The Dark Side; Digital audio equipment recommendations and setup.

duke86fan said:
i dont even have a doctor rn because my family doesn't know what to do with me

and definitely no ear doctor that would really help.. i've had to go to the urgent care when i really needed it and they syringed my ear with water to the point that it hurt
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I'm sorry. I don't know what to tell you anymore. In theory, America is a reasonably rich country, and its citizens should have access to medical care. I'm not sure why you don't, and I have no idea how to fix that. All I know is that I asked my doctor about my hearing last year, and he hooked me up with an ENT (ear-nose-throat physician) to test my hearing with my insurance covering the bill. No water or pain was involved.
 
botherly said:
I'm thinking about starting a Roon thread, or should I just post about it here? I might document my experience setting it up with a NUC and building a Roon endpoint with a Raspberry Pi 3.
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If you plan to document its configuration, a separate thread might be better. It would be easier to find that way. I was starting to work on a Roon box myself using HP's pseudo-NUC before I got distracted by the Bottlehead.
If this keeps up, we just might need a subforum for project documentation.
 
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There's the DIY Projects thread you could utilize. It's gotten a bit buried over time

The DIY/Projects Thread

I pretty much only post about music here, so none of you would know I was an electronics technician. While I've never been much of an audiophile hobbyist I did get through a pretty substantial project, as apprentices a colleague and I made a pretty serious amplifier: Its a bit of a beast...
www.needlesandgrooves.com www.needlesandgrooves.com
 
duke86fan said:
I just keep hearing that a DAC will even make YouTube and Spotify (low bitrate AAC or OGG files) sound good. I just wanna hear that difference
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I'm not so sure I personally agree with that.. when I played AAC files with either my Marantz HD DAC1 and then my Vega, I don't hear much of a difference. But when I play Tidal on each, the difference is substantial. Junk in, junk out. Playing a scratchy, beat up vinyl on either a $100 TT or a $5000 TT is probably not going to make a huge difference either. I'm pretty new to the digital stuff, but I do find that, like vinyl, the source matters.
 
duke86fan said:
so then why am i feeling emotionally bleh with music and why do i download the FLACs instead of the MP3s when its more space on my computer (not to mention buying vinyl when it mostly sounds the same as an MP3 and just feels better).. my overthinking brain wonders "what is bottlenecking me from being able to hear things so good everyone loves it, are my headphones trash or are they good, would i benefit from a DAC or am i doing nothing, can i really not hear over 12 khz, are my headphones dying, why am i mentally bored by this stuff.. it cant be because i made stupid challenges of listening to a shit ton of music most i barely wanna listen to"...

i also probably am pissed because i sold what was probably a good quality copy of pet sounds so i could buy an analogue productions pet sounds that probably wont sound any different.
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Honestly if you can't hear a difference there is no need to worry about it. Store the smaller files, save yourself space, and listen away.
 
Slimwhit33 said:
I'm not so sure I personally agree with that.. when I played AAC files with either my Marantz HD DAC1 and then my Vega, I don't hear much of a difference. But when I play Tidal on each, the difference is substantial. Junk in, junk out. Playing a scratchy, beat up vinyl on either a $100 TT or a $5000 TT is probably not going to make a huge difference either. I'm pretty new to the digital stuff, but I do find that, like vinyl, the source matters.
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i just remember hearing that from john darko and some reviews on sites like analog planet
 
duke86fan said:
i just remember hearing that from john darko and some reviews on sites like analog planet
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I don't believe any DACs exist that will turn turds into diamonds. If it's a shitty source stream, some DACs might improve it a little bit but it won't make it sound like a million bucks. Compressed files simply are missing the information there. To use a somewhat bad/simple analogy, if you play a VHS on a 4K television, it's not going to suddenly look like a 4K bluray.

As @Joe Mac said though, if you can't hear the difference, no need to worry about sinking a bunch of money into it.
 
MikeH said:
I'm a proud Roon subscriber now! My brother and parents got me a 1 year sub to it for my bday. Already been diving into it and remember how much I loved it when I had the 30 day free trial.
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enjoy paying about 700 for it in a year


i am so lucky to not have multiple places to listen to music and just one laptop and one turntable... audiovana or foobar is all i'll need
 
duke86fan said:
enjoy paying about 700 for it in a year


i am so lucky to not have multiple places to listen to music and just one laptop and one turntable... audiovana or foobar is all i'll need
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Cool...? To each his own. I’m happy to pay for something I use every day and it accomplishes different things than what Audiovana or foobar would for me. It’s also quite awesome from the music discovery aspect.
 
MikeH said:
Cool...? To each his own. I’m happy to pay for something I use every day and it accomplishes different things than what Audiovana or foobar would for me. It’s also quite awesome from the music discovery aspect.
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Its not cheap but €10 a month on the yearly sub for something that is so far ahead of all its competitors and makes listening to files an experience rather than a chore is well worth it for me too. The fact you can add files from the two lossless streaming providers into your library is pretty damn awesome too!
 
Joe Mac said:
Its not cheap but €10 a month on the yearly sub for something that is so far ahead of all its competitors and makes listening to files an experience rather than a chore is well worth it for me too. The fact you can add files from the two lossless streaming providers into your library is pretty damn awesome too!
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Yea—I have a pretty large library of FLAC files and the ability to have all of my music in the same place as Qobuz and have it work seamlessly, along with multi room audio, radio streams, etc is so awesome. I also really enjoy the whole Roon Radio/focus features and have been discovering lots of old and new music. I never was a big Spotify fan and Apple Music was never great at helping me discover new music. So it’s been a revelation from that standpoint too.
 
MikeH said:
Yea—I have a pretty large library of FLAC files and the ability to have all of my music in the same place as Qobuz and have it work seamlessly, along with multi room audio, radio streams, etc is so awesome. I also really enjoy the whole Roon Radio/focus features and have been discovering lots of old and new music. I never was a big Spotify fan and Apple Music was never great at helping me discover new music. So it’s been a revelation from that standpoint too.
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Yeah I’m less of a fan of the radio/discovery, just because I like to discover music for myself through more traditional channels. Although then I’ll doubtless be playing it over qobuz through Roon lol! I love how it handles multi room too and having the NUC as an always on core that all other devices work off is a revelation!
 
Joe Mac said:
Yeah I’m less of a fan of the radio/discovery, just because I like to discover music for myself through more traditional channels. Although then I’ll doubtless be playing it over qobuz through Roon lol! I love how it handles multi room too and having the NUC as an always on core that all other devices work off is a revelation!
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Yea my computer is running Roon core at home now since I always have it on but might eventually switch over to a NUC if/when I move from an apartment to a house. I just really enjoy playing an album and when it’s done, it’ll just keep playing something similar. I definitely use other things for music discovery too and go with friend recommendations, etc. And my fiancé is British doing its nice to sometimes toss on the BBC radio stream on the weekends.
 
Slimwhit33 said:
I'm not so sure I personally agree with that.. when I played AAC files with either my Marantz HD DAC1 and then my Vega, I don't hear much of a difference. But when I play Tidal on each, the difference is substantial. Junk in, junk out. Playing a scratchy, beat up vinyl on either a $100 TT or a $5000 TT is probably not going to make a huge difference either. I'm pretty new to the digital stuff, but I do find that, like vinyl, the source matters.
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MikeH said:
I don't believe any DACs exist that will turn turds into diamonds. If it's a shitty source stream, some DACs might improve it a little bit but it won't make it sound like a million bucks. Compressed files simply are missing the information there. To use a somewhat bad/simple analogy, if you play a VHS on a 4K television, it's not going to suddenly look like a 4K bluray.

As @Joe Mac said though, if you can't hear the difference, no need to worry about sinking a bunch of money into it.
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btw here is the quote i got it from

"all of these dacs sound different, and all of them make spotify, soundcloud, tidal, qobuz, mixcloud, pandora, youtube, google play music if it still exists.. it makes any audio from the computer sound better than if we just used its headphone output"
 
MikeH said:
Yea my computer is running Roon core at home now since I always have it on but might eventually switch over to a NUC if/when I move from an apartment to a house. I just really enjoy playing an album and when it’s done, it’ll just keep playing something similar. I definitely use other things for music discovery too and go with friend recommendations, etc. And my fiancé is British doing its nice to sometimes toss on the BBC radio stream on the weekends.
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Oh yeah good old Beeb! I might have only moved across the Irish Sea but we don’t get BBC radio natively (unless you live near the border with the north or can pick up a weak signal from Wales). I love being able to stick on a stream of the amazing 6 music or even just 5 live for the football!
 
duke86fan said:


btw here is the quote i got it from

"all of these dacs sound different, and all of them make spotify, soundcloud, tidal, qobuz, mixcloud, pandora, youtube, google play music if it still exists.. it makes any audio from the computer sound better than if we just used its headphone output"
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Right—it should improve it slightly especially as the external DACs he showcases are better than a built-in laptop DAC. But the source still matters. FLAC will sound better than a YouTube stream of the same song. DACs won’t suddenly make compressed audio truly uncompressed.
 
MikeH said:
Right—it should improve it slightly especially as the external DACs he showcases are better than a built-in laptop DAC. But the source still matters. FLAC will sound better than a YouTube stream of the same song. DACs won’t suddenly make compressed audio truly uncompressed.
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oh... that makes sense... so it wont sound THAT much better.. i didn't notice much of a difference between my laptops soundcard and a dragonfly black (even though i was able to hear 96K like they wanted i still didn't notice much a difference in the sound quality). maybe the dragonfly sound just wasn't for me or maybe i just cant hear it... either are good posibilities
 
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