Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

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????????

That's great entry level stuff, I'm sure it sounds awesome! I was thinking of buying the DacMagic 100 for myself, think it'll be a good value upgrade and a very good match for your system. I'll see if I can take it home tonight and try it out. Can't come up with anything better - though you may also consider one of the new Cambridge amps w built in DAC such as the CXA60 http://www.crutchfield.com/S-pfePpt2A3YH/p_779CXA60S/Cambridge-Audio-CXA60-Silver.html - have only listened to it once but was impressed.

yeah i've been happy with it. i'm not really looking to upgrade my amp. so i'll checkout the DacMagic, just adding a $35 Chromecast Audio and a solid bargain audiophile DAC should be good.

I might be looking for something that can play a USB thumb drive through a home stereo...would one of these aforementioned DACs be the solution? Or something else?

a Heos Link can do that (and many other cool things) http://usa.denon.com/us/heos-link

Ums: brought the dacmagic100 home and tested - gotta admit I'm no big fan of a b demoing... but think it works really well, it's not a huge revelation but it makes everything sound more clear and relaxed, I'll probably get one (or a more expensive dac)

Have a somewhat expensive system that sounds a bit cheap w/o the dac but proper expensive w the dac :P

Thanks for the info, niels!

You're very welcome

Applying for jobs that match my degree in literature a bit better, but always happy when my experience with hifi turns out to be just a tiny bit useful outside of current job

Cool Thx, also read about the Musical Fidelity V90 which is at a similar price

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