Recent content by RTHerringbone

  1. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    One thing I can be absolutely certain of is not getting a CD player. I donated all my CDs (~1,400 of them!) to a charity shop about a decade ago after I'd ripped them all losslessly to a NAS drive, which itself has been unplugged and gathering dust in a cupboard for at least five years.
  2. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    This trio of things (WiiM Ultra, FiiO K13 R2R and FiiO FT7) is giving me a lot of satisfaction. Having proper music in the room where I spend most of my time is absolutely fantastic :love: I don't tend to go overboard with impressions of quality, but I'm listening to Hania Rani at the moment...
  3. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    Right, I'm all aboard the custom cable train; should arrive next week. It's just nice to be able to choose an exact length and termination types. Colour-wise I've been very extravagant and gone all-black - I don't need colour on my cable if my bloody headphone amp has a backlit porthole :LOL...
  4. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    @Jasonovich how stiff is the cable that you ordered from https://cxnnected.co.uk/? I do like the amount you can alter their cables and the prices seem fair. I can order a much shorter one from them but just wondered if the braiding means they don't hang and are fairly stiff? Ideally I'd like...
  5. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    Nice! I assume the car service was kind to you.
  6. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    This was a good decision :cool: I felt a bit impulsive just assuming that the Ultra would need a boost to get the most out of headphones but honestly, the difference with / without external amplification is monumentally large. Sounds great, works well, looks fantastic. And I have actually...
  7. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    Oh. PEQ is really quite a thing, isn't it? To my mild annoyance, I connected the K13 to my Chromebook via USB just to see what the fuss is about. I found the FT7 headphones in their database of headphones and used the 2018 Harman Over-Ear target profile and it makes a wild difference. I *do*...
  8. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    I've taken a brief look at the NOS / OS decoding modes and they're certainly different. NOS is probably a little more "fun" in the mids but really I think for now I'm happy to stick on OS. One thing FiiO don't do brilliantly is apps / websites / UI. To access PEQ I can use the app fairly easily...
  9. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    Ha! The LED lighting changes based on the sampling rate of the track. Yellow when it's >48kHz 🤓 :cool: And (fortunately) I've figured out how to drop the brightness of all the LEDs.
  10. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    The downside is that I now have two small black remote controls that I'll never, ever use :LOL:
  11. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    FiiO DAC / amp is here and up and running. I'm not looking at anything like PEQ or the NOS / OS options just yet. It's totally different to the headphone amp in the Ultra. Everything carries so much more weight and it feels fuller and more powerfully conveyed. Zero brightness and without...
  12. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    I've always been a bit sceptical about the What Hi-Fi "Best Buy" lists. Those Røde headphones feature on this list, along with Austrian Audio who I've also not heard of, nor have I seen them reviewed elsewhere. I do wonder what motivations they have behind compiling these lists..... I have...
  13. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    They're very much on my radar, but as they have a distinctive sound signature I've sort of dismissed them. My understanding is that the K13 as a R2R will be "imperfect", so I was keen to have a pretty transparent set of headphones to tinker with to understand the influence of PEQ from that...
  14. RTHerringbone

    Best compact headphone listening solution?

    @Shrek Your signature says you have some HD600s. They're obviously very highly regarded and fit my "second pair" requirements of being over ear, dynamic drivers, on budget and neutral. Have you any feedback about using them - any pros and cons? Reviews imply the bass is pretty weak and they...