for a guy who introduced the car analogy into this conversation in the first place. Can we safely assume you recant that, now? It is clear to everyone here but you. You'd like to heap some scorn on a manufacturer making what you consider to be overpriced, underperforming, technically vague equipment. You view amplifiers as a point A to point B device. Other people shockingly don't, and aren't interested in belittling a manufacturer making a product we've not heard or bought because of its dollar to watt ratio.

I've obviously looked at the website, I linked you to it. My point, which you somehow missed, is that this company is producing a $150,000 sports car with terrible 0-60-0 performance, objectively speaking. You argued that this would be "more talked about", yet there are no criticisms.

Not true: https://flyermotorwerks.com/ff003/ This is a pretty universally beloved car. It's inefficient, impractical, and does not articulate any particular design goals aside from "looking good". Cars for 1/9th the price can undoubtedly best it in all technical aspects. Car guys, for the most part, seem to adore Chris Runge's handmade throwback cars. Audio guys (distinct from audiophiles) seem to hate pricey, bespoke audio equipment. I'm not certain where that disparity lies.

I came back to edit out the snark in my above post, but had passed the edit window. I regret it, @kilroy, my apologies.

There are threads you've commented on here at CA that make this claim. That's a report. There are plenty of others on HardOCP and similar sites to be found easily on google. I happily keep my music on an SSD, but the OP was not asking "what do you own in your system". He was asking about purchasing parts for an audio-specific PC, and I thought he might appreciate knowing that popular opinions differ on wrt storage drives. Also, if you're set on being pedantic, questions end with question marks.

Another idea, @Scottes, is to use a player that can process the signal to your liking then output that over the network to a small "endpoint" computer of your choosing. That endpoint has no real storage, little processing, and no function aside from playing music. It's a pretty attractive solution from a simplicity standpoint. The Sonore MicroRendu is designed to do exactly this, and it can be considered near top-of-the-line. A Sonore SonicOrbiter SE is a little cheaper, and a whole host of off-the-shelf micro computers (e.g. BeagleBone, Raspoberry Pi) are cheaper yet. The Sonore units have the virtue of being purpose-built and having support sommunities here already. The best way to do this would involve switching from MediaMonkey to a more focused player, like JRMC, Roon, or HQPlayer. Have a look at those and see if it's a bridge too far.

An SSD is perfect for running an operating system, but not necessary (and possibly detrimental) for music storage. You'll never be pulling data off those drives at any speed, and SSD drives reportedly underperform against many platter drives in terms of electrical noise. I can't speak to whether this has any sonic impact in even the most carefully constructed systems, but I think the jury is very much out on SSDs for playback.

Lots of good reasons for a graphics card, even in an HTPC. CUDA offload for HQP upsampling, resampling or supersampling video for smoother playback, 4k playback, etc.

You'll need fans, but you can get very quiet ones. The best fanless GPUs still pump heat into the case, and in a fanless case there's nothing to dissipate that heat effectively. You *could* also spring for some of streacom's DIY heat pipes, but it will take some copper bending, which sounds daunting to me. Better to go for fans. If you're buying a cuda chip because you need offloading, you should go for one that stands to make a difference over your CPU. That means you'll want a 10xx series card -- likely the 1060 or 1070. Palit makes a version of that card that doesn't even start the fan until the card gets over 50c, which sounds like a good way to go. See here: https://www.quietpc.com/pal-ne51070s15p2-1041j