Needles & Grooves

Which cans and which DAC?

Every blind test I've done over the years has shown me I can't hear the difference either.

@High Rant District 58X and monolith USB dac (i wrote a review of it on the digital audio thread)

planning on upgrading to a higher level sennheiser or something with a similar sound but more detailed like the sundara or the 6XX or whatever else might work

I can definitely tell a difference in lossless and Spotify streams using a CTH, Topping D10 and 6XX. I can rarely detect the difference with the same 6xx on a JDS ODAC and Objective2.

@debianlinux i do like my 58x's sound but might need a bit more intensity, and i do plan on bumping up slightly higher to a dragonfly red because i need a dongle dac.. so i dunno whether to do a 6XX or a different headphone

The 6xx definitely demands power to even begin to sound right. They do sound oh so right, though.

@debianlinux it was that or the sundaras to me... also tbh i think that tidal just in general bugs me... the exclusive mode pisses me off by forcing me at 48% system audio, and i dont even hear the difference in the FLAC and MQA compared to spotify

Have you downloaded FLAC or just streaming songs through Tidal? Are you sure your comp isn’t running the audio through something else first? Mac runs audio through something called OS Mixer which doesn’t give you the highest quality audio. IIRC you’re on windows but might have something similar happening

I’d double check your signal path. Unfortunately I only know how to easily do this through Roon. You should definitely be noticing a difference between Spotify and FLAC...