What's your setup/configuration look like?

[castalla]

What all this discussion has to do with how a user's system LOOKS is beyond me

 

[EddNog]

What all this discussion has to do with how a user's system LOOKS is beyond me

Because aesthetics are a thing.

 

[TonyE]

Those Tannoys aren’t all that different from my own speakers. MoFi SourcePoint 8, themselves just a, “miniaturized,” SourcePoint 10. Masterpiece design by Andrew Jones; I’ve endgamed with these.

-Ed

I think the Tannoys are a lot more efficient than the Sourcepoints though. An 8 watt triode or VFET will drive them to very loud levels.

You're too young to end game. Let's say you're "end game'd" for the next six months. Until you decide that Maggies are the Holy Grail. Which they are... just a PITA to live with.

Oh, don't post those pictures in the AVS forums.... your TV is much too small and you only have one subwoofer. You ought to check those people.... 120 inch screens and eight 24 inch woofers.... just on the front wall. ;-)

.....


It is worth mentioning that not everybody agrees about the importance of impulse-response fidelity, e.g.: Zero Phase In Studio Monitors

The article contains comments by dr. Floyd Toole, dr. Wolfgang Klippel, Andrew Jones and James Croft, who based on their research all seem to suggest impulse response / phase response accuracy to be much less of a priority in loudspeakers compared to flat on-axis magnitude response and smooth directivity - both of which are not really possible with one-way, full-range designs.

And by the way, even Bruno Putzeys in the article you linked advocates multiway speakers, he just prefers crossovers done in DSP because that way the designer can optimize both magnitude and phase response, as well as directivity and distortion.

Yes, there are definite issues with the widebanders. I cheat and have the little woofers to help them out under 60Hz, otherwise they can get "shouty". I do have the 8 inch drivers that I need to install in the cabs when I get around them... for those I got a super tweeter with a crossover at around 5Khz,. The smaller 4 inchers have pretty good treble. Within their loudness and low frequency limitations they are fantastic sounding affairs though.

Thanks for the article. Bruno does indeed push for two way speakers. He points out the issue with how different drivers will work into the room and the phase anomalies of crossovers. One of things he noted is how to create a curve that will counter act the phase shifts of the crossovers. I'm seriously thinking of getting a DSP that will allow me to modify the signal in the time domain and then feed that into dual amps at home and see how that works. It will not be a frequency domain correction, just a time domain correction. Something that requires a DSP of sorts.

Oh, one more thing about Bruno.... note he sort of agrees about dipoles and how they load the room. He is very right, the loudness of the waveform of large planar dipoles decays linearly with distance and doesn't get much reinforcement from the room... whereas point source monopoles decay with the square of the distance and at our usual listening distances ( 12 feet or so ) are predominantly the "room sound".

 

[TonyE]

What all this discussion has to do with how a user's system LOOKS is beyond me

Ay caramba! From the Land of Lladro no less.

How can you say such things?

You should know about such things.

I've been to Valencia... my great, great, great, great... grandfather came from Castellon. Plus the family roots in the usual places in Alicante, Valencia and Cartagena. Now my roots in Navarra... well... yeah, they'd agree with comment of yours, but anyone who grew up along the Coast, would understand things that look good.

( los americanos no tienen ni idea de lo que hablo.. )

Oh, soon we'll be there for two months... Mayo y Junio. I figure there will be less tourists this year. Wife might want more Lladros...

 

[Mr Ee]

I’ve endgamed with these.

You go through hifi faster than I can read your posts.
You'll have something new in your 'Setup' pictures next month.

 

[castalla]

Ay caramba! From the Land of Lladro no less.

How can you say such things?

You should know about such things.

I've been to Valencia... my great, great, great, great... grandfather came from Castellon. Plus the family roots in the usual places in Alicante, Valencia and Cartagena. Now my roots in Navarra... well... yeah, they'd agree with comment of yours, but anyone who grew up along the Coast, would understand things that look good.

( los americanos no tienen ni idea de lo que hablo.. )

Oh, soon we'll be there for two months... Mayo y Junio. I figure there will be less tourists this year. Wife might want more Lladros...

Benvinguts

 

[slartibartfast]

I figure there will be less tourists this year. Wife might want more Lladros...

For some reason lots of people are booking holidays in Western Europe this year. It might be busier than you think.

War prompts Europeans to switch holidays away from eastern Mediterranean

Summer holidaymakers opting for ‘more familiar, easy-to-reach locations’ as travel industry counts cost of Middle East conflict

www.theguardian.com

 

[EddNog]

You go through hifi faster than I can read your posts.
You'll have something new in your 'Setup' pictures next month.

Speakers are the thing I stick with. I also dicked around with cheaper stuff until I finally bit the bullet and bought the summit gear I always wanted (the full Topping D90 III/Pre90/B200 set).

Here’s a good analogy: I didn’t want to spend the money on the NSX, but that was really what I wanted. So I fucked around with a Miata, then an RX-7, then a 300ZX, then a 3000GT, then an S2000…wasted time and money. Finally spotted the NSX in the color I wanted, low mileage, good price used. Done, got my NSX.

Speakers were the same; the LS50 Metas were cheap, under $800 for open-box pair. No way I could spring almost $3K for those MoFis. One day an open box set showed up for $1,600. Immediately sprang for them and sold the LS50s. Done.

So speakers, amp, DAC, even preamp are done.

Yes, I’m still fuckin around with my streamers, but that’s to be given. They’re not crazy expensive (got a Raspberry Pi 3 kit coming in tomorrow, and a FiiO SR11 on its way from China. Yes, I can get a silver one in America. No, I don’t want a silver one, so a black one from China for $60 more it is). I am playing around with a FiiO R7 right now, which is cool, and I’m going to keep it for my headphone setup, but the SR11 or the Raspberry Pi will likely end up as my speaker chain head unit.

I dropped off my Eversolo DMP-A6 Gen 2 this afternoon at Whole Foods for Amazon return. My dad’s WiiM Ultra is going up on eBay some time soon. I sold my own one many months ago already. I played with the Fosi S3 yesterday. It’s okay, but it’s not black and it is currently still Roon UNready, so back to Amazon it went this morning from the UPS store.

Call it stupid if you like, but there’s no Roon Ready WiiM that’s black AND has USB out, so that means there’s no WiiM on the market for me at this time (plus I convert my DSD stuff to 352.8KHz/32-bit PCM in Roon and the WiiMs don’t go over 192KHz).

-Ed

 

[castalla]

For some reason lots of people are booking holidays in Western Europe this year. It might be busier than you think.

War prompts Europeans to switch holidays away from eastern Mediterranean

Summer holidaymakers opting for ‘more familiar, easy-to-reach locations’ as travel industry counts cost of Middle East conflict

www.theguardian.com

If this 'excursion' continues there'll be no tourism as the cost of aviation fuel escalates ... in fact virtually all economic activity is going to suffer.

 

[TonyE]

@castalla..... non stop round trip tickets from LAX to BCN paid for already. 88 Kg of checked in luggage and another 24Kg of carry on.

We do have a rental car for the month of June. Car, parking and insurance all paid for. If worse comes to worse we'll put brandy in it.

So long as AVE, the metro and taxis are running we're OK. In any event, Barcelona is a walkable city and we're staying very close to family. Heck, our airBnB is a block from my old school. ;-)

Oh tourists... we stay away from the parts of town where they congregate.. When we travel we are locals.

And yes, I check out the stereo shops.

We're taking the WiiM Sound this time. We're gonna have Tidal HiFi and Netflix (take a Chromecast with us.. always). It's gonna be a nice luxury in our "home base". We have a place with a veranda on La Diagonal.

I'm not worried about the Middle East. We're avoiding the UK, France, Amsterdam, etc... No further North than Andorra, Perpignan and Llivia. We'll do Toledo, Madrid for sure. Tarragona, Girona, Figeres, Cadaques, Costa Brava, Costa del Azahar... two months is too short. So we won't go to Zaragoza, Pamplona and Bilbao.

No, we can't take the WiiM Sound in the short trips... We'll have to make up by drinking more wine.

Oh, of course.... Cava, Rueda (verdejo), Monastrell, Garnacha, Ribera del Duero (tempranillo), Penedes. No Rioja... pfft... that's for export. In Japan we became experts in Sochu and Awamori... When is Rome do as the Romans. There's a particularly fine black garnacha from Tarragona (Reus) that is still inexpensive and it's fantastic chilled on a hot summer afternoon with a bit of pan fried fish.... We figure we'll drink a few cases.... 60 days... 5 cases, at least. Since we got an AirBnB with kitchen... if we invite the family over, figure another two more cases to start.

Molt bé, per la teva salut

Interesting thing. though. Even though the World Cup is in North America, we'll be in the Old Country. I just hope that being ranked Number One we don't get bumped out early. It'd be nice to see Barca win and then Spain win too.

 

[Mr Ee]

Call it stupid if you like

I hope you realise that wasn't at all what I meant.
I'm almost jealous of all the gear you've had through your lounge! (OK, not almost.)
Keep it up, it's interesting hearing your thoughts on all the gear; certainly better than some YouTubers

I'm in the market for a new headphone amp, so will read up on the R7 now...
Although I'll probably get the topping dx5 ii, fed from my wiim ultra.

Oh, and nice car Finally.

 

[castalla]

@castalla..... non stop round trip tickets from LAX to BCN paid for already. 88 Kg of checked in luggage and another 24Kg of carry on.

We do have a rental car for the month of June. Car, parking and insurance all paid for. If worse comes to worse we'll put brandy in it.

So long as AVE, the metro and taxis are running we're OK. In any event, Barcelona is a walkable city and we're staying very close to family. Heck, our airBnB is a block from my old school. ;-)

Oh tourists... we stay away from the parts of town where they congregate.. When we travel we are locals.

And yes, I check out the stereo shops.

Get a bank loan! 1 US gallon of gas would cost about 8 dollars today... Check your car has the obligatory V16 emergency signal light - triangles are redundant.

 

[TonyE]

Get a bank loan! 1 US gallon of gas would cost about 8 dollars today... Check your car has the obligatory V16 emergency signal light - triangles are redundant.

Gas in California is now above 5 bucks per gallon.

When you realize how much longer our distances are in the US, you realize that gas in Spain is cheap.

Heck, everything in Spain and Japan is cheap compared to what we pay in the US.

We could rent our house in the US and spend half the year in Kyoto and half in Barcelona and spend half the money that we spend in the US.

The only emergency I dread is dropping the porron.

 

[slartibartfast]

Get a bank loan! 1 US gallon of gas would cost about 8 dollars today... Check your car has the obligatory V16 emergency signal light - triangles are redundant.

A rental car should be OK. Of course rental cars are like magnets for thieves in Barcelona.

 

[TonyE]

A rental car should be OK. Of course rental cars are like magnets for thieves in Barcelona.

Funny you'd say that.

The only time we've had an issue was in Valencia.

We had a summer cold, so we were blowing our noses all the time. To collect the trash we had a plastic shopping bag from El Corte Ingles around the stick shift. Otherwise the car was empty. Our stuff was in the hotel.

We went out to dinner, an outdoor paella (*), late in the evening. Parked our rental in a pay park with a couple of guards. When we got back there were a bunch of guardia civiles around our car... the doors were opened, there were used kleenex all over the front and two moros sitting on the curb nearby, handcuffed.

Turns out they thought we had stuff from El Corte Ingles... they broke in, found the used snot Kleenex and got busted immediately.

We had no issues in Barcelona.

Naturally, we're not going to Andalucia and within Barcelona we don't need to drive so the car will stay in the car park. We're staying by Gracia, so that's a neighborhood without too many tourists to begin with.

(*) It was a paella de cazadores... with snail, rabbit, chicken.... the waiters brought the paella to our table and told us to wait for 5 minutes to let it rest. From the corner of my eye I could see they were snickering about the Americanos who had no clue what they'd ordered. Well, we showed them, when they served us, the first thing we devoured were the snails. They were delicious.

 

[EddNog]

I hope you realise that wasn't at all what I meant.
I'm almost jealous of all the gear you've had through your lounge! (OK, not almost.)
Keep it up, it's interesting hearing your thoughts on all the gear; certainly better than some YouTubers

I'm in the market for a new headphone amp, so will read up on the R7 now...
Although I'll probably get the topping dx5 ii, fed from my wiim ultra.

Oh, and nice car Finally.

That’s the one that’s not even that into music! This big fella on the other hand, here he is laying next to me during a listening session:


What headphones are you listening with? I recently bought a Schiit Jotunheim 3 to drive my pair of Dan Clark Æon 2 Closed with Noire pads. I absolutely love these cans! I’ve had a pair of Sennheiser HD 6XX for years, and they’re great, just wish they had more bass. The DCA planars, which I bought refurb a couple of months ago, gave me exactly that, very similar tonality except with proper bass, and even more punch, but no sacrifice in the mids or highs at all. The main thing is these planars need serious current to sing, so while the HD 6XX sound the same with the Jotunheim 3 as with the Topping L30 II, I noticed a serious improvement with punch and slam with the Æon 2s when I went from the Topping to the big Schiit. I do admit the Mesh card in the Jotunheim 3 was a waste; I should’ve just saved the money and bought the amp itself. The R7’s DAC is way better, so I plan to use the balanced Line Out from the R7 to feed the Jot 3’s balanced line in and see how it compares to the integrated Mesh DAC (which is currently connected to a USB port on my Mac Mini M1/Roon Server).

-Ed

 

[Mr Ee]

What headphones are you listening with?

I've been eyeing Schiit stuff for a while.
Stop making it so complicated for me. I thought I'd reached a decision!
I had the Fiio K13, Fosi ZH3 and Topping DX5 II on my shortlist.
Have the Fiio. Bought and sold the Fosi (didn't like it much), so thought I might as well try the Topping. And it has a spectrum analyser


Fostex TH900 mk2 for 'serious' listening. Astell & Kern T5P, which is what I'm looking for a headphone amp for. To me, they sound like a 'baby' Fostex (even though a couple of reviews I read were mediocre, I really like them - shows what the so-called experts know ), but of the many headphones I tried at my local(ish) hifi store the Fostex were the ones I craved, and finally bought 2nd hand (I bought the A&Ks from the store).

I don't use my B&W P9 Signatures much as they are open backed, but they are a totally different listening experience.
And my wife says they are dog-sh** brown!

If only I lived near you. It seems there's a thriving 2nd hand market there...

Guess I have to post a pic of a headphone setup now to keep on topic.

 

[EddNog]

I've been eyeing Schiit stuff for a while.
Stop making it so complicated for me. I thought I'd reached a decision!
I had the Fiio K13, Fosi ZH3 and Toppping DX5 II on my shortlist.
Have the Fiio. Bought and sold the Fosi (didn't like it much), so thought I might as well try the Topping. And it has a spectrum analyser


Fostex TH900 mk2 for 'serious' listening. Astell & Kern T5P, which is what I'm looking for a headphone amp for. To me, they sound like a 'baby' Fostex (even though a couple of reviews I read were mediocre, I really like them - shows what the so-called experts know ), but of the many headphones I tried at my local(ish) hifi store the Fostex were the ones I craved, and finally bought 2nd hand (I bought the A&Ks from the store).

I don't use my B&W P9 Signatures much as they are open backed, but they are a totally different listening experience.
And my wife says they are dog-sh** brown!

If only I lived near you. It seems there's a thriving 2nd hand market there...

Guess I have to post a pic of a headphone setup now to keep on topic.

Headphones are different because the size and shape of our head and ears dramatically affects what we hear and how the headphones fit, so I take reviews and even measurements with a much larger grain of salt when it comes to headphones. What sounds great to me literally may sound like poop or feel incredibly uncomfortable for you to wear.

Looks like T5P does not require mega amplification, so the Topping should be fine. Same for TH-900. The response graph for TH-900 looks like something even I’d like. Both are good looking cans!

-Ed

 

[TonyE]

@Mr Ee ... check out the Nitsch Pietus Maximus before you buy a Schiit branded headphone amp...

DIY Whammy with a bunch of opamps to roll.
Nitsch Pietus Maximus (with DAC).

Grado SR325 with the big cups
Oppo PM3 (upgraded factory cables)
Sennheiser HD650 ( stock ).

I have not used the Topping D90LE much to drive headphones, I guess I should.

Having a dedicated home office system and working from home means I don't listen to headphones as much as I used to. It's sad that Oppo got out of the business.

I ought to look into the Fostex headphones... love their wideband speakers... any recommendations? Most likely I'll go second hand, as usual.

 

[TonyE]

I do admit the Mesh card in the Jotunheim 3 was a waste; I should’ve just saved the money and bought the amp itself. The R7’s DAC is way better, so I plan to use the balanced Line Out from the R7 to feed the Jot 3’s balanced line in and see how it compares to the integrated Mesh DAC (which is currently connected to a USB port on my Mac Mini M1/Roon Server).

-Ed

Can you get the multibit DAC card in the Jotunheim? It's a plug in, right?

Yes, it seems like the Mesh DAC is a down step from the multibit ( with Unison ). It's also cheaper. I'm sorry for you but glad to have found out because you saved me the money.... I guess my next DAC upgrade will be a Schitt Gungnir 2 or Yggdrasil ( I doubt the Cingular will be on the used market any time soon... I might have to pay MSRP.... look for sales... )