Awesome Audiophile Snake Oil

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

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").