Back before companies started making purpose-built DJ headphones, these were the most commonly used headphones for the job. And they were...okay. So I've got a soft spot in my heart for them, because they were what I had when I was learning.
But my nostalgia isn't remotely strong enough to get...
DACs shouldn't have a "sound signature." What you really (should) want to know about a DAC is how much it alters the sound (less is better), and how much that level of proficiency costs (again, less is better). These are questions much better answered with numbers than words.
Personally, I...
The new Aeon RT/Asgard combo is a heckuva deal. Neither of these products is what I'm looking for. But if this had been around a few years ago, when I was just starting to get serious about headphones, this would definitely have been a good way to go.
I'm very happy with the M11S. I wanted a Roon Ready DAP, and it's by far the best value among that group. I don't know how it stacks up against other pure DAPs for value, but FiiO generally gets good marks for bang-for-the-buck.
It wasn't long ago at all that IEMs approximating one of the target curves were rare as hen's teeth. And expensive.
Moondrop, more than any other manufacturer, helped to change that situation. I was frankly surprised that their first couple headphone offerings were not similarly disruptive to...
I don't see how that can be true. Can you have a wide-open sound stage if the instruments all collide with each other? I think this is more a question of the "air" that people attribute to R2R DACS; it's like the soundstage you get when you put a shell to your ear at the beach.
The recent DACs that have the 9038 Pro chip going to new heights of transparency are apparently doing so by using all of the eight cores in parallel and summing at the end. This is just doing the same with eight mono chips.
I went the luxury route and got a Raspberry Pi 4 with a nice case so I could just go with WiFi. I use RopieeeXL on that, and run it out to an SMSL 500 (again, I went luxury). So, the endpoint in total was, like, $475? I guess if you think of the Rpi as the endpoint, it was about $50--again...
I gotta give Topping credit: they definitely are not afraid to cannibalize the sales of their higher-end models. Here they've got a $99 desktop box that runs off bus power and manages to put out distortion and noise levels that most manufacturers aren't matching at any price. And although...
Yeah, all modern digital is up to the task. But digital used to be just 8-bit, and I wanted to be sure we weren't implying that digital is inherently capable of transparency.
Yes, but it's so much easier to do that kind of task in the digital domain that a lot of restorers would choose digital even if the output weren't superior.