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How suitable would this be for Sennheiser HD600s? I have an RME Adi-2 which sounds great with these headphones but a second headphone amp/dac could come in handy.

Just had a listen to that track on Tidal. 22khz AAC, and it sounds fantastic! Really goes to show that production is far, far more important than high bitrates.

Does anybody else think Fast Car by Tracy Chapman is lacking in bass, thin sounding and with a glare to the mix that sounds unpleasant? I’m confused as to it’s inclusion as a test track. The other tracks make a lot more sense to me. Maybe there’s more than one master floating around?

March Audio p252 amp, RME ADI-2 dac, Topping d50, Topping d50s. this site has been amazing.

And I am a big fan of Tool. Epic concert in Auckland last Friday. :p

The problem is not with compression in mastering, it's that the loudness wars took that idea well and truly past the point of improving the sound and into degrading it instead.

Yes. Attenuators are cheap and unlike potentiometers shouldn't degrade the sound quality. This also has the advantage of maximising your SNR, as analog attenuation will reduce both the signal and the noise from the dac, whereas adjusting the volume digitally will reduce the signal but the noise...

Even with my own limited understanding of sampling thereom, I can see within the first few pages that the authors do not understand the basic tenets.

All of that may very well be true. And at the same time, completely irrelevant to an audience that is primarily concerned with the technical requirements for optimal audio reproduction. Now, if the “gimmicks” were a part and parcel of a bigger picture that included more care taken to provide...

Amir, with respect, isn’t this just proving the futility of higher than 96khz sampling rates? The “scam” is indicating to the consumer that there is anything different or better in the higher rate - whether that’s in a wasteful PCM encode at 192khz, or MQA saying that it is delivering a 192khz...

This guy is either a troll or just so far gone with his own subjectivist beliefs that he won’t consider anything that even slightly counters his views. The cognitive dissonance is too much for him to bear. Given the tone perhaps our admins would consider showing him the door?

Ok, that makes more sense now, in the context of headphones at least. In terms of DAC use, if you had a very high gain amp, such that a lot of digital attenuation was necessary, I would have thought some simple XLR attenuators on the output could resolve that issue. But given it's already in the...

Thanks for your reply. Well actually all digital volume control will introduce some noise because of quantization. I was just ruling that out as insignificant due to internal processing algorithms. Your answer seems to be focused in terms of absolute terms. But what seems to me is that you...

I'd be interested to know the SINAD over the aptX HD and LDAC bluetooth connections. Many times devices that have bluetooth have a significant hit on the bluetooth. So is this a real hifi input or is it just another cheap addon?

I was just thinking about the volume control function on my ADI-2 FS dac. It uses a combined analog/digital volume control, it switches between the analog steps and uses digital volume attenuation (the manual says using 48 bits) in between the steps in order to make the volume transitions...

No, just for it to sound "romantic". :D:D:D

I was just thinking laterally about the ways we could add some pleasurable distortion and remove some detail from the music :cool:

And even easier again to just stick some cotton wool in your ears. Job done.

There is nothing "ear bleeding" about an accurate dac. That is a complete myth. If that is what you are experiencing with a well-engineered dac, then it's something else in your playback chain going wrong. Here's an analogy for you. I like to make espresso coffee. If I get freshly roasted...

I call BS on this. I want cymbals to sound like cymbals. I want to hear the rich harmonics that a saxophone produces. Not distortion products tacked on. Distortion is not relaxing and it is not musical. They take something away from the music, not add something to it.