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

[saintlouisbagels]

4 hours ago, Spuriae said:

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.

The funny thing is that state of the art, instrument grade DACs are available for as low as a couple hundred $$ nowadays

Even this $90 dongle measures in the top like 15% for SINAD

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/tanchjim-space-portable-headphone-adapter-review.46231/

 

5 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

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.

lol yeah, audiophile really is a negative term - like someone calling themself a gamer.

 

5 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

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

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

How does this site get its sources?

Do it somehow directly stream from like a Tidal or Spotify source?

Or does it take a lossless file and re-encode them to match Tidal and Spotify's encoding?

Idk, I just feel like Spotify might be dishonest about their codec and quality of their library is all over the place. But hey, that might be my subjective brain talking lol.

[Stahlmann]

22 minutes ago, saintlouisbagels said:

How does this site get its sources?

Do it somehow directly stream from like a Tidal or Spotify source?

Or does it take a lossless file and re-encode them to match Tidal and Spotify's encoding?

Idk, I just feel like Spotify might be dishonest about their codec and quality of their library is all over the place. But hey, that might be my subjective brain talking lol.

I'm not entirely sure, i guess they just have 2 files uploaded, one in FLAC and one in 320kbps MP3.

 

The 320kbps bitrate is the same as Spotify, albeit in a different codec since spotify doesn't use MP3. But from what i read online, they're comparable.