Recent content by RJW232

My advice: stop looking at cables. If you need cables to change the sound, the equipment sucks. Better have a look at the acoustics in the listening room. That's >75% of the sound you hear.

Properly engineered audio electronics (not talking about mechanical devices) can also easily last for decades, even when switched on 24/7. The component cost is not much higher than for mediocre equipment. It's really a matter of engineering the details. Things like thermal stability is often...

Don't expect miracles from electronics. Year on year we may seen very small evolutions, if any... I recently compared the circuit diagrams of one of the latest Marantz amps with one of about 10..15 years ago. Almost identical. The main difference is in the housing of the amps. But lots of...

Now playing: The system only dreams in total darkness by The National.

Barco is in the high-end projector market, so it wouldn't make sense if they started cost-cutting in the audio segment. It's more complementing their existing business.

Lucky for him that there's not much information in the highest frequencies. Good sound perception is mainly determined by the mid range (voices). :-)

And when doing A-B comparison, check that the playback level is the same. If one of them is just 0,5dB louder, you may already think that's the best option while it can be the worst (although really worse DAC's don't exist anymore).

Hmmm, I heard those details with my B&W PX7 via bluetooth and Spotify (compressed) on my phone. Couldn't it be that you noticed it because you were listening to something new, so you paid more attention? Have you tried listening to the same music with your old equipment?

Maybe a very alternative suggestion: could it be your ears? It wouldn't be the first time that ears are clogged up with noticing (my own experience...). How do others perceive the sound quality?

Be aware that a streaming amp will be obsolete once streaming services come and go, or change their API's and the amp manufacturer doesn't provide software updates anymore. A pure analogue amp will never be obsolete. Especially if they don't use any proprietary components. When the services...

I'm at a point where the only functionality I want is to be able to search for an album. I don't want any algorithms, playlists etc.

TO be honest, it's really overrated. One of my amps has Dirac, but much better results can be achieved with positioning the loudspeakers and listening seat. There are a number of reasons why DSP's are not the best option: - You change the character of the loudspeakers and those...

If you play an album via a streaming service just as much as you would play a physical album the artist would earn the same with services like Qobuz. Let's say you play an album 50 times, and an album has 12 tracks. Qobuz pays about 0,02 USD per track streamed. The artist get 10...20%. So the...

Something simple is just play CD's. I ripped all my CD's years ago, but bought a CD player again, because it's much nicer to play CD's than fiddling on a smartphone screen to find the albums. And if I don't want to play a CD, I stream the music from Tidal.

You can check the dynamics and see if there's (much) clipping in the track. But there's nothing wrong with compressed sound or clipping, as long as it was the intention of the producer/artist. For example: I think the two albums Taylor Swift made with Aaron Dessner sound great. But from a purist...