Blown away by Equalizer APO last night - what's next!

[Andro]

This just all sounds so exhausting. I wish you could just relax and enjoy music! You can endlessly chase that last .0000001% or just...be!

I've started building my first stereo in like 1985, and for the first 30 years I was enjoying just music, not its quality. But in the last 15 years or so I found that there is more music to hear when it's good. Few months ago just for fun I've tried my old Arcam amp that I bought for $800 in 1995, and it's kind of.... not enjoyable anymore.

 

[Verig]

And granted, I can accept that statistically the HD music is just mixed on more expensive equipment by more experienced engineers that don't bother of making CD tracks anymore, this could be true. But then it has to be over 90% statistical fidelity. Unfortunately I cannot give you a single CD track from this 836 collection where I can say I'm blown away by quality, none of them is perfect.

Sound engineering, mixing, mastering... are just jobs. Sometimes there's more artistic freedom, sometimes not. A better sounding master is not necessarily made by any more competent person and the equipment can be the same.

When it comes to HD it can't be "night and day" because of the format itself. You can try this. Record something let's say 24/96. Have a listen. Convert to 16/44.1. There you go.

 

[Gringoaudio1]

Please share how you are playing them. I'm still struggling with playback solutions. Ampcast and Spotify are working well and they sound great. WiiM is currently OOS on the eBay store but I'll order it when I see one. I have Foobar2000 but I can't configure it to my taste - it has infinite options and I'm sure it will do all that I want. But I don't have the time to set it up.

In any case, doing the remote desktop into the PC and finding and playing music with my laptop/tablet is NOT the best experience. To make matters worse, Windows kills the HDMI sound for some reason. Funny enough, it comes back after waiting for 5-15 minutes, or I have to walk over and disconnect the HDMI and reconnect it behind the PC. And that only works 3 times out of 5. Powering off the AVR and powering it on brings it back some times. Fiddly...

And then when I am watching TV (Vivo music channels) or a movie, the boom-iness comes back... Maybe I just need to turn the sub gain down for movies

I am using JRiver through Equalizer APO via USB out to a Topping D10 to the preamp. Or receiver depending on what I have set up any given month.