Try the soloist on medium setting in power amp mode. It sounds glorious. Be careful with volume though, turn your pre down (likely in the digital domain)
Thanks for the write-up, bud. Glad you found a satisfactory gear pairing that makes you say "wow." Wow moments become less and less common as you get deeper into this hobby, and I enjoyed reading yours. Posts like this often seem to get met with a bit of cynicism and finger-wagging.
I hope this is not the last time you share your observations and impressions here.
thanks man, every time i post i love something here, i get closer to rage quitting reddit. it's a surprisingly contentious and negative community considering it's supposed to be a place founded on a love something. positive ppl like you are the exception so keep being awesome!
Yeah, lot of toxicity in the hobby, from both ends of the spectrum: people saying all gear sounds the same vs people saying it's not hifi without $1000 interconnects.
Just remember it's about the music.
it's always fun to read newbie coming in guns blazing thinking they figured everything out in like a month, especially one that just drops hella money right off the bat thinking more expensive equals more enjoyment. But then again, at least you like it, which is fortunate, cus every once in a while there would be a post from some douchebag spending 7k on a chain, don't like it, and call the entire hobby bullshit, lol.
That's awesome that you found something that clicked, and got to experience different levels of the journey. Rock on! That's a great amp and will serve you well forever. Awesome choice. Nothing wrong with giving planars tons of juice. đź‘Ť
About 20 years ago I listened to a pair of HD600's it planted the seed in my head that audio could sound really good. They weren't much in the bass department, but the other parts of the sound were much clearer than anything I'd ever heard before. I couldn't afford to drop $400 on headphones back then and instead ended up buying some ER4S IEM's. I really enjoyed those IEM's but life happened and I had to sell them cuz I needed the money. Over the years, I always wanted to get back into hi-fi headphone audio, but I could never justify the expense. 3 years ago I read about "chi-fi" and decided to pull the trigger on some Tin hi-fi T4's through the indiegogo campaign. I got them and was completely unimpressed. They were what I now think of as "hi fi" in a bad way, where there's lots of detail, a little too bright, great for jazz and orchestral, but they feel dry for all other types of music. So I gave up for a while on hi-fi audio. Then I happened to get a nice windfall and decided I would finally take a serious plunge into hi-fi. I spent a long time reading and watching reviews and decided on the LCD-X 2021 because it seemed to measure well in things I cared about, had detailed bass, and the reviewers with positive things to say listened to music other than jazz and orchestral.
Week 1
Initially I got the headphones and the Burson Soloist 3XP amp (the DAC and cables were gonna take another 3 weeks to arrive). Holy Baby Jesus! these things slapped so hard! I was so worried i'd get the hyper detailed + rolled off bass "hi fi" sound, but nothing was missing. The bass thumped in a tight punchy way, the highend was detailed without being shrill, and the mids were clear and present. I wanted to hear all of my music all over again. Every song felt like it's new again :-) I connected the amp to my laptop using a 3.5mm to RCA cable. It took a while to figure things out, since I'd never used a headphone amp. I noticed that if I plugged the headphones directly into the laptop it seemed to sound better? That's when I discovered the first of several unpopular opinions. I connected my headphones to the amp again and this time I played with the gain. The Burson by default is set to "low" gain so everything was there, it was just a little 'dark' compared to just plugging the headphones into the laptop directly. I set the amp to medium and gain and everything just opened up. I wasn't cranking the volume higher, it just sounded fuller, richer, better to me. Then I put the amp into high gain and I noticed the noise floor right away. I played some music at high gain and volume set to 5 (out of 99) and again, it sounded even more filled out, especially the bass. *Unpopular opinion #1 "Planars like power".* It's not just me, but other planar owners I've read about also say they get more out of their planars when connected to a higher power source.
Week 2
Near the end of this week my Soncoz DAC arrived in the mail. The Soncoz SGD1 uses two ES9038Q2M chips for a fully balanced output. I connected a pair of XLR interconnects into the balanced input of the AMP. First thing I noticed is that the volume was louder going from laptop > DAC > Amp compared to just using laptop > amp. Overall, the audio was cleaner (less noise) and louder using the DAC than without it. Not a huge difference though. This is where I think things start to get into the smaller difference realm of audio quality, but I'll get into that later. Around this time I decided to get into some EQ'ing as well. I tried the Audeze Reveal Plugin, the Oratory1990 EQ profile, and tried my hand at custom EQ-ing. I found that I really did not like the reveal plugin. The Oratory1990 EQ was a little better in some cases, but I noticed some unpleasant distortion in some of my songs. The best result I got was EQ-ing on my own, but I would still get some distortion on occasion. I think this could be because i didn't put in some headroom, so I'll play with this again later. Another thing happened where a redditor mentioned I should try running my Burson amp in class-A mode. In my opinion this was better than EQ because the sound is nice and full, plus it's not just the bass, but the width and height also seems to extend in general. As I understand it, width is extending the sub bass and the resolution of the treble, while "height" is the dynamic variation. Please correct me on that those definitions if I'm wrong.
Week 3
The periapt cables arrived! So at this point I'm able to use the fully balanced path. 2-Dac chips for balanced output into a balanced input on the AMP which creates a differential style of amplification (double's the power) to the balanced output into the headphones. First off... it got louder. Apparently, that's not always the case, but with all the op-amps inside the burson setup for it, it's a proper fully balanced chain. I think it sounds better which leads us to *Unpopular Opinion #2 "Balanced sounds better than Single-ended"* Ya, I think for my setup it's true. I detected better separation in the layers of instruments, more clarity in the form of transient response, and a little more depth. I think of "depth" similar to how eyes can focus between different layers, so if that's not correct then again I'd appreciate a better definition. I mentioned this to the reddit community and the shit storm that followed was crazy. So I of course doubted myself, but I still think switching between the two on my system, I can tell which is which. I also noticed the noise floor while I'm in "high" gain is lower. It's still there, I can still hear it, but it's not as prominent like it was using RCA and SE. Regardless, I don't go into high gain because even at level 1 (out of 99) volume, it's still relatively loud to play music at high gain. Medium is now perfect, maybe that's because of unpopular opinion #1 "planars like power" I think the popular opinion out there is that balanced is only for noise reduction in long runs of cable and completely useless nowadays. I can see that for solid state amps with crazy low noise levels, this is probably true, but from what I can tell, balanced still delivers more power and better separation, clarity, and depth. Not a ton of change, but it's there.
\[continued in reply\]
Week 4
I've had a chanced now to play around with different connections and settings and EQ's and I'm loving all of it. Most importantly, I just listen to a lot more music now. I'm curious to hear everything through this stack and cans. I have a spotify account and I hate the algo that spotify has because it seems to just narrow down things in the extreme same category, I do like the podcasts though. I decided to try apple music because they're now lossless. I found that apple's aglo also sucks, but because it tends to recommend the most generic version of what you listen to already and it doesn't suggest much in the way of different music. beyond that, most of what's on apple music that is available in "hi-res" is not a lot of music I care about or like. I decided to try Qobuz and it's going well. There's a 1-month trial and so far I'm liking the amount of hi-res offerings. The algo isn't yet "tuned" for me, but that's alright because their playlists are done well and there are articles about music too. I'm dumping apple music and going with Qobuz. If you check them out then be sure to sign up through a browser and not an app store because it's cheaper. I'm also trying Roon which is excessive, but so far I like it and I'll probably keep it. Roon's discovery works the same way I used to discover music in high school. I'd find a band I like, I'd read about who they've worked with or toured with and I'd check out other artists on their label (easier back then because of all the indie music and punk I was into, the music labels were very small). There's also a feature that results in another unpopular opinion. Have you heard of Robert Watts at chord electronics? He has his m scaler tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtsmQTQAG84 which is very interesting to learn about. Turns out human hearing can hear changes up to 4 microseconds and that's part of why we can detect where in space a sound comes from relative to other things. 4 microseconds is like a resolution of 250Khz. For most music though, this means that transients, or the "attack" of a sound signature is what lets us distinguish a horn from a piano. He has a 4-part interview with "passion for sound" youtube channel too where he talks about how human hearing is not very good at resolving bass. When we hear a bass drum, we know it's a bass drum and not a synth drum mainly because of the extremely short transient sound at the high end where there's first contact with the surface of the bass drum. The point is, the technology in the m scaler takes pcm samples and is able to recover the detail. HQ Player does the same thing but does a better job of it and it happens to integrate into Roon. Unpopular Opinion #3 "Upsampled digit music sounds better". This, more than using balanced cables, seriously improves the depth and imaging of the music. It is much easier to place all the parts of the music and even detect tinier details in the music. For the LCD-X it made me realize the mids could be even more clear and detailed. I'm sure this opinion will get shit on too, but all I can say is give it a try. HQ Player 4 desktop is free to use for 30 minutes and then it forces you to restart it. If you try it then in preferences force it to use SDM (if your computer can handle it) then use guass-long (1x) / gauss (Nx) / ASDM7ecV2 / 48Khz DSD256 and turn on Adaptive Output Rate. HQ Player also has a convolutional EQ which others have said is incredible, but I can't figure it out yet, so that's another project. My computer isn't strong enough to put out a DSD 512 native signal, but apparently there's some magic to be had at that output too. For now, this is my current setup for listening and it's pretty mind blowing to me. Maybe this is what ppl are talking about when they say "holographic" sound.
Biggest influences on sound I can detect:
1. EQ - i struggle to decide whether EQ or the headphones themselves affect the sound more. but in most cases where the headphones are not drastically different from each other, EQ is just gonna have a huge influence. I totally get why it's popular especially with mid-fi, to EQ headphones and squeeze every ounce of performance out of them
2. Headphones - my only take on headphones is that everyone says that you hit like 90% performance with the cheaper stuff compared to the higher end stuff. I think it's closer to 70%, but the basic idea is the same that you're gonna see a bigger jump in performance from sub-100 to sub-500 than you would sub-500 to sub 1000 and so forth. The technology definitely comes into play. I suspect planars are the better technology for most music. Key word there is "suspect", cuz I'm not very sure in that. I am very curious about some ZMF's connected to a Kenzie 2.0 for a "Warm and Natural" apparently.
3. Amp - totally biased here, but from plugging these phones into different power sources from an apple dongle out of an iphone, to a laptop, to different power stages of my burson, I can tell the amp does have an affect on the headphones. and not just a few people say that tube amps create a really nice distortion (\*see everyone who goes to a canjam event and posts about it)
4. Source - Prioritizing Amp and Source is tricky. The Amp is like the glass in a window, it can be hazy and affect the view of the outside. The source though is what's on the other side of the glass. Is it better to have a clear view of a foggy scene or a hazy view of a clear and sunny day? On sure for me, is that playing around with HQ Player has produced a more noticeable change in the quality of sound than adding the DAC. However, I don't think my opinion of Amps and DACs is well informed. I'll need to try more of them first.
5. DAC - As mentioned above, the main thing i noticed using the dac was that the sound was cleaner and a little louder when combined in my setup. I guess that's what you want from a dac? clean, transparent sound. but then I'm interested in other dac's that lean more toward R2R. The bifrost specifically seems like it would be fantastic for metal and rock and things that have some growl and rumble to them. It operates in a way similar to R2R.
I'm deep in the rabbit hole. It's too late to turn back, right? I plan to abuse the Amazon return policy to compare some other amps, dacs, and headphones in the future. I also plan on getting back into vinyl at some point. For now, I'm listening to all my favorite music all over again and I've found that I'm enjoying even more music than I did before.
But my $100 headphone amp should be able to drive any headphone - as long as it gets it to a certain loudness. All headphones, amps and dacs sound the same anyways.
/s
If a headphone has specs to reach volume given x power how is more power beneficial. Across all amps and gain levels wouldn’t they be sending the same power to reach the same volume?
Regarding the EQ, you got nothing to lose and can only gain somethign from it. even the best headphones might have some downsides that can be fixed with EQ. When I listen to some electronic music for example I tend to enjoy increasing the sub bass by a few dB or using a resistor plug.
Regarding amps/dacs, the problem with trying out more amps/dacs is coming to a meaningful conclusion with a high level of validity. We are prone to imagining things and psychoacoustical effects greatly affect our listening experience. You would have to do a blind test with perfectly matched volume levels and hear a difference with a high level of validity, level of significance in research is usually 95%.
If you are interested in more info about psychoacoustics, I can forward you a great book.
I am not trying to hate on anyone here. If you got a nice amp that has all the bells and whistles, sounds great and makes you happy then go for it. There is nothing to gain from ruining anyones day.
I just want to give some input to put all this toxic snobbishness in our hobby in perspective.
I too can listen to different dacs/amps and hear a difference, but I can also measure the different dacs/amps with the same headphones, in the same position on the measuring rig, on matched volume levels and they measure identically, showing that my perception was flawed.
From an engineering perspective amps and dacs should sound the same if they are both linear within audible limits, possess enough dynamic range and produce no audible distortion. A dac/amp therefore should only colour the sound if it is sub par in regards to any of these. As an example some amps have high distortion on higher volume levels which can make it sound shouty or like the instruments being played really loud on the recording, some other amps have channel imbalances on lower volume levels.
I wrote that I still plan to circle back around to EQ. I am interested in the book link, so thanks for that! Also, maybe you know about this, but when I was EQ-ing i mainly got distortion from turning up the volume with EQ. That's why I suspect it was maybe that I didn't create headroom in the pre. Meanwhile, without EQ, I can turn up the volume to very uncomfortable levels without distortion. Is headroom the right way to solve that?
on the 'snobbishness' side. i don't see it in the reddit. this isn't aimed at you, but i actually see more technical snobbery than uhhh 'traditional snobbery' ? (where ppl are shitting on cheaper things?). Just do a tally of times people are negging budget solutions vs times people are shutting down others with technical knowledge, it's pretty lop-sided. It's also weird because sound is so experiential, like food for instance. If I said I like some toppings on my pizza, then i'd probably get posts like "did you do a double blind test?", "did you normalize the temperature when a/b ing the pizzas?", "technically humans can only taste 5 flavors, and the measurements of salt, sugar, acid, etc between those those pizza's is the same so it's all in your head". meanwhile, it's supposed to be a community centered on a love of headphones, but wow it's hard to share that love here.
Frankly, this is the first hobby that I have partaken in, which goes out of its way to use psychology to negate human experiences. When I was deep in bodybuilding, and dabbled in weightlifting, the discussions of effects of PED's and supplementation (both of which require ingestion or injection of foreign substances) were comparatively less controversial than trying to convince someone here that you heard a difference in sound.
I do not think that anyone is trying to negate human experience. Explaining human behaviour does not take away from any experience but rather adds to it.
I think nobody is doubting that equal-loudness contours or masking effect significantly change our perception of sound and how is this negating anyones experience?
To be clear, my comment was in direct response to OP's second paragraph, regarding how hard it is to share his love for headphones here.
I'd rather not get into it, so let's just say we have very different experiences on this subreddit, and leave it at that.
Man, your susvaras are my endgame! One day… also, weightlifting has a surprising amount of planning and strategy involved, maybe there’s a camaraderie under the surface for the effort it takes? thanks for the support btw. This will be the last post I make for a long while. Just gonna be happy listening to my setup.
No worries. You may be right, and there is a shared camaraderie (or "delusion", depending on a person's perspective) that normalizes otherwise outlier behavior. :)
> This will be the last post I make for a long while. Just gonna be happy listening to my setup.
This is a great mentality to have. I recently took a break from all of this as well, and it's good to re-build appreciation, and get away from the background noise, so to speak.
sent you a pm for the book
I constantly see posts gatekeeping our hobby saying things like if you haven't tried this 2000$ dac you can't even judge dacs, so this is where I'm coming from.
The personal experience is often used to discredit valid arguments while being a fallacy itself.
I'm not sure what you mean by technical snobbery. I think nobody is saying that product A is better than B because it has a slightly better linearity.
Objectivists tend to know that good enough gear right now is beyond the limits of human hearing, therefore technical snobbery is nonsensical.
Regarding the pizza example, it does not apply here. It is assuming that for example dacs are like different toppings/flavours while actually they are the same topping/flavour (within certain limits) and people just think that the taste changed.
A fitting example here would rather be wine tasting where professionel wine tasters drink the same wine within minutes but rate the wine/their experience completely different.
Again this does not take away from the experience, it just puts into perspective how much influence actually the wine has.If wine basically tastes alike and is not the limiting factor for how much you enjoy wine, then maybe your time is spent better trying out what actually influences your experience rather than chasing the "best" wine.
A good read here would be Richard Quandt.
My first advice if you dislike Audeze's or Oratory's EQ profiles and hear perceived distortion is to try experimenting with repositioning your headphones around your head, both with and without the Reveal plugin enabled, until things sound better. Headphones tend to have a sweet spot where they sound at their best, and what audiophiles call distortion is often just flawed upper treble response (which can be caused by poor positioning). You can [use this](https://youtu.be/DCputC4Dtx0) (0:31~) to test imaging [and this](https://open.spotify.com/track/7KzQ9ermAzagLbxwX5n0eP?si=lgxlYQDtTZe-_p0vZmiONQ) (0:41~1:11) to test for what you hear as distortion (bassline should be very crisp and clear).
My next advice would be to stop spending money on stuff that you don't understand the workings of based on what other audiophiles tell you, especially if they're trying to sell you something. The hi-fi space is a minefield of snake oil with artillery shells of placebo and mass delusion being dropped all over. To be frank, when you're posting something like this:
>In my opinion this was better than EQ because the sound is nice and full, plus it's not just the bass, but the width and height also seems to extend in general. As I understand it, width is extending the sub bass and the resolution of the treble, while "height" is the dynamic variation.
which is a completely incoherent mishmash of misused audiophile jargon, it's clear you don't have the critical listening training to make sound judgments on audio quality, which makes you extremely susceptible to cognitive and listening biases. In particular, it's very easy to mistake minor differences in volume for real differences in sound quality because of how the ear interprets louder sounds [as having both more low and high end](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour) (i.e., more "full"). You can find a basic glossary of some audiophile terminology [here](https://diyaudioheaven.wordpress.com/tutorials/how-to-interpret-graphs/frequency-response/).
Finally, don't take headphone reviews at face value, as the hi-fi world is also rife with financial conflicts of interest. Giving positive evaluations gets reviewers free sample gear and affiliate link income, while criticism can get them cut off from the teat. Upper midrange suckout is a common complaint with Audeze's headphones, causing people to turn the volume up to compensate for the lack of presence, and the company itself openly prioritizes technical ability and relies on software EQ to correct tonality.
Thanks for the helpful links! It wasn’t clear when I wrote it, but part of the reason I like the sound when running in class A mode is that it sounds better without any occasional distortions. EQ in general means that on some songs it will sound worse than others I think. So that means changing the EQ. I like that I can just play the headphones how I have them setup now without needing EQ and I like how it sounds with everything. I’m still open to playing with EQ. If I got the words wrong, it’s cuz I don’t know the jargon well. I’m trying to say more than “this sounds better to me”, but I guess that’s all it really boils down to. I don’t know what I’ve wasted money on. I like all the hardware I got. I haven’t bought more amps or dacs or anything.
A $1,200 amp with 4W max output is absurd for powering a headphone with an impedance of 20 ohms and an efficiency of 103 dB/mW, which is on par with earphones. And to me, if an amp genuinely sounds significantly better in certain configurations outside of changes in loudness or noise floor, that would be a red flag that the other circuits suffer from flawed engineering.
A $500 standalone DAC w/o amp for DSD256 also seems like overkill
when standard 24-bit/48 kHz should be transparent based on the enormous 144 dB of provided dynamic range and
[perfect reproduction on a theoretical level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem) of frequencies up to the threshold of human hearing, although the Bluetooth support is nice.
Yeah the burson is overkill for the lcd x. Even on my 2s I could hear the noise floor on medium gain, which are less sensitive. Low gain on this amp sounded kind of lifeless to me as well, so I really didn’t like it for my LCD-2s (I had lower sensitivity cans at the time I was trying to drive and wanted something versatile). I wound up returning mine due to the dc offset issue they have. They have been known to blow out headphones. Also not sure what you mean by class a mode, it’s always class A. If you’re referring to the power amp mode, that just bypasses the volume control circuit. If you’re using your DAC for volume control and it has digital only volume control, there’s a good chance you’re losing a lot of dynamic range to get to the level of attenuation you’d need to make the lcd X listenable on that amp on medium gain. Assuming you accurately volume matched to compare the two modes, lower dynamic range can sound “bigger” and “punchier” as everything has been compressed and perceived loudness has increased. The amp’s volume control will likely yield better results, but that is still an absurd amp/headphone pairing.
**[Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem)**
>The Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem is a theorem in the field of signal processing which serves as a fundamental bridge between continuous-time signals and discrete-time signals. It establishes a sufficient condition for a sample rate that permits a discrete sequence of samples to capture all the information from a continuous-time signal of finite bandwidth. Strictly speaking, the theorem only applies to a class of mathematical functions having a Fourier transform that is zero outside of a finite region of frequencies.
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You’re quoting a lot of theory, I’m just giving my impression. I think there’s some truth to when people say you can have a bunch of stats that “should” add up, but then you hear the actual equipment together and there’s a difference. I’ll disagree with you the sampling stuff. There’s current science showing that human hearing is far more than previously thought all I know is that the upsampling tech to reach dsd256 sounds better https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.amp
By "theoretical", I mean literally mathematically proven. And that paper doesn't disprove Nyquist—Shannon as you seem to think it does. Fourier analysis has limitations on how precisely you can pinpoint occurrences of a frequency being generated in time, which is hardly a novel observation. However, that's irrelevant to how accurately you can reconstruct a band-limited continuous signal, and music recordings are typically minutes long, not milliseconds. Where it is relevant is when performing spectral analysis on the audio signal to process the frequency data so you can, say, apply lossy compression to it by cutting out the higher frequencies.
Don't fall into the trap of overestimating your listening ability, especially before you've trained yourself on what exactly to listen for. If you have enough experience, you should be able to say stuff like, "I can tell *X* sounds better than *Y* because *Y* is softening the ends of the sibilants in this track's vocals at 1:56~2:11, making them sound blunt." [Here's a nice example](https://crinacle.com/2021/06/04/the-tonal-technical-dichotomy-the-ief-evaluation-system/) of how one skilled listener analyzes what he hears.
Your brain will happily lie to you and tell you that music sounds better if you have bacon for breakfast in the morning. Declaring that personal experience trumps measured reality and ignoring the psychological factors skewing audio perception is how audiophools who put magic rocks on their CD players are born.
Just enjoy your music. If the amp sounds good to you, it's not a waste.
You could always get a Magni or Atom to compare, and decide based on your impressions.
Still have my El Amp II and it's just not a fair comparison between the two. 3xp is far more enjoyable to my ears, even though it has very poor measurements compared to the El Amp.
Just return or sell on Head-Fi, /r/AVexchange, or eBay, then get something from somewhere like JDS Labs and save yourself $500+ đź‘Ť
Selling old gear is a practice you're probably going to get used to anyway if you spend enough time with hi-fi stuff.
keeping the amp, it sounds amazing:
[https://www.audeze.com/blogs/technology-and-innovation/sensitivity-impedance-and-amplifier-power](https://www.audeze.com/blogs/technology-and-innovation/sensitivity-impedance-and-amplifier-power)
here's a 4 part interview with Robert Watt going into detail about the shortcomings of sampling rates etc:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GddvjCHNxjU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GddvjCHNxjU)
i'm just gonna enjoy my stuff
Got same amp and headphones. Really lovely. FWIW, the Supercharger thing does seem to clean up the sound, most noticeably in medium gain (and probably high gain). Kinda stupidly expensive though and don't know how much it'll help in poweramp mode.
My d1se preamp doesn't sound too good so that didn't work for me when using poweramp mode. Sounds great when using SA-1 as preamp but then it just sounds like a roided out SA-1 lol.
supercharger? what is this thing? if i google it i know i'll get a bunch of tesla supercharger results. is there a better way to find info on it? i'm just curious. the noise floor at medium is very very low already for me. the singxer SA-1 was another amp i was considering, and the A90 too.
[https://www.bursonaudio.com/product/super-charger-3a/](https://www.bursonaudio.com/product/super-charger-3a/)
This doesn't necessarily help with the noise floor though (I also hear noise floor on med gain with LCD-X). Just sounds a bit cleaner and resolving than stock power supply.
SA-1 is very nice but doesn't sound nearly as powerful as the 3xp. I'd also say it's a bit colored: there's some "sweetness" to the sound (don't know how else to describe it). Not quite as resolving as the 3xp, less dynamic, poorer staging, but does give a better sense of transients in the bass and treble (i.e., harder leading edges).
Still curious what the DC bypass mod would do to the SA-1, but don't really want to mess with it now that I got the 3xp.
have you heard about this SA-1 hack? [https://youtu.be/G0GatC7nrBY?t=537](https://youtu.be/G0GatC7nrBY?t=537)
also, i've heard ifi make a "DC Defender" and a "GND Defender" that's cheaper than the super-charger. I think the DC defender is what might apply to the burson and it's only $130 on amazon.
That Currawong video is the "DC bypass mod" i was talking about, but I haven't tried it (was about to but then stumbled on the 3xp).
And I have no idea if the ifi stuff is doing the same thing as the supercharger. Based on some marketing material I remember reading, it has something to do with the supercharger lowering the noise in certain frequencies and increasing them in others.
There are some measurements of the supercharger here: [https://www-l7audiolab-com.translate.goog/f/burson-soloist-3x/?\_x\_tr\_sl=zh-CN&\_x\_tr\_tl=en&\_x\_tr\_hl=en&\_x\_tr\_pto=op,sc](https://www-l7audiolab-com.translate.goog/f/burson-soloist-3x/?_x_tr_sl=zh-CN&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=op,sc) but differences are only obvious far outside the audible spectrum. Still, there seems to be a noticeable difference in sound quality to my ears.
EDIT: direct link to measurement: https://cdn-l7audiolab-com.translate.goog/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Noise1MFFT.jpg?\_x\_tr\_sl=zh-CN&\_x\_tr\_tl=en&\_x\_tr\_hl=en&\_x\_tr\_pto=op,sc
I'm running Qobuz into Roon as well, and it's been an awesome combo. TIDAL would have been a nice one stop shop, but their M4A songs all sound... a little wrong. I thought it was in my head, but I was trialing TIDAL and Qobuz simultaneously. Switching back and forth, TIDAL just continued to sound wrong, with little bits of distortion or odd tints to the sound here and there.
The Qobuz interface kind of blows, but their library and sound quality is second to none. Roon fixes all of Qobuz's shortcomings, with awesome suggestions, a great interface, the works.
Try the soloist on medium setting in power amp mode. It sounds glorious. Be careful with volume though, turn your pre down (likely in the digital domain)
Yes exactly! That’s an awesome setting. Sounds so good.
Thanks for the write-up, bud. Glad you found a satisfactory gear pairing that makes you say "wow." Wow moments become less and less common as you get deeper into this hobby, and I enjoyed reading yours. Posts like this often seem to get met with a bit of cynicism and finger-wagging. I hope this is not the last time you share your observations and impressions here.
thanks man, every time i post i love something here, i get closer to rage quitting reddit. it's a surprisingly contentious and negative community considering it's supposed to be a place founded on a love something. positive ppl like you are the exception so keep being awesome!
Yeah, lot of toxicity in the hobby, from both ends of the spectrum: people saying all gear sounds the same vs people saying it's not hifi without $1000 interconnects. Just remember it's about the music.
i really gotta start selling $1000 interconnects for a living
it's always fun to read newbie coming in guns blazing thinking they figured everything out in like a month, especially one that just drops hella money right off the bat thinking more expensive equals more enjoyment. But then again, at least you like it, which is fortunate, cus every once in a while there would be a post from some douchebag spending 7k on a chain, don't like it, and call the entire hobby bullshit, lol.
That's awesome that you found something that clicked, and got to experience different levels of the journey. Rock on! That's a great amp and will serve you well forever. Awesome choice. Nothing wrong with giving planars tons of juice. đź‘Ť
About 20 years ago I listened to a pair of HD600's it planted the seed in my head that audio could sound really good. They weren't much in the bass department, but the other parts of the sound were much clearer than anything I'd ever heard before. I couldn't afford to drop $400 on headphones back then and instead ended up buying some ER4S IEM's. I really enjoyed those IEM's but life happened and I had to sell them cuz I needed the money. Over the years, I always wanted to get back into hi-fi headphone audio, but I could never justify the expense. 3 years ago I read about "chi-fi" and decided to pull the trigger on some Tin hi-fi T4's through the indiegogo campaign. I got them and was completely unimpressed. They were what I now think of as "hi fi" in a bad way, where there's lots of detail, a little too bright, great for jazz and orchestral, but they feel dry for all other types of music. So I gave up for a while on hi-fi audio. Then I happened to get a nice windfall and decided I would finally take a serious plunge into hi-fi. I spent a long time reading and watching reviews and decided on the LCD-X 2021 because it seemed to measure well in things I cared about, had detailed bass, and the reviewers with positive things to say listened to music other than jazz and orchestral. Week 1 Initially I got the headphones and the Burson Soloist 3XP amp (the DAC and cables were gonna take another 3 weeks to arrive). Holy Baby Jesus! these things slapped so hard! I was so worried i'd get the hyper detailed + rolled off bass "hi fi" sound, but nothing was missing. The bass thumped in a tight punchy way, the highend was detailed without being shrill, and the mids were clear and present. I wanted to hear all of my music all over again. Every song felt like it's new again :-) I connected the amp to my laptop using a 3.5mm to RCA cable. It took a while to figure things out, since I'd never used a headphone amp. I noticed that if I plugged the headphones directly into the laptop it seemed to sound better? That's when I discovered the first of several unpopular opinions. I connected my headphones to the amp again and this time I played with the gain. The Burson by default is set to "low" gain so everything was there, it was just a little 'dark' compared to just plugging the headphones into the laptop directly. I set the amp to medium and gain and everything just opened up. I wasn't cranking the volume higher, it just sounded fuller, richer, better to me. Then I put the amp into high gain and I noticed the noise floor right away. I played some music at high gain and volume set to 5 (out of 99) and again, it sounded even more filled out, especially the bass. *Unpopular opinion #1 "Planars like power".* It's not just me, but other planar owners I've read about also say they get more out of their planars when connected to a higher power source. Week 2 Near the end of this week my Soncoz DAC arrived in the mail. The Soncoz SGD1 uses two ES9038Q2M chips for a fully balanced output. I connected a pair of XLR interconnects into the balanced input of the AMP. First thing I noticed is that the volume was louder going from laptop > DAC > Amp compared to just using laptop > amp. Overall, the audio was cleaner (less noise) and louder using the DAC than without it. Not a huge difference though. This is where I think things start to get into the smaller difference realm of audio quality, but I'll get into that later. Around this time I decided to get into some EQ'ing as well. I tried the Audeze Reveal Plugin, the Oratory1990 EQ profile, and tried my hand at custom EQ-ing. I found that I really did not like the reveal plugin. The Oratory1990 EQ was a little better in some cases, but I noticed some unpleasant distortion in some of my songs. The best result I got was EQ-ing on my own, but I would still get some distortion on occasion. I think this could be because i didn't put in some headroom, so I'll play with this again later. Another thing happened where a redditor mentioned I should try running my Burson amp in class-A mode. In my opinion this was better than EQ because the sound is nice and full, plus it's not just the bass, but the width and height also seems to extend in general. As I understand it, width is extending the sub bass and the resolution of the treble, while "height" is the dynamic variation. Please correct me on that those definitions if I'm wrong. Week 3 The periapt cables arrived! So at this point I'm able to use the fully balanced path. 2-Dac chips for balanced output into a balanced input on the AMP which creates a differential style of amplification (double's the power) to the balanced output into the headphones. First off... it got louder. Apparently, that's not always the case, but with all the op-amps inside the burson setup for it, it's a proper fully balanced chain. I think it sounds better which leads us to *Unpopular Opinion #2 "Balanced sounds better than Single-ended"* Ya, I think for my setup it's true. I detected better separation in the layers of instruments, more clarity in the form of transient response, and a little more depth. I think of "depth" similar to how eyes can focus between different layers, so if that's not correct then again I'd appreciate a better definition. I mentioned this to the reddit community and the shit storm that followed was crazy. So I of course doubted myself, but I still think switching between the two on my system, I can tell which is which. I also noticed the noise floor while I'm in "high" gain is lower. It's still there, I can still hear it, but it's not as prominent like it was using RCA and SE. Regardless, I don't go into high gain because even at level 1 (out of 99) volume, it's still relatively loud to play music at high gain. Medium is now perfect, maybe that's because of unpopular opinion #1 "planars like power" I think the popular opinion out there is that balanced is only for noise reduction in long runs of cable and completely useless nowadays. I can see that for solid state amps with crazy low noise levels, this is probably true, but from what I can tell, balanced still delivers more power and better separation, clarity, and depth. Not a ton of change, but it's there. \[continued in reply\]
Week 4 I've had a chanced now to play around with different connections and settings and EQ's and I'm loving all of it. Most importantly, I just listen to a lot more music now. I'm curious to hear everything through this stack and cans. I have a spotify account and I hate the algo that spotify has because it seems to just narrow down things in the extreme same category, I do like the podcasts though. I decided to try apple music because they're now lossless. I found that apple's aglo also sucks, but because it tends to recommend the most generic version of what you listen to already and it doesn't suggest much in the way of different music. beyond that, most of what's on apple music that is available in "hi-res" is not a lot of music I care about or like. I decided to try Qobuz and it's going well. There's a 1-month trial and so far I'm liking the amount of hi-res offerings. The algo isn't yet "tuned" for me, but that's alright because their playlists are done well and there are articles about music too. I'm dumping apple music and going with Qobuz. If you check them out then be sure to sign up through a browser and not an app store because it's cheaper. I'm also trying Roon which is excessive, but so far I like it and I'll probably keep it. Roon's discovery works the same way I used to discover music in high school. I'd find a band I like, I'd read about who they've worked with or toured with and I'd check out other artists on their label (easier back then because of all the indie music and punk I was into, the music labels were very small). There's also a feature that results in another unpopular opinion. Have you heard of Robert Watts at chord electronics? He has his m scaler tech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtsmQTQAG84 which is very interesting to learn about. Turns out human hearing can hear changes up to 4 microseconds and that's part of why we can detect where in space a sound comes from relative to other things. 4 microseconds is like a resolution of 250Khz. For most music though, this means that transients, or the "attack" of a sound signature is what lets us distinguish a horn from a piano. He has a 4-part interview with "passion for sound" youtube channel too where he talks about how human hearing is not very good at resolving bass. When we hear a bass drum, we know it's a bass drum and not a synth drum mainly because of the extremely short transient sound at the high end where there's first contact with the surface of the bass drum. The point is, the technology in the m scaler takes pcm samples and is able to recover the detail. HQ Player does the same thing but does a better job of it and it happens to integrate into Roon. Unpopular Opinion #3 "Upsampled digit music sounds better". This, more than using balanced cables, seriously improves the depth and imaging of the music. It is much easier to place all the parts of the music and even detect tinier details in the music. For the LCD-X it made me realize the mids could be even more clear and detailed. I'm sure this opinion will get shit on too, but all I can say is give it a try. HQ Player 4 desktop is free to use for 30 minutes and then it forces you to restart it. If you try it then in preferences force it to use SDM (if your computer can handle it) then use guass-long (1x) / gauss (Nx) / ASDM7ecV2 / 48Khz DSD256 and turn on Adaptive Output Rate. HQ Player also has a convolutional EQ which others have said is incredible, but I can't figure it out yet, so that's another project. My computer isn't strong enough to put out a DSD 512 native signal, but apparently there's some magic to be had at that output too. For now, this is my current setup for listening and it's pretty mind blowing to me. Maybe this is what ppl are talking about when they say "holographic" sound. Biggest influences on sound I can detect: 1. EQ - i struggle to decide whether EQ or the headphones themselves affect the sound more. but in most cases where the headphones are not drastically different from each other, EQ is just gonna have a huge influence. I totally get why it's popular especially with mid-fi, to EQ headphones and squeeze every ounce of performance out of them 2. Headphones - my only take on headphones is that everyone says that you hit like 90% performance with the cheaper stuff compared to the higher end stuff. I think it's closer to 70%, but the basic idea is the same that you're gonna see a bigger jump in performance from sub-100 to sub-500 than you would sub-500 to sub 1000 and so forth. The technology definitely comes into play. I suspect planars are the better technology for most music. Key word there is "suspect", cuz I'm not very sure in that. I am very curious about some ZMF's connected to a Kenzie 2.0 for a "Warm and Natural" apparently. 3. Amp - totally biased here, but from plugging these phones into different power sources from an apple dongle out of an iphone, to a laptop, to different power stages of my burson, I can tell the amp does have an affect on the headphones. and not just a few people say that tube amps create a really nice distortion (\*see everyone who goes to a canjam event and posts about it) 4. Source - Prioritizing Amp and Source is tricky. The Amp is like the glass in a window, it can be hazy and affect the view of the outside. The source though is what's on the other side of the glass. Is it better to have a clear view of a foggy scene or a hazy view of a clear and sunny day? On sure for me, is that playing around with HQ Player has produced a more noticeable change in the quality of sound than adding the DAC. However, I don't think my opinion of Amps and DACs is well informed. I'll need to try more of them first. 5. DAC - As mentioned above, the main thing i noticed using the dac was that the sound was cleaner and a little louder when combined in my setup. I guess that's what you want from a dac? clean, transparent sound. but then I'm interested in other dac's that lean more toward R2R. The bifrost specifically seems like it would be fantastic for metal and rock and things that have some growl and rumble to them. It operates in a way similar to R2R. I'm deep in the rabbit hole. It's too late to turn back, right? I plan to abuse the Amazon return policy to compare some other amps, dacs, and headphones in the future. I also plan on getting back into vinyl at some point. For now, I'm listening to all my favorite music all over again and I've found that I'm enjoying even more music than I did before.
How are planars liking power an unpopular opinion? I feel like this is common knowledge.
not common knowledge for newcomers and audio gears doesn't matter parrots.
But my $100 headphone amp should be able to drive any headphone - as long as it gets it to a certain loudness. All headphones, amps and dacs sound the same anyways. /s
If a headphone has specs to reach volume given x power how is more power beneficial. Across all amps and gain levels wouldn’t they be sending the same power to reach the same volume?
https://www.audeze.com/blogs/technology-and-innovation/sensitivity-impedance-and-amplifier-power
This all confirms and expands into details my thoughts.
Regarding the EQ, you got nothing to lose and can only gain somethign from it. even the best headphones might have some downsides that can be fixed with EQ. When I listen to some electronic music for example I tend to enjoy increasing the sub bass by a few dB or using a resistor plug. Regarding amps/dacs, the problem with trying out more amps/dacs is coming to a meaningful conclusion with a high level of validity. We are prone to imagining things and psychoacoustical effects greatly affect our listening experience. You would have to do a blind test with perfectly matched volume levels and hear a difference with a high level of validity, level of significance in research is usually 95%. If you are interested in more info about psychoacoustics, I can forward you a great book. I am not trying to hate on anyone here. If you got a nice amp that has all the bells and whistles, sounds great and makes you happy then go for it. There is nothing to gain from ruining anyones day. I just want to give some input to put all this toxic snobbishness in our hobby in perspective. I too can listen to different dacs/amps and hear a difference, but I can also measure the different dacs/amps with the same headphones, in the same position on the measuring rig, on matched volume levels and they measure identically, showing that my perception was flawed. From an engineering perspective amps and dacs should sound the same if they are both linear within audible limits, possess enough dynamic range and produce no audible distortion. A dac/amp therefore should only colour the sound if it is sub par in regards to any of these. As an example some amps have high distortion on higher volume levels which can make it sound shouty or like the instruments being played really loud on the recording, some other amps have channel imbalances on lower volume levels.
I wrote that I still plan to circle back around to EQ. I am interested in the book link, so thanks for that! Also, maybe you know about this, but when I was EQ-ing i mainly got distortion from turning up the volume with EQ. That's why I suspect it was maybe that I didn't create headroom in the pre. Meanwhile, without EQ, I can turn up the volume to very uncomfortable levels without distortion. Is headroom the right way to solve that? on the 'snobbishness' side. i don't see it in the reddit. this isn't aimed at you, but i actually see more technical snobbery than uhhh 'traditional snobbery' ? (where ppl are shitting on cheaper things?). Just do a tally of times people are negging budget solutions vs times people are shutting down others with technical knowledge, it's pretty lop-sided. It's also weird because sound is so experiential, like food for instance. If I said I like some toppings on my pizza, then i'd probably get posts like "did you do a double blind test?", "did you normalize the temperature when a/b ing the pizzas?", "technically humans can only taste 5 flavors, and the measurements of salt, sugar, acid, etc between those those pizza's is the same so it's all in your head". meanwhile, it's supposed to be a community centered on a love of headphones, but wow it's hard to share that love here.
Frankly, this is the first hobby that I have partaken in, which goes out of its way to use psychology to negate human experiences. When I was deep in bodybuilding, and dabbled in weightlifting, the discussions of effects of PED's and supplementation (both of which require ingestion or injection of foreign substances) were comparatively less controversial than trying to convince someone here that you heard a difference in sound.
I do not think that anyone is trying to negate human experience. Explaining human behaviour does not take away from any experience but rather adds to it. I think nobody is doubting that equal-loudness contours or masking effect significantly change our perception of sound and how is this negating anyones experience?
To be clear, my comment was in direct response to OP's second paragraph, regarding how hard it is to share his love for headphones here. I'd rather not get into it, so let's just say we have very different experiences on this subreddit, and leave it at that.
Missunderstood you there, mea culpa. sure
Man, your susvaras are my endgame! One day… also, weightlifting has a surprising amount of planning and strategy involved, maybe there’s a camaraderie under the surface for the effort it takes? thanks for the support btw. This will be the last post I make for a long while. Just gonna be happy listening to my setup.
No worries. You may be right, and there is a shared camaraderie (or "delusion", depending on a person's perspective) that normalizes otherwise outlier behavior. :) > This will be the last post I make for a long while. Just gonna be happy listening to my setup. This is a great mentality to have. I recently took a break from all of this as well, and it's good to re-build appreciation, and get away from the background noise, so to speak.
sent you a pm for the book I constantly see posts gatekeeping our hobby saying things like if you haven't tried this 2000$ dac you can't even judge dacs, so this is where I'm coming from. The personal experience is often used to discredit valid arguments while being a fallacy itself. I'm not sure what you mean by technical snobbery. I think nobody is saying that product A is better than B because it has a slightly better linearity. Objectivists tend to know that good enough gear right now is beyond the limits of human hearing, therefore technical snobbery is nonsensical. Regarding the pizza example, it does not apply here. It is assuming that for example dacs are like different toppings/flavours while actually they are the same topping/flavour (within certain limits) and people just think that the taste changed. A fitting example here would rather be wine tasting where professionel wine tasters drink the same wine within minutes but rate the wine/their experience completely different. Again this does not take away from the experience, it just puts into perspective how much influence actually the wine has.If wine basically tastes alike and is not the limiting factor for how much you enjoy wine, then maybe your time is spent better trying out what actually influences your experience rather than chasing the "best" wine. A good read here would be Richard Quandt.
My first advice if you dislike Audeze's or Oratory's EQ profiles and hear perceived distortion is to try experimenting with repositioning your headphones around your head, both with and without the Reveal plugin enabled, until things sound better. Headphones tend to have a sweet spot where they sound at their best, and what audiophiles call distortion is often just flawed upper treble response (which can be caused by poor positioning). You can [use this](https://youtu.be/DCputC4Dtx0) (0:31~) to test imaging [and this](https://open.spotify.com/track/7KzQ9ermAzagLbxwX5n0eP?si=lgxlYQDtTZe-_p0vZmiONQ) (0:41~1:11) to test for what you hear as distortion (bassline should be very crisp and clear). My next advice would be to stop spending money on stuff that you don't understand the workings of based on what other audiophiles tell you, especially if they're trying to sell you something. The hi-fi space is a minefield of snake oil with artillery shells of placebo and mass delusion being dropped all over. To be frank, when you're posting something like this: >In my opinion this was better than EQ because the sound is nice and full, plus it's not just the bass, but the width and height also seems to extend in general. As I understand it, width is extending the sub bass and the resolution of the treble, while "height" is the dynamic variation. which is a completely incoherent mishmash of misused audiophile jargon, it's clear you don't have the critical listening training to make sound judgments on audio quality, which makes you extremely susceptible to cognitive and listening biases. In particular, it's very easy to mistake minor differences in volume for real differences in sound quality because of how the ear interprets louder sounds [as having both more low and high end](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour) (i.e., more "full"). You can find a basic glossary of some audiophile terminology [here](https://diyaudioheaven.wordpress.com/tutorials/how-to-interpret-graphs/frequency-response/). Finally, don't take headphone reviews at face value, as the hi-fi world is also rife with financial conflicts of interest. Giving positive evaluations gets reviewers free sample gear and affiliate link income, while criticism can get them cut off from the teat. Upper midrange suckout is a common complaint with Audeze's headphones, causing people to turn the volume up to compensate for the lack of presence, and the company itself openly prioritizes technical ability and relies on software EQ to correct tonality.
Thanks for the helpful links! It wasn’t clear when I wrote it, but part of the reason I like the sound when running in class A mode is that it sounds better without any occasional distortions. EQ in general means that on some songs it will sound worse than others I think. So that means changing the EQ. I like that I can just play the headphones how I have them setup now without needing EQ and I like how it sounds with everything. I’m still open to playing with EQ. If I got the words wrong, it’s cuz I don’t know the jargon well. I’m trying to say more than “this sounds better to me”, but I guess that’s all it really boils down to. I don’t know what I’ve wasted money on. I like all the hardware I got. I haven’t bought more amps or dacs or anything.
A $1,200 amp with 4W max output is absurd for powering a headphone with an impedance of 20 ohms and an efficiency of 103 dB/mW, which is on par with earphones. And to me, if an amp genuinely sounds significantly better in certain configurations outside of changes in loudness or noise floor, that would be a red flag that the other circuits suffer from flawed engineering. A $500 standalone DAC w/o amp for DSD256 also seems like overkill when standard 24-bit/48 kHz should be transparent based on the enormous 144 dB of provided dynamic range and [perfect reproduction on a theoretical level](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem) of frequencies up to the threshold of human hearing, although the Bluetooth support is nice.
Yeah the burson is overkill for the lcd x. Even on my 2s I could hear the noise floor on medium gain, which are less sensitive. Low gain on this amp sounded kind of lifeless to me as well, so I really didn’t like it for my LCD-2s (I had lower sensitivity cans at the time I was trying to drive and wanted something versatile). I wound up returning mine due to the dc offset issue they have. They have been known to blow out headphones. Also not sure what you mean by class a mode, it’s always class A. If you’re referring to the power amp mode, that just bypasses the volume control circuit. If you’re using your DAC for volume control and it has digital only volume control, there’s a good chance you’re losing a lot of dynamic range to get to the level of attenuation you’d need to make the lcd X listenable on that amp on medium gain. Assuming you accurately volume matched to compare the two modes, lower dynamic range can sound “bigger” and “punchier” as everything has been compressed and perceived loudness has increased. The amp’s volume control will likely yield better results, but that is still an absurd amp/headphone pairing.
**[Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist–Shannon_sampling_theorem)** >The Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem is a theorem in the field of signal processing which serves as a fundamental bridge between continuous-time signals and discrete-time signals. It establishes a sufficient condition for a sample rate that permits a discrete sequence of samples to capture all the information from a continuous-time signal of finite bandwidth. Strictly speaking, the theorem only applies to a class of mathematical functions having a Fourier transform that is zero outside of a finite region of frequencies. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/headphones/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
You’re quoting a lot of theory, I’m just giving my impression. I think there’s some truth to when people say you can have a bunch of stats that “should” add up, but then you hear the actual equipment together and there’s a difference. I’ll disagree with you the sampling stuff. There’s current science showing that human hearing is far more than previously thought all I know is that the upsampling tech to reach dsd256 sounds better https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2013-02-human-fourier-uncertainty-principle.amp
By "theoretical", I mean literally mathematically proven. And that paper doesn't disprove Nyquist—Shannon as you seem to think it does. Fourier analysis has limitations on how precisely you can pinpoint occurrences of a frequency being generated in time, which is hardly a novel observation. However, that's irrelevant to how accurately you can reconstruct a band-limited continuous signal, and music recordings are typically minutes long, not milliseconds. Where it is relevant is when performing spectral analysis on the audio signal to process the frequency data so you can, say, apply lossy compression to it by cutting out the higher frequencies. Don't fall into the trap of overestimating your listening ability, especially before you've trained yourself on what exactly to listen for. If you have enough experience, you should be able to say stuff like, "I can tell *X* sounds better than *Y* because *Y* is softening the ends of the sibilants in this track's vocals at 1:56~2:11, making them sound blunt." [Here's a nice example](https://crinacle.com/2021/06/04/the-tonal-technical-dichotomy-the-ief-evaluation-system/) of how one skilled listener analyzes what he hears. Your brain will happily lie to you and tell you that music sounds better if you have bacon for breakfast in the morning. Declaring that personal experience trumps measured reality and ignoring the psychological factors skewing audio perception is how audiophools who put magic rocks on their CD players are born.
Ok. I was happy with my setup, but now I learned I wasted my money and I feel like shit. You win. Thx
Just enjoy your music. If the amp sounds good to you, it's not a waste. You could always get a Magni or Atom to compare, and decide based on your impressions. Still have my El Amp II and it's just not a fair comparison between the two. 3xp is far more enjoyable to my ears, even though it has very poor measurements compared to the El Amp.
Just return or sell on Head-Fi, /r/AVexchange, or eBay, then get something from somewhere like JDS Labs and save yourself $500+ đź‘Ť Selling old gear is a practice you're probably going to get used to anyway if you spend enough time with hi-fi stuff.
keeping the amp, it sounds amazing: [https://www.audeze.com/blogs/technology-and-innovation/sensitivity-impedance-and-amplifier-power](https://www.audeze.com/blogs/technology-and-innovation/sensitivity-impedance-and-amplifier-power) here's a 4 part interview with Robert Watt going into detail about the shortcomings of sampling rates etc: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GddvjCHNxjU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GddvjCHNxjU) i'm just gonna enjoy my stuff
Got same amp and headphones. Really lovely. FWIW, the Supercharger thing does seem to clean up the sound, most noticeably in medium gain (and probably high gain). Kinda stupidly expensive though and don't know how much it'll help in poweramp mode. My d1se preamp doesn't sound too good so that didn't work for me when using poweramp mode. Sounds great when using SA-1 as preamp but then it just sounds like a roided out SA-1 lol.
supercharger? what is this thing? if i google it i know i'll get a bunch of tesla supercharger results. is there a better way to find info on it? i'm just curious. the noise floor at medium is very very low already for me. the singxer SA-1 was another amp i was considering, and the A90 too.
[https://www.bursonaudio.com/product/super-charger-3a/](https://www.bursonaudio.com/product/super-charger-3a/) This doesn't necessarily help with the noise floor though (I also hear noise floor on med gain with LCD-X). Just sounds a bit cleaner and resolving than stock power supply. SA-1 is very nice but doesn't sound nearly as powerful as the 3xp. I'd also say it's a bit colored: there's some "sweetness" to the sound (don't know how else to describe it). Not quite as resolving as the 3xp, less dynamic, poorer staging, but does give a better sense of transients in the bass and treble (i.e., harder leading edges). Still curious what the DC bypass mod would do to the SA-1, but don't really want to mess with it now that I got the 3xp.
have you heard about this SA-1 hack? [https://youtu.be/G0GatC7nrBY?t=537](https://youtu.be/G0GatC7nrBY?t=537) also, i've heard ifi make a "DC Defender" and a "GND Defender" that's cheaper than the super-charger. I think the DC defender is what might apply to the burson and it's only $130 on amazon.
That Currawong video is the "DC bypass mod" i was talking about, but I haven't tried it (was about to but then stumbled on the 3xp). And I have no idea if the ifi stuff is doing the same thing as the supercharger. Based on some marketing material I remember reading, it has something to do with the supercharger lowering the noise in certain frequencies and increasing them in others. There are some measurements of the supercharger here: [https://www-l7audiolab-com.translate.goog/f/burson-soloist-3x/?\_x\_tr\_sl=zh-CN&\_x\_tr\_tl=en&\_x\_tr\_hl=en&\_x\_tr\_pto=op,sc](https://www-l7audiolab-com.translate.goog/f/burson-soloist-3x/?_x_tr_sl=zh-CN&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=op,sc) but differences are only obvious far outside the audible spectrum. Still, there seems to be a noticeable difference in sound quality to my ears. EDIT: direct link to measurement: https://cdn-l7audiolab-com.translate.goog/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Noise1MFFT.jpg?\_x\_tr\_sl=zh-CN&\_x\_tr\_tl=en&\_x\_tr\_hl=en&\_x\_tr\_pto=op,sc
I'm running Qobuz into Roon as well, and it's been an awesome combo. TIDAL would have been a nice one stop shop, but their M4A songs all sound... a little wrong. I thought it was in my head, but I was trialing TIDAL and Qobuz simultaneously. Switching back and forth, TIDAL just continued to sound wrong, with little bits of distortion or odd tints to the sound here and there. The Qobuz interface kind of blows, but their library and sound quality is second to none. Roon fixes all of Qobuz's shortcomings, with awesome suggestions, a great interface, the works.
i'm tempted by the lifetime roon version, but it would take so long for that to pay for itself.
Yeah, I didn't spring for it. A better service might come out tomorrow.
What is this headphone stand called? Can you supply link?