Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

*upgrades CD player* "oh my speakers sound terrible"
*upgrades speakers* "oh my amp sounds terrible"
*upgrades amp* "oh my headphones sound terrible"
*upgrades headphones* "oh wait it was my ears that were terrible"

+ .. return to start.

i.e. the unspoken audiophile mantra.

I dunno. I bought a stereo that's nice and I like it and I haven't really been too obsessed. I keep thinking about a common sense audiophile thread because there's so much good stuff that's so cheap now it's unreal but this thread is made for making fun of like crazy record player shelves made out of titanium and shit like that

I would read a common sense audiophile thread abt good cheap shit like the Dragonfly - I can't remember which thread most of the discussion of that is on...

The output jack on my dragonfly broke after ~ a month and I've been too lazy to send it in. One weird thing is that the USB plug is really long; it won't fit snugly in any USB port but I guess it works. I couldn't make out much of a difference in fidelity but I didn't do blind tests or anything

I think upper miSisippi shakedown has praised the dragonfly here in the past.

My post makes it sound like I'm dissing the dragonfly but it's more like "not enough data"

i fell for the dragonfly groove for a while.
but then i became concerned about a massive extension to my USB connection that would eventually become annoying.
i mean the thing is extending out of the audio out, and so will eventually be something you have to wiggle to get a decent connection on a la old school walkman/headphone connections - or was that just me ?
subsequently, after a lot of ummm'ing and arrrr'ing i fixed up the NAS/Sonos groove for my archive needs, which has no extended connectors hanging off my laptop.
but is basically the same thing i.e. a nice external DAC for your mp3 collection that can feed into your amp.
the results of which sound fantastic.

xpost : !!! and relevant !!

Yeah mark, the wiggling thing was my issue too, thought it was the USB connect at first but figured out it was the 1/8 inch output jack. Just a defect, though, they'll fix it if I send it to em.

I'm definitely going to spring for a standalone DAC like you describe. Probably going to buy a desktop computer or media center thing for my tunes too, I really only listen to music at home or in the car so portability not really an issue

After a decade and a half of audiophile tinkering, it was almost a relief to just sell it all in 2012 and get something simple in its stead. Now it's just a Marantz CD/tuner/streamer/amp, a pair of Q-Acoustics monitors and a mid-range Pro-Ject turntable. And it's just *fine*. Most of the time I AirPlay Spotify off my old iPhone to the Marantz anyway - the CDs and vinyl only come out occasionally.

That's still way audiophile compared to like 99% of ppl!

Maybe - but it was the first time I'd bought anything from Richer Sounds* since I got my first separates system in 1993! It felt good to go home ;)

(* - UK audio/home cinema chain, characterised by small-footprint stores, gear-stacked-high and very good deals; nothing high-end)

RS have got some semi-hi-end stuff in the window of the store near me. Pair of Tannoy speakers at £800. Serious buffs would call that mid-range or even entry level I guess but it's more than I've ever spent on speakers.

No reason why we can't use this thread for sensible audiophile talk as well as crazy snake oil.

Sold my hi-fi stand, put the speaker stands in the loft, and have now put the hi-fi at one end of the room on top of a wooden Ikea shelf thing. No, I can't sit in the sweetspot anymore, but it still sounds lovely in terms of 'music in the room'.

The classic Quad electrostatics sound really great, espeically the ESL-63s. They aren't cheap though, need loads of room as they need to be at least a metre away from walls for the best sound, and if you like low bass they are not the speakers for you.

if you can live with those caveats everything else about them is wonderful.

Sold my hi-fi stand, put the speaker stands in the loft, and have now put the hi-fi at one end of the room on top of a wooden Ikea shelf thing. No, I can't sit in the sweetspot anymore, but it still sounds lovely in terms of 'music in the room'.

ahh .. the joys of parenting.
was wondering what you were going to do with your set up once the little hands and feet got into action.
fear not, you will get the sweet spot back in about 10 years time.

Yeah, actually, RS do have some premium stuff now. Back in the '90s, it was nothing over £300; I think they broke that ceiling when they started selling Arcam gear (which they weren't allowed to discount, IIRC) and the whole Big Telly boom.

I've never been happier with vinyl playback than with this Pro-Ject; I suspect it's glossing over some of the harsher details the Michell/NVA used to dig out, but that's ok. I picked up a 1976 CBS Masterworks LP *for free* (the weekend market opposite my wife's place had four crates of mostly terrible LPs sitting out, all gratis - it was like the Clayderman motherlode) of Bernstein conducting Tchaikovsky, and it was lovely and almost pristine. Paul Williams and 10CC records for a quid round the corner too ("we have a lot of good stock in at the moment, which is why the overspill bargain crate is so good"; cheers, but I'm probably not going to look at your "good stuff").

I still buy CDs occasionally. I could never switch entirely to MP3/FLAC unless I had some kind of dedicated storage. AirPlay from iTunes is too flaky (I start doing anything else substantial with my wifi and it breaks up) and even the Marantz itself has a tendency to just drop off the network.

http://https%3A//farm6.staticflickr.com/5623/22799473776_e855f10750_k.jpg

Damnit.

https://flic.kr/p/AJHges

Just wait until she has her own Spotify playlist...

(Ava: Talking Heads, Propaganda, St Vincent, Laurie Anderson, Berlin-era Bowie, Kraftwerk, Thomas Dolby and Harold Budd; Lulu: Ex Hex, Wild Flag, Helium, Irene Cara(!), Waxahatchee and the Ghostbusters theme)

At their mum's, they have their own record player in their bedroom.

I just got the Chromecast Audio and for $35 it's maybe the greatest audio product ever created.

My wife just got herself a Neet AirStream, which is even cheaper, but probably not as flexible. Plugged into her amp, she's streaming iTunes from laptop and Spotify from phone to that. I think it's possible to do more from her Windows PC with the right software, but this is pretty good for now.

the good thing about Chromecast Audio is your NOT streaming from your device...it has it's own Wi-Fi connection, which means that the phone just directs it to the music, so 1) not nearly as compressed as Bluetooth over the air streaming and 2) it's not using your phone and draining the battery, like if you were even in the middle of an album you can turn your phone off and the album would keep playing on spotify...also the chromecast app instantly integrates with every music and content app (except itunes because apple won't let them)...set up took literally one minute.

great product. w/spotify on extreme quality i was having a tough time telling the difference A/Bing between Chromecast and a CD of Air's Moon Safari (yes i realize that makes me sound kind of insane)

i'm always glad i won those B&W matrix 804s in a work raffle and married into a nice teac amp

xp I got a new fire TV to do that with spotify, but they haven't made the app compatible yet. I used to use a raspberry pi + bluetooth which was annoying b/c of the reasons you describe.

I have an NAD DAC 1 (which has been discontinued), I'm sure it's got problems but it was a cheap and easy solution to getting music from my computer across the room to my stereo without running a USB cable across the main entry door to my house. It clicks and cuts out sometimes, don't know why.

Yeah, actually, RS do have some premium stuff now. Back in the '90s, it was nothing over £300;

It's just not the same now! How I loved going to RS in the 90s because it was the only hi-fi store which didn't just take one look at me and go "scruffy teenage girl, not going to spend more than £30, don't even talk to her, assume she'll break things, won't even know what basic words like 'frequency' or 'connector' mean, etc". Cups of tea, free mugs, letting me try all their stuff and ask questions and spend my £30 on the best £30 headphones they had.

Now I go in and it's like "scruffy thirty-something woman, not going to buy a £1000 TV setup, ignore her while bro-ing incessantly at any blokes who come in and serving them first, awright m8 check out our massive flatscreens, yeah? brilliant for the big game yeah like WOOARGGHHH GOAAAALLLL innit yeah" fuck off

also thanks for buying Cambridge Audio and using the name to churn out things with the build quality of yogurt pots for £300 each

I swear the low-end CA CD player (which I got to replace a mid-range one which died after not that many uses, and no, of course the different ranges don't respond to each other's remotes) deliberately has "sit uselessly for several seconds after inserting a CD before even attempting to read it" programmed in just so the sales staff can go "ah well if you don't want that you can pay £150 more for the next model up"

The funniest CD player failure I witnessed was this 80s model with a big chunky disc tray that would eject very slowly and creakily. Sometimes it would give up halfway through and reverse direction, as if to say "ah fuck this shit, I'm not playing any CDs today dammit"

LOL about the Cambridge Audio comment. Back in the 90s I used to work in my dad’s hi-fi shop and it got rather tedious having to explain that, “No we don’t have the new CA product given a 5-star review in What Hi-Fi this month, interesting that Richer Sounds advertise in What Hi-Fi eh? Oh, do you know who owns CA by the way?”.

Is there a stereo equipment advice thread on ILX? I would be up for reading such a thing. I'm still using the same Richer Sounds starter-kit separates I bought with my first ever cheque from the Melody Maker 17 years ago, but the bits might need replacing some time soon (especially given how funny my 17 month old daughter finds it to clamber up to the stereo and start bashing the buttons and cranking the switches).

I helped a friend buy a system from RS in the new era and they punted her this weird CD player that may have sounded OK but had the crappiest firmware and interface. It took an age to do or respond to anything and didn't understand the concept of gapless playback.

It didn't sound that good either.

Is there a stereo equipment advice thread on ILX?

I turned up these:
Stereo thoughts
stereo question
Stereo Equipment

Thanks Austin

There are also a couple of threads with audiophile in the title.

Upper mississippi otm upthread re chromecast audio - just got mine, and after years and years (that followed years and years of napster, ftping, torrents etc) of only using physical media at home I feel like I've travelled back in time to the joy of discovering the possibilities of p2p music sharing - which is all just to say: considering what this gizmo does and how well it does it the price point is absolutely incredible

I work at this webshop https://www.hifiklubben.dk/ and we sell a lot of streaming devices, and while Sonos Connect, Heos Link and Bluesound Node all offer better sound (the passive streamers), very good app control (esp handy for multi room purposes) and more, they're also 10 times the price. Curious to hook up the chromecast to a proper dac (it has optical out!) and hearing the results.

I don't consider myself a great authority on hifi, but have worked with it for years so happy to give advice on equipment itt.

@tom violence: iirc the nad wifi dac has a few differnt frequencies of transmission to choose from. Maybe you can eliminate some of the dropout issues - which are surely signal/interference related - by trying another one.

I'd buy a few Chromecasts in a heartbeat if the iOS version of Google Play Music app wasn't so awful. Having my full iTunes library available in the cloud (for free!) is amazing, but I can only bear to play it through the Sonos interface.

Curious to hook up the chromecast to a proper dac (it has optical out!) and hearing the results.

Woah hadn't thought of that

http://wathifi.com

Wow, this one is amazing!

http://www.musicdirect.com/p-7419-ps-audio-noise-harvester-black.aspx

Eliminate noise right at the source. The PS Audio Noise Harvester is the world's only device that actually eliminates line noise from your home's power lines. Most power conditioners attempt to isolate your equipment from all the power line noise, but they cannot eliminate or remove power line noise. Only the Noise Harvester removes AC noise and converts it to another form of energy, light.

So basically you're paying 75 bucks for a small blue LED lamp.

Some gems on that site.

I used to buy in to *some* of this stuff. Not the power conditioners or magic stones or floating racks or whatever, but I did spend an awful lot of money on cables between 1996 and 1999 and I also stuck a Musical Fidelity valve output stage on my Marantz CD player because I found it too "fatiguing". "Mike's Little Distorto Box" as my friend liked to call it. I have no doubt that's what it was doing - adding some vacuum tube even-order harmonic distortion to sweeten things up.

Even power conditioning, I'm not 100 sure about but playing gigs at local clubs with amps there could definitely be problems with certain outlets where the amp would really buzz then you'd plug it in somewhere else and that would be fine. Watch is an extreme example because guitar amps are pretty prone to buzz and the club's probably had grounding issues but it doesn't seem impossible that a/c current could cause distortion on a stereo amp

The idea is that the power supply in the amp or CD player itself does all the filtering you need, or it can't be really be fit for purpose. This is in a domestic environment where you're hopefully not subject to grounding problems or crazy surges (again, your device should just shut itself off in that circumstance). So there really should be any need to "clean" your mains AC before it gets to your stereo gear. But that kind of fits with the audiophile mindset that really exotic equipment is a delicate flower, sensitive to every little thing, and needs to be protected (rather than immune to it, if it's been designed properly).

Really *shouldn't*, I mean

yeah i spose. i don't know why guitar amps are so subject to weirdness in power supply out of the wall then...because it happened w/tube and solid state gear and ALL the time.

anyway

niels - what if i mated my Google Chromecast to something like this? (or what's a good affordable DAC w/an optical in you'd recommend?)

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=833986&gclid=Cj0KEQiAyIayBRDo4vjdqJrgxZ0BEiQAhOYCYK9H_Hn7pvxpeq5QlDMa4MdK0vOYqNFJA2ir6tBlbIEaAgBZ8P8HAQ&is=REG&m=Y&A=details&Q=

I'm limited in that I know mostly about brands in our line-up (NAD, Denon, Cambridge, B&W, Dali, Audioquest) but that Audioengine D1 is well-reviewed, has optical in and 24-Bit 192 kHz support, so looks good to me. I guess maybe you're paying a bit extra for a headphone amp, but then again it may come in handy. Will it be placed near your computer or will you use a usb power adapter?

In order for the Chromecast to remain a bargain, I guess we need to stay well below the $499 price of a streamer like the Bluesound Node 2, which has v good internal DAC http://www.bluesound.com/en-us/products/node-2/?cl.

Anyway, you can probably try it out and return it if you're not satisfied with the improvement in sound. Curious to hear the results, I'll try to take a few different DACs home myself and try them out when I get the time.

What do you have in your system?

i don't know why guitar amps are so subject to weirdness in power supply out of the wall then...because it happened w/tube and solid state gear and ALL the time.

thanks for the explanation matthewk that makes sense

niels:

I have:

Cambridge 540a Azur amp (8 ish years old?) with the companion/optional phono stage that was sold with it. This has a good headphone stage so I don't really need to pay extra for a headphone amp.

Rega P1 turntable w/glass platter upgrade & Ortofon 2M Blue cartridge

Marantz DVD player I got on clearance from MusicDirect

Speakers: EPOS ELS 3 bookshelfs with HSU Research VTF-1 powered sub

so....basically a bunch of good value "entry level" audiophile stuff.

But your point about the headphone amp is good, I don't need that. this isn't near my PC, I strictly want to stream wireless from Spotify at extreme quality into my stereo system...

Would a Cambridge DAC be a good choice just because I have one? Obviously looking at the lowest range of price for a respectable DAC, or tell me about any of the other options would be great.

The moment this thread became useful it became waaaaaaay less fun

If I didn't respect your work in the Doors so much I would have created an especially sassy retort to that post

More like DORKS amirite????????