Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

So I looked around and for OSX users there's a desktop app called Soundcast

https://github.com/andresgottlieb/soundcast

which will send iTunes audio, and audio from a browser, to ChromeCast--

seems to work!

okay back on topic, Sennheiser's new $55,000 headphones!

http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/03/sennheiser-new-orpheus-headphones/

"As you can imagine, there are numerous design improvements that work to stamp out any audiophile kryptonite -- such as building amps into the ear cups to avoid any noise introduced by cabling, and eight DACs in total with a sampling rate of up to 384 kHz."

So if the amps are built into the ear cups, what is that marble tube amp thing?

that marble will tickle your eyeballs at hundreds of THz

xp good question. anyway, by using crazy electrostatic headphones, you are forced to move away from small signal design in an area where you usually don't have to, so you can no longer leverage amazing and cheap op-amps. that is quite a trade off.

Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades

Do these weirdos ever actually enjoy listening to music qua music or are they constantly listening for impurities/imperfections. Sounds maddening

I don't really understand why you need 8 discreet dacs??

7 wasn't enough in the lab

they first tried 7, but their digital signals were analog and their analog signals were digital. so they added one more.

(it was shingy's idea)

24 bit signal, no more than three bits per DAC, otherwise the electron orbitals clash and there's some kind of gravitational interaction. Got to keep those bits as far apart as possible until they combine in the ear. They're triode valve DACs of course, one bit per ode.

If I keep this up I might get hired to write their promos.

I thought this was really funny:

http://www.lampizator.eu/LAMPIZATOR/REFERENCES/THETA%20Universal/theta.html

that is utterly great

lol, when the first paragraph described the size of the Theta, I thought to myself "that's bigger than a laserdisc player", and then I scrolled down...

Amazing

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--IEHpDUxc--/18s3sd0a10tf3jpg.jpg

amazing story

looking at this and reviews of diff components online, they all read exactly the same -- "better definition in bass, greater depth and openness in the soundstage, increased separation in treble." i just read a review of a damn turntable mat that had that language

Definition, schmefition, here's the REAL test: Listening to Caetano Veloso Foreign Sound is a hallucinogenic experience with the Theta. My brain is immediately fooled that I am inside a vibrating cloud of sound, and Mr. Veloso is too real and too close for my heterosexual comfort.

I currently only listen to streamed music on my iphone earbuds and I gotta say the bass soundstage is spread wide open

This isn't snake oil, but pretty cool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CE_zmpHcWQ

Excellent. I watched it all waiting for him to mention Nakamichi, and he did right at the end!

Wow!

That is totally nuts.

I saw one of those Nakamichis in a stereo store in the '80s; it was ridiculously expensive for its time, and for the fact that cassettes were never going to be anywhere close to a serious audiophile format (iirc, it was around $500, while decent consumer-grade decks went for $80 and up).

Also, I thought the main appeal of auto-reverse was for recording; if a piece is longer than the length of a side of tape, in theory, if the auto-reverse was quick enough, you could continue recording onto the next side missing far less music than if you had to flip the tape yourself (particularly if you're taping a concert or something off the radio). The quickness of the reverse was a spec often touted by manufacturers (I seem to remember one deck changed direction in .02 seconds).

I thought I was seeing something exotic when one of these came in to the store recently:

http://i66.tinypic.com/20uubue.jpg

that is so cool! a tape duplicator, yeah?

'theta' is a very apt name for snake-oil high-end audio b/c it reminds me of scientology, and the guys who write about this stuff make about as much sense as l. ron hubbard.

xp It's actually just a dubbing deck but you can load seven cassettes into the playback deck; maybe if you just want to make a comp of cassingles? Heh.

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/03/15/high-definition-vinyl-will-soon-become-a-reality/

Interesting idea. Not totally into the idea of new HD turntables, would be interested to see how these sounded on older ones.

lol HD vinyl you have to be kidding me.

All in, Rebeat and Joanneum estimate that stamper-related costs will be reduced by 50 percent, while the time required to produce a new piece of vinyl slashed by 60 percent.

on the minus side a new copy of "Thriller" will cost the end consumer $100+

that's actually really interesting and makes a lot of sense, why bother with lacquer or electroplating when you can just burn the grooves with a laser?

Rebeat and Joanneum estimate that stamper-related costs will be reduced by 50 percent, while the time required to produce a new piece of vinyl slashed by 60 percent.

i don't think the "gigantic production bottleneck" nowadays is necessarily from the stampers taking too long to produce, but from the flood of repressings, which a new HD VINYL product would just add to.

the wording is kind of ambiguous and probably tweaked in their favor. i don't see how shortening the time to make a master plate will slash total production time by 60 percent. it seems in this case they consider production time to be from making the master to printing the first vinyl record ("a new piece of vinyl").

like you're still going to have to wait in line until they finish printing RSD gimmick records and another million copies of "Abbey Road" (now in HD!).

anyone else have this:

http://www.audioquest.com/usb_digital_analog_converter/dragonfly-dac

"Buy your music again, again!"

xp yes and I love it

if u search by post, there is a bunch of talk abt those on some thread

new version coming soon, let's you hook it up to mobile devices too

mobile devices already have awesome DACs

(but perhaps you were referring to hooking up to the amplifier section)

lol HD vinyl you have to be kidding me.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, March 16, 2016 10:37 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I know right? Might as well wait for blu-ray

what DAC is in an iPhone? maybe as good as the Dragonfly, if so I did not realize

will come in handy if the iPhone 7 has no headphone jack though

Apple uses cirrus logic components for audio, iirc. They used to do more direct to market stuff years ago but are pretty much exclusively a supplier of chip designs now.

Everything I've read speaks highly to the DAC of the iPhone.

But I think the DAC on my late 2009 iMac is noticeably worse than what the Dragonfly offers. I'm really happy with the Dragonfly's performance BUT I MIGHT BE HEARING THINGS, etc.

One of my audiophile colleagues doesn't think much of the iPhone 5 DAC compared to new d-fly but I'll try it out when we get one in the shop

allegedly the DAC in the iPhone 6 was a major upgrade

The DAC is fine, but the noise floor in a phone isn't great. Plus, they don't output 24/96 audio, so they can't get that much dynamic range out of it.