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I have often wondered if some variations in individual preferences for frequency responses are related to different people preferring to listen at different volumes. In those scenarios, Fletcher-Munson curves/equal loudness contour kicks in. But I would still prefer to know the frequency responses of most headphones so I can figure out what frequency response curves I enjoy. That way, I don’t have to try all the headphones that deviate too far from my preferences. While I 100% agree with the article, I have often seen people use the arguments in the article to say that speakers in-room measurements (or even room acoustics) don’t matter. I think since most headphones have smooth bass response and most rooms don’t, that is a perspective I can’t buy into. Unfortunately, we don’t know what we don’t know. So once again, if people don’t measure their rooms, they don’t really know what they’re hearing.

I have to admit, I was super confused by this thread because I stopped upgrading JRiver a long time ago but I still recommend a lot of people to use it. First, I realized this issue/announcement started in May 2023. Second, I didn’t understand not being able to acces JRiver server means so I ended up looking it up first. Free JRiver Server Access Has Ended For Older Versions If you're using JRiver Media Center 27 or older, the player will no longer be able to access some online services provided by JRiver. Core functionality will work, but cover art and CD lookup will fail. These servers are expensive to run and so we will provide them for free only for recent versions of MC (28 to 31 at this time). So I guess if you haven’t upgraded since 2019, you won’t get the CD data when you rip a CD. That sucks. I think the free exact audio copy gives you the CD data but I can’t remember where the data comes from. But if you’re spending $15 to buy a CD and can’t afford to pay JRiver $30, you have the option to manually enter the CD data and manually download the album art for that CD. But are there other functionalities that people are missing from not being able to access the JRiver Server? Also, what would be a payment alternative that people would accept? Let’s say JRiver knew that running these server for some services would always have an additional cost. And customers expect to have indefinite access to these features once they buy the software. Should they charge $30 for the software and then an annual fee of $2/year for access to the JRiver server? So that people like @Audiophile Neuroscience can know upfront what features would be indefinite supported and what features actually has annual costs? What exactly is the time limit for cutting off the software support here if there is no subscription model for this server access? Sure, 5 years seems short. But some people would say 10 years, some would say 30 years. Think of people you helped with 5 or 10 years ago. If they come back to you and expect free assistance, do you think it’s fair?

I wonder if someone can just do a screen cap for @woshifeng3627 to show how to set these settings. I don't own HQPlayer so I can't help. But I do help others locally to setup their streaming or digital audio settings and sometimes these settings are confusing. To make matters more challenging, some of my friends are also primarily Chinese speaking so I find doing screen cap (or taking a photo of the screen and maybe circling with your Apple Pencil) to indicate where to click would just make life a lot easier for everybody involved? As to his other questions, even without using HQPlayer, I think I can venture an answer: 1) 20kHz filter is to filter out the >20kHz sound/noise. Some people feel that filtering out the higher frequency sound would prevent the >20kHz noise from getting into the DAC and give better sound. Others feel that there is audio content that is important in the >20kHz so it is better to keep the >20kHz sound. I presume this mostly applies to music that are >48kHz so usually 96kHz or above 2) Adaptive gain is to make all the music tracks play at approximately the same volume level, instead of letting the loudness of each track fluctuate based on how the tracks were originally recorded. Another way to think about it is that without adaptive gain, the tracks are played "bit-perfect" albeit with your upsampling/noise shaping selected whereas with adaptive gain turned on, you are also adjusting the volume.

I don’t use Spotify but are you using the HeOS app or the Spotify app running Spotify Connect into HeOS for this? my friends keep telling me the Spotify app is very good. But I guess yeah a big tv looks nicer.

It is possible that A95 output always converts to 48kHz while Apple TV is sending 44.1kHz to your Denon. not sure how you can verify if that’s what’s happening.

My personal philosophy about room treatment is this. I think in the decades before, most audiophiles and dealers tweak their stereo sound by pure trial and error. Change the solid state amp to tube amp, change the cables, move the speakers a bit and hear the difference. And basically, we tweak until we like what we hear. As a result, it is not uncommon to see bass traps being sold at local stereo stores. The dealer recommends whatever product they have in stock, let you demo them at home, if you like them, you can purchase them. The problem with that approach is that in any room if you put any large (or even small) objects in the room, you're going to inevitably change the room acoustic. So we will always hear a change in the sound but it is not a guarantee that the sound would improve for the better. Sometimes a change is just a change, it could be an improvement in one frequency range but leading to sacrifices or complications or compromises in other frequency ranges. Now that microphones are relatively cheap and computer modelling of rooms is more feasible by bigger companies, I personally think that room acoustic treatment should always be dictated by either measurements, or room simulations. And the choice of traps and panels for room acoustic treatment should also be dictated by these physical parameters, whether you are doing it DIY like @botrytis or asking a company to analyze things for you. Going back to @davide256's questions: 1) I think thin acoustic padding dampening panels might look nice but in general, their ability to absorb midrange frequencies is not great because they're too thin so you may end up with absorption of only the highest frequencies so the midrange frequencies would still keep reverbing around the room, causing trouble 2) I also think that it is rare that a tube trap outperforms other types of bass traps in terms of performance for space. So unless you have a specific aesthetic or physics-based reason to get tube traps, you probably shouldn't be buying tube traps. I think that's why most people here, like @firedog, is recommending a consultation with GIK or Vicoustic so that you have a sense of how to optimally treat the room within your budget.

I didn’t ask for recommendations from GIK or Vicoustic because I know whatever they recommend I won’t do since I didn’t want to plaster my living room with panels and bass traps. But the problem then is that I ended up doing lots of measurements with REW not just in the primary listening position but also at every position that I might want to put a bass trap or panel on to see what type of panel I need. Because say buying a 2” bass trap to address say a 100Hz peak is just not going to do much. Based on the measurements I put the appropriate bass trap or panel at the location of my choice. While the sound is definitely better, the limited number of panels limit the total impact of the treatment at the listening position. Moreover, sometimes a panel at a corner might absorb a bass peak but it might also absorb another frequency that was cancelling a peak at your listening position. So sometimes I’ll see one bass peak go down but another frequency go up slightly. It didn’t matter to me that much because either way I knew I was going to add DSP/EQ on top of the room treatment. It worked out great for me but it’s definitely not for most people. So yeah, I would echo everybody else that if you’re willing to pay and treat the entire room, just consult GIK or Vicoustic. I would even say don’t buy those Amazon acoustic panels as there is a very high probability that you might need to replace them with better GIK/Vicoustic panels. Vicoustic products look nicer but GIK products are quite a lot cheaper. Otherwise, bass traps and acoustic panels work based on physics so they all work the same if they’re designed the same.

I am not an expert on Schiit product line. When I look at the website, Modi has no headphone jack so it doesn’t have an amp. And I didn’t see an option to add a headphone jack/amp. Magni+ on the other hand is amp only with no options to add a DAC. Magni has the option to add a DAC. ALC4080 is not just a DAC. It’s actually a DAC with a low powered amp to feed your headphones. So to replace the ALC4080 you need a DAC and amp. @PeterG’s suggestion of the Audioquest Dragonfly is another good one because they’re DAC+amp. Getting into the weeds, some DACs have enough power that they can directly drive headphones as if they have an amp built inside. That’s probably where you’re getting conflicting info. But hey, if someone told you Schiit Modi can drive your Aria, go for it. If it works, let us know. If it doesn’t work, get your refund from the person who gave the advice.

So the reason I agree with @The Computer Audiophile’s reservations is that @Gamboge is using IEMs. I used to have more wired IEMs and I’ve driven them from my desktop or laptop or iPhone or iPad built in DACs and compared them to my Chord Mojo. Depending on the IEM and how easy or hard it is to drive, I have to admit, the amp portion of Chord isn’t really doing much so you’re essentially just hearing the DAC section and while I can hear an improvement, it is definitely not as dramatic an improvement I get from listening through full sized headphones which require more power to drive. So given the price range @Gamboge is thinking of, I would have some reservations to strongly recommend buying blind.

Schiit Modi has no amp or volume control so you won’t be able to connect your IEM to it. To replace ALC4080, you need a DAC and an amp. ALC4080 is actually DAC+amp. I think @bogi has some great suggestions of products in your price range. And yes, I think you’re hearing from all of us that the only way is to try a DAC+amp product and see if it sounds better to you compared to the ALC4080. It probably will. Personally, I suspect I have 70-80% confidence that an external DAC+amp would sound better to you with your Aria IEMs.

I realized @Gamboge might think the question is simple but it’s actually quite complicated. First, Magni+ is not an external DAC. It is a headphone preamp/amp. I’m not familiar with the Schiit line of products. But I think you can buy the regular Magni and then add an internal DAC but that is over double the price of the Magni+ If you’re using the motherboard ALC4080 to drive your Aria IEMs, when you connect the Magni+ to the ALC4080, you will get more power to your IEM. The issues though can be that there is too much power and you might get noise to the IEM through the amp or that the impedance matching of the IEM is better with ALC4080 instead of with the Magni+. Or even if the impedance matching is better with Magni+ than ALC4080, you might simply prefer the frequency response of the ALC4080 with Aria IEMs. This is why @The Computer Audiophile says that you need to try the product to know whether your Aria IEMs sound better with the product. There is science behind audio but you can’t guess based on the science whether you’re going to like the product. Similarly, in theory, if you’re spending money on a well-built DAC+amp product from Schiit that costs significantly more than ALC4080 (which is probably a <$10 part and possibly a <$1 part), you would expect the spec and power output to be better with the Schiit than the ALC4080. But once again, whether you like the sound when paired with the Aria IEMs is less predictable.

Whether you need more power to drive the new speakers also depends on how big your room is and how loud you play your music. I would say definitely hook up the system first and see how it works out. Don’t randomly buy something before you’ve tried the speakers with the Yamaha as it’ll give you a sense of what you might need. if you are to upgrade, it’s probably best to get a new receiver with more power mostly because the Yamaha is a bit on the older end and digital technology has changed a lot in the past 7 years. A newer Denon or Marantz receiver is going to have much better digital room correction capabilities so you’ll get better sound out of your speakers and subwoofer.

Wow... Super excited for @The Computer Audiophile. Getting perfectly coherent surround speakers definitely improves the sound based on my experience with various friends and dealers. That said, I don't know what happens when you are already running really well-designed convolution filters although I can tell you my old speakers don't sound like my current ones with convolution filters. I wonder if @mitchco might have some suggestions in terms of optimal placement for two Submerge at your place. Although they might not be the most aesthetically pleasing place for you, but I'm sure you'll get a sonically satisfying experience.

Getting into the weeds, I think there are many reasons why setting a higher crossover at 60Hz would sound better (so options #2/4). 1) I think in @cjf's specific scenario, there is an actual trough at around 70Hz and likely at some other frequencies below 70Hz too because if you look at most Magico speaker measurements (anechoic and in-room), the speakers themselves usually have a higher output at a much lower frequency even if the speakers in an anechoic chamber tend to have a more precipitous drop in volume at 40Hz due to the sealed design. Regardless, this is more of a room acoustic/seating position placement/speaker placement issue. So the subwoofers can compensate to a certain extent. 2) Even if the woofers can produce 20Hz-40Hz sound, I generally find the sound to be "less clean" compared to the 20-40Hz sound huge subwoofers can produce. 3) But more importantly, I think if you crossover the woofers at 60Hz, the speakers bass from 60-200Hz would generally be cleaner because the woofers no longer has to produce 20-60Hz sound and I find the distortion of the 60-200Hz sound to be lower. In fact, I sometimes for fun would add in Roon a 20Hz or 24Hz high-pass filter to my music just to hear how much cleaner the woofers would sound if I were to cross them over. Of course, these filters would remove the ultra-low frequency signal that gives the overall sense of ambience. I personally think that everyone should try this to understand the distortion levels of their main speaker woofers. 4) I have a friend who finds that he enjoys crossing over his Wilson Sophia 3 and now Sasha DAW at 40Hz. I suspect the reason is that Wilson speakers are ported and the ported bass starts to dominant starting around 40Hz and my friend just prefers the non-ported bass sound rather than the ported sound as he definitely does not have any major dips between 20-100Hz on his measurements. So now he gets the non-ported sound from 40-100Hz from his Sasha DAW and 20-40Hz bass from his sealed subwoofers. I think this is why I find the topic so interesting. Especially when I see so many proponents of option #3 out there online. And when people disagree, they would usually say option #2 is always the best. But it often feels like nobody is really discussing the nuances of all the different options and the pros and cons.

Yes. I'm referring to the fact that some people don't like using digital crossover. Or can't. For example, Chris doesn't have two dCS Rossini and I don't have two Chord DAVE and we probably really like the sound of our preferred DACs. So it is not possible to do digital crossover for the speakers and subwoofer if we want to use our preferred DAC. I guess technically we can use a cheaper DAC for the subwoofer and digitally crossover to our preferred DAC for the mains. Regardless, I'm of the philosophy that audio systems is like life. We are always making compromises whether we acknowledge it or not.