You really owe it to yourself to give Chinese audio brands a chance. They are spectacular right now.

[HAL90000]

I've got a decent little headphone collection, and honestly the best stuff I own is all Chi-Fi (Chinese HI-Fi). My HD 600s ($399 CAD + tax) on a $300 amp can not begin to hold a candle to my $100 Truthear Hexa paired with a $109 Shanling UP4. Not even close. The Chi-Fi setup wins hands down in every possible way.

For years I stuck with American, UK, and European brands, thinking that I was still living in the 1980s when things made in China weren't always the best quality. I was wrong.

 

Sure, some Chinese stuff isn't in my good books. Hifiman for example is a brand that I'm really not a fan of. I think their products are poorly Q.C.'d and I don't like the sound of their headphones. But the good stuff isn't good, it's GREAT. Audioquest Dragonfly Cobalt? No! Buy a $100 Chi-Fi dongle DAC I can almost guarantee you'll like it better and you'll save hundreds of dollars. Thinking of buying an expensive western IEM? Don't do it. Buy a Chinese IEM. The bang for your buck is so much better. 

If a $100 IEM from China can absolutely curb stomp a $400 European headphone, I'm sold for life, and you should be too. If you're an audiophile, haven't experienced Chi-fi, and want your mind blown, go buy the Truthear Hexa and read up on dongle DACs from china and pick something up around $100. Your mind will explode. The only thing I'll add is that all the Chi-Fi stuff I've listened to benefits from throwing a little EQ boost at it between 20Hz and 500Hz. Sounds great without it but if you want chef's kiss quality give it a little bump.

[NeverNotExhausted]

Yup, Chi-Fi is getting really good. The Hexa's and the 7hz Dioko's are insane for the price they're asking. I also have a set of Duno Titan S's and they've become my daily drivers. Then I run a Fiio K3S DAC/AMP Combo, if you're not running anything super high impedance it's a ripper little unit

[HAL90000]

19 minutes ago, NeverNotExhausted said:

Yup, Chi-Fi is getting really good. The Hexa's and the 7hz Dioko's are insane for the price they're asking. I also have a set of Duno Titan S's and they've become my daily drivers. Then I run a Fiio K3S DAC/AMP Combo, if you're not running anything super high impedance it's a ripper little unit

I was considering the Dioko's just because Crinacle tuned them but I doubt they'd match the Timeless so I skipped em. Timeless and Hexa are my fav audio producing devices right now above anything else I have.
Got any IEM recommendations for me in the sub $300 CDN range? Also have you tried the Truthear HOLA? I got them for $25 all-in a few months ago and they're decent for "listening to music in dangerous neighbourhoods where you might get your IEMs stolen" type situations. Surprisingly good for the price. No match for the Hexa but decent and accurate enough to justify their price. 

[NeverNotExhausted]

11 minutes ago, HAL90000 said:

I was considering the Dioko's just because Crinacle tuned them but I doubt they'd match the Timeless so I skipped em. Timeless and Hexa are my fav audio producing devices right now above anything else I have.
Got any IEM recommendations for me in the sub $300 CDN range? Also have you tried the Truthear HOLA? I got them for $25 all-in a few months ago and they're decent for "listening to music in dangerous neighbourhoods where you might get your IEMs stolen" type situations. Surprisingly good for the price. No match for the Hexa but decent and accurate enough to justify their price. 

I don't have anything near the $300 range sorry. I tend to cap out at around $200AUD for IEM's, and then anything more expensive tends to be headphones for desktop use

[HAL90000]

2 minutes ago, NeverNotExhausted said:

I don't have anything near the $300 range sorry. I tend to cap out at around $200AUD for IEM's, and then anything more expensive tends to be headphones for desktop use

In that case, any IEM recommendations just generally speaking?

[Kaetemi]

Lovely clean sound quality from FiiO E10K-TC DAC here. 

 

And Superlux HD-681 EVO headphones are always a solid buy with great audio quality for cheap as well. Just need a fix for the head strap that keeps snapping.

[HAL90000]

1 minute ago, Kaetemi said:

Lovely clean sound quality from FiiO E10K-TC DAC here. 

 

And Superlux HD-681 EVO headphones are always a solid buy with great audio quality for cheap as well. Just need a fix for the head strap that keeps snapping.

The E10K is a great device. Almost all the entry level dac/amp stuff that comes from the big Chinese companies sounds good. No comparison in the market from any other geographical region IMO.

[NeverNotExhausted]

27 minutes ago, HAL90000 said:

In that case, any IEM recommendations just generally speaking?

Dunu Titan S's are a great one. They're a very "Grado-esc" bass lacking sound signature. So I like them for more mellow music and for content consumption. If you like bass then I'd give them a pass.

 

Etymotic ER2SE's are also a ripper budget option. They have to go deeeeeeeeeep into your ear to get the best out of them, so they aren't comfortable, but boy do they sound amazing. They also have the ER2XR's if you want that extra bass.

 

Anything more expensive than that I haven't really had extensive time with. I've listened to a few really nice IEM's and headphones in short bursts, but not long enough to give recommendations

[avidgamer121]

In my country, chinese brands were always looked upon as cheap during early days of android. But since, like when xiaomi, realme, oppo, vivo, oneplus etc. entered the market they were like an overnight success. But hypocrisy is our own countrymen during those early days of android called them cheap just because they were local brands manufacturing in China.

[NinJake]

The sound quality of most chi-fi products I've heard is excellent for the price.

 

The quality control / warranty departments might not be so. (Your mileage may vary)

[Kaetemi]

7 hours ago, xdagamer said:

In my country, chinese brands were always looked upon as cheap during early days of android. But since, like when xiaomi, realme, oppo, vivo, oneplus etc. entered the market they were like an overnight success. But hypocrisy is our own countrymen during those early days of android called them cheap just because they were local brands manufacturing in China.

 

Because foreign manufacturing is generally chosen to be cheap, not for quality. So "local" "brands" who manufacture/import from China generally import crap, 'cause they don't care.

 

But now there's a lot of Chinese who are very passionate about electronics who can take advantage of the fact that their local market now has all that convenient cheap manufacturing capability. And thus, also produce high quality products at a lower cost.

[HAL90000]

12 hours ago, NeverNotExhausted said:

Dunu Titan S's are a great one. They're a very "Grado-esc" bass lacking sound signature. So I like them for more mellow music and for content consumption. If you like bass then I'd give them a pass.

 

Etymotic ER2SE's are also a ripper budget option. They have to go deeeeeeeeeep into your ear to get the best out of them, so they aren't comfortable, but boy do they sound amazing. They also have the ER2XR's if you want that extra bass.

 

Anything more expensive than that I haven't really had extensive time with. I've listened to a few really nice IEM's and headphones in short bursts, but not long enough to give recommendations

Thanks for the tips I'll check those out

[Stan2292]

it's very hard to justify the existence of $200 - $600 products from westone/shure and most of the "traditional" western IEM brands right now (etymotic's single BA driver products are still good if you are wacky enough to enjoy df-neutral tuning in an IEM...). moondrop pretty much straight up groinkick everyone at this price range. in the headphone space, hifiman is doing pretty well at bringing planar from high end brands like audeze to the masses, although they do have slight qc issues from time to time. and fiio is killing it in the affordable dac/amp/portable player space, beating everyone in value.

 

that being said, an hd600 on a cheap schiit stack is still better than a $500 moondrop/hifiman product on a $300 fiio dac+amp. you like the $100 truthear and $100 shanling combo probably because you like intimate sound stage. i only use my moondrop blessing 2 when out and about. at home, hd600 is much better and produces much nicer sound than something inside my ear canal.

[cmndr]

The people that I know who are the most "Chinese products suck" are ethnic Chinese. 

There's definitely some solid electronics coming out of China but you REALLY need to do your research, you're one cost cutting production measure away from a great part becoming bad (as in initial production run is great, it gets great reviews and then... cost cutting). To be fair, there's US/EU companies that are seeing their products get degraded once one subcomponent changes in their Chinese factory (e.g. I've recommended the Polk R200, newer reviews show that that speaker has gotten worse, potentially due to a part swap)

[Stahlmann]

I gotta hand it to them. The FiiO K5 Pro DAC/AMP i have and the Moondrop KATO IEM's are the only 2 "chi-fi" products i ever bought, They're both awesome and not too expensive.

[HAL90000]

On 7/18/2023 at 9:44 AM, Stahlmann said:

I gotta hand it to them. The FiiO K5 Pro DAC/AMP i have and the Moondrop KATO IEM's are the only 2 "chi-fi" products i ever bought, They're both awesome and not too expensive.

You shouldn't use those two together. The fiio K5/K7 have to much juice to un IEMs properly. Both great products though. I have a K7 and some ChiFi IEMs the best two are the Truthear Hexa and 7Hz Timeless that I have. I use a little Shanling UP4 dongle for those and the K7 for full size headphones. It's decent stuff all around.

[Stahlmann]

55 minutes ago, HAL90000 said:

You shouldn't use those two together. The fiio K5/K7 have to much juice to un IEMs properly. Both great products though. I have a K7 and some ChiFi IEMs the best two are the Truthear Hexa and 7Hz Timeless that I have. I use a little Shanling UP4 dongle for those and the K7 for full size headphones. It's decent stuff all around.

I'm not using them together. The K5 is powering my Beyerdynamic Headphones. The KATO is my on-the-go solution and only ever hooked up to my phone. (whithout any added amp)

[HAL90000]

Just now, Stahlmann said:

I'm not using them together. The K5 is powering my Beyerdynamic Headphones. The KATO is my on-the-go solution and only ever hooked up to my phone. (whithout any added amp)

You owe it to yourself to get a dongle DAC. A lot of the cheap stuff sounds so much better than it ought to for the price you might be shocked. Personally I think my Shanling UP4 22 (About $100 USD) sounds way better than my Fiio K7 and that's using the UP4 over LDAC I'm not even wired. If you want wired, also for about $100 USD you can get an iFi GO-Link and the difference in audio quality will blow your mind. I don't recommend going wireless (even though some wireless dongles rock) if you're on iphone as you're limited to AAC for bluetooth and you really want at least AptX and LDAC is even better. iPhone does not support these. 

[Stahlmann]

2 minutes ago, HAL90000 said:

You owe it to yourself to get a dongle DAC. A lot of the cheap stuff sounds so much better than it ought to for the price you might be shocked. Personally I think my Shanling UP4 22 (About $100 USD) sounds way better than my Fiio K7 and that's using the UP4 over LDAC I'm not even wired. If you want wired, also for about $100 USD you can get an iFi GO-Link and the difference in audio quality will blow your mind. I don't recommend going wireless (even though some wireless dongles rock) if you're on iphone as you're limited to AAC for bluetooth and you really want at least AptX and LDAC is even better. iPhone does not support these. 

I don't think i'll need a dac. I don't see the one in my phone being a bottleneck. Even the codecs you mention hardly matter in the real world. Sure, AAC isn't lossless, but the AKG N400's are an example of IEM's that are limited by AAC but the sound quality is still praised by practically every audiophile reviewer.

 

Audio compression is most noticeable in the higher frequencies, but that's kind of a moot point, as natural hearing loss will prevent you from hearing these frequencies to begin with. I'm in my middle twenties and 16500Hz is about as high as my hearing goes nowadays. I tried many blind tests and even when trying super hard, i couldn't hear a difference between lossless FLAC and lossy Spotify Ogg/Vorbis compression when listening on my K5 + Beyerdynamic Amiron combo.

 

The only reason i have a K5 to begin with it because my 250 ohm headphones are too quiet without it. There is no difference in sound quality - at all - between the K5 and my onboard audio.

 

Audio gear is a market you have to be very careful in imo. I don't know another market with so many snake oil sellers, and i don't know any other market with so many happy customers that buy this snake oil.

[saintlouisbagels]

33 minutes ago, Stahlmann said:

I don't think i'll need a dac. I don't see the one in my phone being a bottleneck. Even the codecs you mention hardly matter in the real world. Sure, AAC isn't lossless, but the AKG N400's are an example of IEM's that are limited by AAC but the sound quality is still praised by practically every audiophile reviewer.

 

Audio compression is most noticeable in the higher frequencies, but that's kind of a moot point, as natural hearing loss will prevent you from hearing these frequencies to begin with. I'm in my middle twenties and 16500Hz is about as high as my hearing goes nowadays. I tried many blind tests and even when trying super hard, i couldn't hear a difference between lossless FLAC and lossy Spotify Ogg/Vorbis compression when listening on my K5 + Beyerdynamic Amiron combo.

 

The only reason i have a K5 to begin with it because my 250 ohm headphones are too quiet without it. There is no difference in sound quality - at all - between the K5 and my onboard audio.

 

Audio gear is a market you have to be very careful in imo. I don't know another market with so many snake oil sellers, and i don't know any other market with so many happy customers that buy this snake oil.

Yesss, finally someone else here.

I've listened to DAC and amp units (sometimes combo, sometimes as separates), and I cannot discern any difference between $60 units and $4000 units. And when I hear it a difference, it's because the audiophile DAC is garbage.

 

I find myself most happy with the $5 Apple dongle because it's completely noiseless whereas I've tried several DACs that have an audible noisefloor on my IEMs. And agreed - AAC is the most practical best codec for 99.9% of people because the benefits of FLAC and other high-res codecs is imperceptible.

[HAL90000]

21 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

I don't think i'll need a dac. I don't see the one in my phone being a bottleneck. Even the codecs you mention hardly matter in the real world. Sure, AAC isn't lossless, but the AKG N400's are an example of IEM's that are limited by AAC but the sound quality is still praised by practically every audiophile reviewer.

 

Audio compression is most noticeable in the higher frequencies, but that's kind of a moot point, as natural hearing loss will prevent you from hearing these frequencies to begin with. I'm in my middle twenties and 16500Hz is about as high as my hearing goes nowadays. I tried many blind tests and even when trying super hard, i couldn't hear a difference between lossless FLAC and lossy Spotify Ogg/Vorbis compression when listening on my K5 + Beyerdynamic Amiron combo.

 

The only reason i have a K5 to begin with it because my 250 ohm headphones are too quiet without it. There is no difference in sound quality - at all - between the K5 and my onboard audio.

 

Audio gear is a market you have to be very careful in imo. I don't know another market with so many snake oil sellers, and i don't know any other market with so many happy customers that buy this snake oil.

", i couldn't hear a difference between lossless FLAC and lossy Spotify Ogg/Vorbis compression when listening on my K5 + Beyerdynamic Amiron combo."

An audiophile, you are not. 

[HAL90000]

6 hours ago, saintlouisbagels said:

Yesss, finally someone else here.

I've listened to DAC and amp units (sometimes combo, sometimes as separates), and I cannot discern any difference between $60 units and $4000 units. And when I hear it a difference, it's because the audiophile DAC is garbage.

 

I find myself most happy with the $5 Apple dongle because it's completely noiseless whereas I've tried several DACs that have an audible noisefloor on my IEMs. And agreed - AAC is the most practical best codec for 99.9% of people because the benefits of FLAC and other high-res codecs is imperceptible.

There's a massive difference between just TIDAL and Spotify idk how people can't hear it. 
There's definitely a difference between the cheaper dacs and higher end dacs but it's not night and day like comparing a ford fiesta to a lambourghini murcielago or anything like that. It's subtle. Apple dongle is ok but honestly a $100 dongle dac smokes it in every way. Most people are not part of the 1% of humans who can hear well enough to buy a $40K DAC very few people can hear/claim to hear that well. IMO arguably going over a few hundred bucks on headphones and amps leads to major diminished returns and there is a ton of amazing cheap stuff out there.

[saintlouisbagels]

2 hours ago, HAL90000 said:

There's a massive difference between just TIDAL and Spotify idk how people can't hear it. 
There's definitely a difference between the cheaper dacs and higher end dacs but it's not night and day like comparing a ford fiesta to a lambourghini murcielago or anything like that. It's subtle. Apple dongle is ok but honestly a $100 dongle dac smokes it in every way. Most people are not part of the 1% of humans who can hear well enough to buy a $40K DAC very few people can hear/claim to hear that well. IMO arguably going over a few hundred bucks on headphones and amps leads to major diminished returns and there is a ton of amazing cheap stuff out there.

Is there any evidence that Spotify may inconsistently encode their music from Artist to Artist?

I know when people talk about the massive difference between Tidal and Spotify, it is sometimes literally a difference between how the album was mastered for Spotify vs mastering for different formats.

I cannot for the life of me discern the difference between 320kbps and FLAC.

And some people claim there is no difference between Tidal and Spotify when doing A/B testing.

 

But there are some days I'll be listening to music on Spotify shuffle (downloaded Liked tracks) and I can easily tell that Spotify sounds like crap compared to the 320kbps mp3 version I have downloaded on the iPhone Music app.

 

I recently added more music via iTunes because the Spotify version of the TENET soundtrack does not hit compared to the FLAC version I've re-encoded to mp3.

 

[Stahlmann]

5 hours ago, HAL90000 said:

There's a massive difference between just TIDAL and Spotify idk how people can't hear it.

Have you ever actually taken a blind test? I was of the same opinion when trying out Tidal and constantly though about how much i missed by using Spotify for years. Then i actually took a blind test and found out i've been making the differences up in my head the whole time. It's called confirmation bias. I had to really try hard and even then i couldn't realiably tell the difference in a blind test. So in normal listening conditions there is no audible difference between 320kbps MP3 and lossless FLAC to me.

 

Take a test and see for yourself: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/

You can also use a frequency sweep and see where your hearing stops.

 

Doing these tests will probably change your view about audio gear aswell.

 

5 hours ago, HAL90000 said:

An audiophile, you are not. Arguably you wasted your money on all your gear and all you need are Koss Porta Pros

No i'm not an audiophile and i never claimed to be one. And i agree that i've wasted a lot of money on audio gear. The main reason why i have $400 headphones is not audio quality, but the wearing comfort. The headphones i have don't even sound that good out of the box and pretty much need EQ to sound decent, but the wearing comfort is unmatched for me.

 

Imo "audiophile" is more of a negative term that's used when talking about people trying to justify spending thousands of dollars to enhance their audio gear way past the capabilities of human hearing.

[Spuriae]

On 7/11/2023 at 7:20 PM, HAL90000 said:

My HD 600s ($399 CAD + tax) on a $300 amp can not begin to hold a candle to my $100 Truthear Hexa paired with a $109 Shanling UP4. Not even close. The Chi-Fi setup wins hands down in every possible way.

There are very few headphone comparisons that end with one product being better than the other in every possible way, especially when you're comparing products as different as the HD600 and Truthear Hexa – not to mention that personal preferences are a thing. The Truthear Hexa may be a better fit for you than the HD600, but without more specifics it's a stretch to call it better in every possible way.

 

14 hours ago, HAL90000 said:

Personally I think my Shanling UP4 22 (About $100 USD) sounds way better than my Fiio K7 and that's using the UP4 over LDAC I'm not even wired. If you want wired, also for about $100 USD you can get an iFi GO-Link and the difference in audio quality will blow your mind.

The Shanling UP4 and FiiO E10k are higher output power but less accurate output quality than the $9 Apple dongle. For efficient IEMs or applications where Bluetooth isn't a concern, the Apple dongle is usually better. Not to say there aren't plenty of Chinese dongles that handily outperform the Apple dongle – it's just that the UP4 and E10k don't.

 

iFi is a British company.

 

14 hours ago, HAL90000 said:

I don't recommend going wireless (even though some wireless dongles rock) if you're on iphone as you're limited to AAC for bluetooth and you really want at least AptX and LDAC is even better. iPhone does not support these. 

AAC on iPhones is different from AAC on Android. iPhone AAC is higher quality than aptX (but less efficient and higher latency); Android AAC is usually lower quality than aptX. LDAC in Auto/low is typically on par with SBC, though LDAC manually forced to a higher bitrate tends to be a top performer (but is also prone to dropouts).

 

6 hours ago, HAL90000 said:

There's a massive difference between just TIDAL and Spotify idk how people can't hear it.

Different services have different masters on many songs, which is separate from the codec. There's sometimes a massive difference between Tidal and other lossless streaming platforms, too.

 

6 hours ago, HAL90000 said:

There's definitely a difference between the cheaper dacs and higher end dacs but it's not night and day like comparing a ford fiesta to a lambourghini murcielago or anything like that. It's subtle. Apple dongle is ok but honestly a $100 dongle dac smokes it in every way. Most people are not part of the 1% of humans who can hear well enough to buy a $40K DAC very few people can hear/claim to hear that well. IMO arguably going over a few hundred bucks on headphones and amps leads to major diminished returns and there is a ton of amazing cheap stuff out there.

Given that state of the art for DACs is available for under $1k, the only reason you'd hear a difference on a $40k DAC would be if the $40k DAC were less accurate than the cheaper one.

 

Which isn't a bad thing per se. Maybe you like the sound of the technically inaccurate $40k DAC. But it's not a matter of being able to hear well enough; it's a matter of personal preference.