Quick questionare - I'm interested in what everyones setups/thoughts are on here.

[Derkoli]

I'm honestly really interested to see what the general thoughts of people on here are, I've seen a wide range of thoughts on alot of things, so I'm wondering what the general consensus is. Thankyou for answering/participating

[Cyberspirit]

1.  I use Spotify. It sounds good enough for me and the price is fair. Would love to have all my music locally but I'm not aware of a place where I could buy songs in high quality format.
2. Headphones all the way. I like to drown out the world when I listen to things.
3. Should be about $210 though, I have a new amp coming in hopefully this month which would add about $120 more.
4. I have a Dac X6 which is a cheap little amp/dac combo.
5. I have listened to some FLAC songs before and they sounded cleaner than the Spotify counterpart so, yes.
6. I've never tried them but I would assume that there's a point where it just becomes a scam.

 

[Derkoli]

4 hours ago, Cyberspirit said:

1.  I use Spotify. It sounds good enough for me and the price is fair. Would love to have all my music locally but I'm not aware of a place where I could buy songs in high quality format.
2. Headphones all the way. I like to drown out the world when I listen to things.
3. Should be about $210 though, I have a new amp coming in hopefully this month which would add about $120 more.
4. I have a Dac X6 which is a cheap little amp/dac combo.
5. I have listened to some FLAC songs before and they sounded cleaner than the Spotify counterpart so, yes.
6. I've never tried them but I would assume that there's a point where it just becomes a scam.

 

I definitely agree with 6, I've only got high-end cables because they look and feel amazing. They sound no different to 10 dollar KabelDirekt cables, and power conditioning I find to be hit and miss, some systems benefit, some don't, I personally find it mostly helps with cutting the noise out of power, really helped to reduce the background noise of my Loxjie P20 (amazing little amp by the way, sounds great)

 

I'm curious, where did you listen to the FLAC music? Tidal seems to apply a slight EQ to their music, so that might've been the source of the "clean" sound.

 

I find these 3 are good for buying high quality music:

 

 

https://www.hdtracks.co.uk/index.php

 

https://bandcamp.com/

 

https://www.7digital.com/

[spwath]

I have a nice headphone setup with my Sennheiser HD250, Pete Millet Jonokuchi amp, Theta DSPro progeny DAC.

Also have nice speakers, big JBLs with altec horns.

 

Speakers probably cost about 400-500, headphone setup another 300-400.

[Cyberspirit]

4 minutes ago, Derkoli said:

I'm curious, where did you listen to the FLAC music? Tidal seems to apply a slight EQ to their music, so that might've been the source of the "clean" sound.

I've tried Tidal before and some songs sounded a tiny bit cleaner but it wasn't big enough of a difference to justify the switch. I was also sent some FLAC songs a while back as an example of the sound.

 

Maybe if I had better equipment I could hear a bit more difference between Tidal and Spotify but, most of the music I listen to doesn't seem to have the highest quality available on Tidal anyways.

 

10 minutes ago, Derkoli said:

find these 3 are good for buying high quality music:

Thanks, I'll check those out.

[Derkoli]

4 hours ago, spwath said:

I have a nice headphone setup with my Sennheiser HD250, Pete Millet Jonokuchi amp, Theta DSPro progeny DAC.

Also have nice speakers, big JBLs with altec horns.

 

Speakers probably cost about 400-500, headphone setup another 300-400.

God I love those cell altec lansing horns, Never heard any though. Only horn-loaded speaker's I've heard are my friends Avantgardes, How do they sound?

[Derkoli]

4 hours ago, Cyberspirit said:

I've tried Tidal before and some songs sounded a tiny bit cleaner but it wasn't big enough of a difference to justify the switch. I was also sent some FLAC songs a while back as an example of the sound.

 

Maybe if I had better equipment I could hear a bit more difference between Tidal and Spotify but, most of the music I listen to doesn't seem to have the highest quality available on Tidal anyways.

Honestly, you do need pretty good gear to justify the change, but there is a pretty good change when you do have nice gear.

 

By "highest quality" do you mean Master quality?

[Cyberspirit]

1 minute ago, Derkoli said:

By "highest quality" do you mean Master quality?

Yeah, I believe it was that one.

[Derkoli]

4 hours ago, Cyberspirit said:

Yeah, I believe it was that one.

Yeah not alot of music is available in Master quality, but I think all but a few albums are in HiFi.

 

One song that isn't in HiFi is Inner Circle - Sweat, and I think thats the only album I can think of that isn't in HiFi.

[spwath]

2 hours ago, Derkoli said:

God I love those cell altec lansing horns, Never heard any though. Only horn-loaded speaker's I've heard are my friends Avantgardes, How do they sound?

Pretty nice, I still need to do fine tuning/redo crossovers, but overall very good. Versitle, good for blasting at parties and indestructible.

[Arphis]

Eventhough I answered question 6 with "Hell no, Snake oil" I see a reason for some people to use power conditioning, when they live in area or a house that has old or insufficient installations. I personally had a ground-loop on my DAC which I fixed buy turning the plug 180°, its a 50/50 chance on your first try in Germany

 

I always wonder how cables for home use are supposed to be worth thousands, when people making, recording, mixing and just in general working with music use regular cables all the time. Do they have spoon makes soup taste better, too?

 

Also, why are manufacturers advertising "oxygen-free-copper" cables? Isnt that supposed to be standard? Where in an industrialized nation would you get copper of such low quality that it contains noticable amounts of oxygen?

 

So yeah lots of snake oil in the whole industry from my point of view, sadly any HiFi store in my area seems to be all into it.

[Derkoli]

4 hours ago, Arphis said:

Eventhough I answered question 6 with "Hell no, Snake oil" I see a reason for some people to use power conditioning, when they live in area or a house that has old or insufficient installations. I personally had a ground-loop on my DAC which I fixed buy turning the plug 180°, its a 50/50 chance on your first try in Germany

 

I always wonder how cables for home use are supposed to be worth thousands, when people making, recording, mixing and just in general working with music use regular cables all the time. Do they have spoon makes soup taste better, too?

 

Also, why are manufacturers advertising "oxygen-free-copper" cables? Isnt that supposed to be standard? Where in an industrialized nation would you get copper of such low quality that it contains noticable amounts of oxygen?

 

So yeah lots of snake oil in the whole industry from my point of view, sadly any HiFi store in my area seems to be all into it.

Yeah, I just use power conditioning to reduce noise, and my power conditioner also increases my available transient power up to 14,720 watts, so any little bursts of power requirements from my power amps are totally taken care of.

[Derkoli]

5 hours ago, spwath said:

Pretty nice, I still need to do fine tuning/redo crossovers, but overall very good. Versitle, good for blasting at parties and indestructible.

Do you have any idea on the efficiency on the horns? I wonder how they compare to something like Klipsch or Avantgarde horns.

[spwath]

4 hours ago, Derkoli said:

Do you have any idea on the efficiency on the horns? I wonder how they compare to something like Klipsch or Avantgarde horns.

Pretty sure they are somewhere around 105 db ish, dependins on the drivers as well. 
They are a bunch more than 97db that the woofers are, have to use an L pad turned down quite a bit

[WH2002]

1. Spotify, it sounds good enough and is cheap. sometimes i listen to other stuff like YouTube but mostly spotify.

2. Speakers, i have a pair of headphones but i don't really like the sound of them so i use my speakers. I know that they are a little big (LEM T400) but they sound great and go really loud.

3. almost 1000. i got my speakers and aplifier second hand for around €350, DAC = €100, mixing board was second hand €150, flightcases = €200, and i spend almost €100 in cables.

4. yes. i use a behringer u-phoria umc404hd to get two outputs from my pc. that way i can mix the levels of system sounds and everything on one channel and spotify on another.

5. with my speakers, i find it difficult to hear the difference between spotify at the highest quality and a flac file. but i ca really hear the difference between high and low quality on spotify.

6. power conditioning is almost never necessary, except if you have either a really bad amplifier or really distorted power. There is really a difference between really low quality cables and high quality cables. but i don't se a point in audiophile priced cables that have been treated by elves under the full moon.

[kokakolia]

On 1/2/2020 at 1:57 AM, Arphis said:

Eventhough I answered question 6 with "Hell no, Snake oil" I see a reason for some people to use power conditioning, when they live in area or a house that has old or insufficient installations. I personally had a ground-loop on my DAC which I fixed buy turning the plug 180°, its a 50/50 chance on your first try in Germany

 

I always wonder how cables for home use are supposed to be worth thousands, when people making, recording, mixing and just in general working with music use regular cables all the time. Do they have spoon makes soup taste better, too?

 

Also, why are manufacturers advertising "oxygen-free-copper" cables? Isnt that supposed to be standard? Where in an industrialized nation would you get copper of such low quality that it contains noticable amounts of oxygen?

 

So yeah lots of snake oil in the whole industry from my point of view, sadly any HiFi store in my area seems to be all into it.

There's a hilarious issue with higher end cables: they're too thick! So you cannot plug them in easily into the amp and the speakers. And when the connection is bad, things get noisy. Whereas a cheap cable that's comparitively thin gets wired effortlessly. No connection issues. Everything just works as intended. Sure, you can always use banana plugs...

 

At least the audio store who sold me the "fancy" cable didn't rip me off. They sold me a high quality thick and heavy 5m Norstone speaker cable for about 18 euros. The cable works just fine, and I won't be purchasing another one anytime soon. 

[rice guru]

1. Out of utter convenience I use Spotify but use foobar a d music bee for my lossless collection.

2. My main desktop setup probably costs about $800 but as I add up my portable gear it reaches above a $1000

3.use both although my speakers are pretty budget

4.yes

5.yes although I have to really care to tell the difference between a high quality mp3 and a flac or dsd 

6.i used to think it was snake oil. But after hearing more expsive setups I learned once you get to a certain level of gear almost anything matters all the way down to how your house is powered and (I'm not talking about like less than $20000 worth of gear) and can affect it. And some cables are tuned to sound different. 

 

[BostonBoston]

as for "high end cables" i'm sure you've heard it before, a conductor is a conductor, there are definitely low end cables that can suck but if you are not running a 1500 watt amp to your 15" subs you do not need to worry about what cable you are using, as long as the connection is made. Not to mention if you buy high end items like Sennheisers they come with cables adequate for themselves. (there does come a point where there are things out of your control that will affect sound and circuits, vibrations from trains or wind turbines, radiation from the sun or cell towers, how your house was built etc)

[cesh me inside b0z]

1.  I download my music, RIP and store them on my computer or my phone for listening on the go.
2. Headphones and speakers.
3. $500-1000 in value, did not pay that.
4. I use onboard and optical pass-through.
5. FLAC & MP3 usually sound pretty much the same, the mastering of the audio counts more.
6. Snake oil.

[Derkoli]

8 hours ago, rice guru said:

6.i used to think it was snake oil. But after hearing more expsive setups I learned once you get to a certain level of gear almost anything matters all the way down to how your house is powered and (I'm not talking about like less than $20000 worth of gear) and can affect it. And some cables are tuned to sound different

Honestly, alot of audiophiles with setups like mine have the whole power delivery to the system custom and seperate to everything else purely because they need alot of power available, Even I have a 50A/240V power delivery setup to my new audio room purely because everything really does need that amount of power, my main monoblocks by themselves can draw nearly 10kW during peak output.

 

But honestly, I don't do it for power quality reasons, what's the point in feeding an AC conditioner perfect sine wave AC, in that situation it would only be choking available power.

 

But I think the point where you start doing custom high current power delivery is when you get above the 250k or so mark. Why wouldn't you to get the absolute best out of your system?

[rice guru]

1 hour ago, Derkoli said:

Honestly, alot of audiophiles with setups like mine have the whole power delivery to the system custom and seperate to everything else purely because they need alot of power available, Even I have a 50A/240V power delivery setup to my new audio room purely because everything really does need that amount of power, my main monoblocks by themselves can draw nearly 10kW during peak output.

 

But honestly, I don't do it for power quality reasons, what's the point in feeding an AC conditioner perfect sine wave AC, in that situation it would only be choking available power.

 

But I think the point where you start doing custom high current power delivery is when you get above the 250k or so mark. Why wouldn't you to get the absolute best out of your system?

Exactly. It's all about insurance that your are getting the most out of your money by spending money.