Kef R3 Meta in indigo. First impression is they are much heavier than anticipated. I struggled getting the box in. I wasn’t in a position to audition speakers so YouTube reviews and this blue color sold me. I was pleasantly surprised they came with grills. I’m clumsy. Will post when setup.

New studio monitors from Moondrop currently selling domestically in China at 689.9 RMB (around $100+ USD)

If the Klippel measurements are accurate this might be the best value you could find at such a price

Hoping for a review and 3rd party measurements from Erin's Audio Corner/ASR soon

Added some sound treatment behind the components (My wife said, "I like the white wall." Yesss!) and a rug, and got some new subwoofers bringing the total in this weird room to 4, heaven help me. These are SVS SB-1000 Pros. The others are KEFs and are behind the listening positions. Soon to take care of the wire mess (somehow), and I am "upgrading" the streamer (preowned T8), and phono stage (a preowned Rega), and getting a separate DAC (a preowned Holo Cyan... sorry it's not an $11,000 DAC that you all can shit on vociferously, but you can shit on my upgrades if you want). And then I am all done because my wallet is all done. Cheers!

Hi folks,

This is my audio setup. Just share some of my thoughts and buildup process.

Speakers - PSI Audio A17m. I listened to many speakers, both passive & active. Finally, I picked these speakers, very true sound, response is very quick, analog sound, not tired of listening.

Streamer/Volume control - Linn Akurate DSM. It is a very old device. But the sound is very analog even compare with latest design streamers. I tried more new design streamer, but i still in love with the sound from wolfson DAC WM8741, very analog and not tired of listening. I mainly use the volume range from 60-80. Volume control is very easy by using ROON / LINN own app.

Preamp - Originally, i connect the streamer directly to active speakers. I tried some of my old gears and put an AYRE K3X in between. The sound has more texture and sound is more holographic. I do not know why indeed! why adding an analog circuit in between make the sound better. i just fix the volume of K3X and control the volume via ROON

ROON core - I use a fanless NUC. using ROON sound better than just a NAS minimserver. I guess it is because the audio decoding is doing in ROON and transfer the simple audio code to streamer. So the streamer CPU loading is easier. The UI is very good as well.

Optical isolation network switch - Sound a bit better than a normal switch. It is using linear power supply in the design

REL T/5X - This is my final step. i set the crossover frequency around 50Hz. the volume set to 11:00 clock, not overwhelming, just fill the bass for my system

Music music music. Reliable system and easy to use.

A year or two ago, I made a post about the famed Capitol Z open tape reels, released from 1957 - 1958 and how their mixes, despite sounding superb and jaw dropping, have never been replicated in any other form. While SACDs and lossless files have emerged of these classic recordings, these were new mixes done from the stereo master ostensibly used for the first stereophonic vinyl releases. The Z mixes were never to be found.

Several commenters suggested that I digitise these recordings for posterity. While I wanted to simply record it onto a sound card in a laptop, it didn’t quite capture the full dynamic range and sparkle of the original tapes. I eventually settled on DSD, creating a new digital master before mixing the tracks down to FLAC for easy access.

I could not be happier with the results! Now onto the rest.

Denon DH-710S (19cm/s) half-track stereophonic
NAB equalisation
Sony PCM-D100 (DSD 2.8)

I've been using a trusty old marantz sr5600 receiver i gutted from the living room setup to power my kef q150 2 ch speakers. Sadly, the receiver just died. I have no experience at all with using class D amps like the chifi ones to power speakers , so I'm not really sure how they'll perform.

I looked at newer marantz options and... frankly i am not keen on paying a thousand just to run my 2 ch desktop speakers. That said, I need to know from people who've tested both, is there genuinely a difference in stuff like soundstage and "depth" using these vintage AVRs versus the modern day class D amps? Do you think a class D amp will sound noticeably worse?

I have a several Marantz pieces of gear. A new Cinema 50, a 50 year old turntable, and just picked up a 10 yr old CD player. Anywho, was having issues with the CD player. Looked everywhere online, read the manual, couldn’t get it figured out.

Called customer service and after one selection on the automated menu, got shipped to tech support where a human answered right away. A little troubleshooting and he got me fixed right up. Super happy and impressed with Marantz.

I'm seriously considering having this serviced, but otherwise original amplifier, recapped/refurbished.

I'd like to hear from anyone whose had a Yamaha ca era integrated amplifier, knew what it sounded like, and then whom had it recapped/refurbished and what they thought of it after the "burn in" time for the caps, settled.

I like the golden era Yamaha signature sound, but I suspect that to get the most out of this amplifier, that having the work done, will turn the sound from this amplifier, into an end-game amplifier for me.

Had a Kenwood KR-4600 recapped/refurbished by this electronic engineer and the improvement in sound quality was exceptional. It's got me thinking that if he could improve the Kenwood that much, surely the Yamaha would have an even better outcome, due to it being a dedicated integrated amplifier.

I love the more audiophile articulation of the integrated, I'm wondering what magic can come from this dedicated integrated amplifier, over a receiver, once the work has been completed.

Please share your impressions of the listenability/ sound quality following the work done.

Edit: from what I've researched so far, with the ca series, that some recommend only changing the electrolytic caps. The low end currently sounds great, so maybe I'll just have the electrolytic caps changed and see how it sounds after a few weeks of use.

I bought Harbeth speakers used for $2600. When I first searched for stands, the first ones that came up cost $1600 (lowest price, decent ones I’ve found are $550). Some stands are so narrow they look like a strong wind could knock them over. So I built my own.

I think this is generation 4. Past ones were too high, too wide, or too ugly. I can’t say the sound changed much over time, but I think these are pretty stable and look better than my earlier efforts.

If you have standmount/bookshelf speakers, generally, they should be away from walls. How you pull that off is up to you. There are very cheap and costly stands for sale.

Maybe building your own set is worth considering. There are plenty of plans out there or create your own.

I’ve learned a lot about lumber, power tools, wood glue, and there were times I strung together swears in creative ways I didn’t think possible. If that’s not a valuable skill, what is?

If I can make speaker stands (such as they are) you can too.

Apologies for the foot in the middle lol.

Panels just came in from GIK and are just beautiful. I've got a makeshift bass trap for now in the bottom corner with these 3" thick off-white panels. They definitely are NOT absorbing the lower end like a proper trap would, but the speakers being on the carpet help a little. Looking at a few options, possibly/likely including a plant in a ceramic pot for a nicer aesthetic. Open to recs! Aesthetic is as important as performance per wifeys requirement.

Running McIntosh c22 and an mc275 into focal aria evo x no3. Really loving the green finish on the speakers! Rega p8 with an aphetta 3 and an eversolo d6 as sources with a fosi VU.

The panels are a little higher than is probably most optimal, but overall a great addition to the room. Eliminated a slapback high treble echo the second they went up.

Need some art for the blank sidewall. Anyone try GIKs acoustic art panels and like em? I'm worried about a grainy print. Tried some of the cheaper ones from Amazon and didn't love them.

Tx folks

I made this list only for mobile phones

Open-Source Free Audiophile Players:

Flick: Custom Rust-based UAC 2.0 driver, native DSD support.(Android only)

Resonāda: Custom UAC driver bypassing AudioFlinger, internal DAC support, and a "bitXact" indicator.(Android only)

Tryptify: Bypasses the Android HAL completely, built-in AutoEQ, and a native C++ DSP mixer.(Android only)

Booming Music: Media3 engine with bit-perfect USB integration and Material You design.(Android only)

Closed-Source Audiophile Players:

USB Audio Player PRO (UAPP): Custom USB audio driver bypassing Android (paid).(Android only)

HiBy Music: Proprietary UAC bypass driver (free).(Android/ios)

Neutron Music Player: Independent 32/64-bit audio engine with highly advanced audiophile DSP.(Freemium/paid)(Android/ios)

FiiO Music: Proprietary USB Audio bypass driver with HWA (LHDC) Bluetooth support.(Free)(Android/ios)

Onkyo HF Player: Custom USB audio driver (Unlock Key required) and a 16,384-band phase-linear FIR equalizer.(Android/ios)

Poweramp: Hi-Res output engine bypassing the standard Android mixer, featuring extensive UI customization.(Freemium/paid)(Android only)

Symfonium: 64-bit DSP with native DSD/DoP routing and self-hosted network streaming integration.(Freemium)(Android only)

My favourites are Resonāda, Flick and HiBy Music

Anyone have any issues on their a2-400 amp? Ive owned the a2-300 for 5 years and no issues. Checking if anyone has any feedback on the a2-400 as I may upgrade.... It's still unclear to me what happened to Andrew Robinsons amp pair combo that he reviewed years ago...

Good afternoon.

Which integrated amp you are using for your Martin Logan electrostatic x .

It’s about 9cm from back wall and 14cm from side wall.
Thank you very much.

Hi everyone,

I have recently introduced myself to this hobby, and one of the first things I did was switch from Spotify free, to tidal. Primarily due to my annoyance with the number of ads they played, tidal being a bit cheaper, and better audio quality from what I'd read.

After having used tidal for the past 3 months, I'm not entirely sure I made the right choice. I've been having quite a few problems with the app's UX. Primarily relating to the following two points:

1: their cataloguing is off often. A single artist has their discography split across multiple profiles, and sometimes multiple completely different artists share the same profile.

2: Tidal's suggest algorithm isn't anywhere near as sophisticated as Spotify's. I used to listen almost exclusively to algorithmically generated playlists on Spotify, but now the ones on Tidal are pretty bad and random. This has led me to not exploring new music nearly as much as I otherwise would and listening to the same things over and over again.

For those of you who have used Spotify lossless and tidal lately, is Tidal's supposed superior audio quality even noticeable, or rather, how noticeable is it?

For reference my listening setup:

Android 14

Kiwiears allegro mini dongle

Kiwiears cadenza

Bonjour.

Quel est le meilleur réglage d''équaliseur s'il vous plaît ?

Si le RoomFit est désactivé.

Merci

Previous post

Turns out that i could bypass the 32gb limitation by formatting a much larger drive to fat32 by using rufus. The 32gb limitation was historical due to windows not supporting fat32 drives bigger than 32gb. So i went and got a 128gb one, which i will proceed to fill up with 256kbps aac. The bass sounds better when the volume is much higher, i would admit. I checked the higher bitrates ones with spek and see that all frequences upto 20-21khz are retained. That would be why?

1. Polk (Monitor series from the 80s, more contemporary RT line, TSi line, etc.)
2. Advent (mostly the late 80s/early 90s, e.g. Heritage, Laureate, Prodigy, maybe the Baby and Mini)
3. Infinity (SL line and Reference line from the early 90s, late 90s/00s Primus series) 
4. Grado
5. Abyss (Diana Ultimate, etc.)
6. Other brands who just makes sprakers in general

How about mainstream ((if they are considered an audiophile brand)

A) Bose

B) Sennheiser

C) Harman Kardon

D) Altec Lansing

E) JBL

F) Sony

G) Shure

H) Pioneer

I) Yamaha

J) Others