Computer Audiophile on the Cheap

[bigbob]

 

 

 

I don't know how many folks would actually "worry" about getting into big bucks territory. This assumes they have the resources to pull together a big bucks system.

 

Many of us enjoy listening to music, and what we have to work with might be a 30-year old receiver, and the huge speakers we bought in College.

 

Inexpensive tweaks--like isolation devices to get the speakers up off the floor will make any speaker sound better. If the driver of the woofer is trying to energize the hardwood floor, it is not going to have a good, well-defined bass response. I see brass points for sale for $30. 

 

If you are using the interconnects that came with the CD player, you can improve the SQ with a better set, without breaking the bank.

 

Many of the discussions about high-end systems fall into subjective opinions. You like the sound, or you think it is lacking.

 

It is hard to quantify a subjective opinion. Reading some reports from the Audio show blames the rooms for the sound they heard. Well, DUH!

 

A friend of mine had a pair of "Voice of the Theatre" loudspeakers, driven by the legendary Western Electric tube amplifiers. And his listening room was the hay loft in his barn. And I have never heard a system sound as sweet. I don't think many would want to build a barn, to listen to music, but at the price listed for some of the components we read about--you could build the house, and the barn.

 

I live in a small apartment. I don't have bean-bags in the corners of the ceiling, or other "treatments". As a matter of fact, this apartment is so small, if I turn up the volume, I can watch the windows vibrate...

 

"Make the Stereo you have sound the best it can..." a very simple goal.

[GUTB]

On the topic of "budget" systems at AXPONA.

 

The Schiit room was actually one of the better-sounding rooms.

 

 

I don't know what those boxes on the bottom were for, probably the big one is a power conditioner, and you can see a Wyrd back there. But this combo on the "budget" Salk3 towers ($2.9k) performed very well. Very detailed, well-imaged soundstage. Depth was lacking (as usual), but in terms of fidelity it was top notch. 

[rickca]

If anyone wants to buy a used Cambridge DacMagic Plus in excellent condition at an attractive price please PM me.

I had it on the buy/sell forum  last year and just got no interest.  Now that there's a community interested in building an excellent system on a budget, perhaps I can find a new home for it.   I also have the BT100 Bluetooth wireless audio receiver with aptX support.

 

This is currently retailing at Crutchfield for $350 (DAC) + $75 (BT100).

[Sam Lord]

On 4/23/2017 at 10:26 AM, Melvin said:

 

Hey Sam .. I've been pleasantly surprised with the great sound I've been getting out of my 2 latest integrated amp acquisitions (Fleawatt TPA3116D2 and APPJ PA0901A). Amazing sound for so little cash! Thanks for sharing. Have fun. 

 

Thanks Melvin, I'll investigate both.  Lots of praise for the Fleawatt.

 

On 4/23/2017 at 1:38 PM, bigbob said:

 

 

When I bought the Modi 2, I really didn't consider the Multibit because of the price. I was replacing a AQ Dragonfly v1.2, which I bought on close-out for $79. I guess I can plead ignorance of what "Multibit" meant at that time. But, I might consider it as an upgrade instead of the Bifrost...Thanks for the tip!

 

My pleasure.  If you look around you'll find the Mimby is well beyond the current base Bifrost by some margin by most accounts.  Mimby is supposed to be very, very close to the Bimby.  Bimby just sounds great: no flavor, just sounds like a +$3k DAC to me.  Super detail, dynamics, and such natural imaging.  Superbly musical.

 

On 4/23/2017 at 1:50 PM, bigbob said:

For me the convenience of building a playlist from my library of files, and sitting back and listening sure beats getting up to turn over a LP. And who spends $2,300 on a device to remove dust and dirt from a vinyl pressing anyhow.

 

+1.   But just FYI, you can create an ultrasonic cleaning station for $200, or buy a super convenient off-the-shelf model for $500.  Check Analog Corner for reports.

[4est]

On 4/24/2017 at 7:11 AM, bigbob said:

 

 

 

I don't know how many folks would actually "worry" about getting into big bucks territory. This assumes they have the resources to pull together a big bucks system.

 

Many of us enjoy listening to music, and what we have to work with might be a 30-year old receiver, and the huge speakers we bought in College.

 

Inexpensive tweaks--like isolation devices to get the speakers up off the floor will make any speaker sound better. If the driver of the woofer is trying to energize the hardwood floor, it is not going to have a good, well-defined bass response. I see brass points for sale for $30. 

 

If you are using the interconnects that came with the CD player, you can improve the SQ with a better set, without breaking the bank.

 

Many of the discussions about high-end systems fall into subjective opinions. You like the sound, or you think it is lacking.

 

It is hard to quantify a subjective opinion. Reading some reports from the Audio show blames the rooms for the sound they heard. Well, DUH!

 

A friend of mine had a pair of "Voice of the Theatre" loudspeakers, driven by the legendary Western Electric tube amplifiers. And his listening room was the hay loft in his barn. And I have never heard a system sound as sweet. I don't think many would want to build a barn, to listen to music, but at the price listed for some of the components we read about--you could build the house, and the barn.

 

I live in a small apartment. I don't have bean-bags in the corners of the ceiling, or other "treatments". As a matter of fact, this apartment is so small, if I turn up the volume, I can watch the windows vibrate...

 

"Make the Stereo you have sound the best it can..." a very simple goal.

 

I take it you have not looked at the prices of Western Electric gear, or Altec for that matter

[bigbob]

4 hours ago, 4est said:

 

I take it you have not looked at the prices of Western Electric gear, or Altec for that matter

 

I think you were missing my point... he had it set-up in the hay loft of his barn. I am not interested in either a Altec or Western Electric tube amp, so, no I haven't been keeping up with their prices.

 

[bigbob]

4 hours ago, Sam Lord said:

But just FYI, you can create an ultrasonic cleaning station for $200, or buy a super convenient off-the-shelf model for $500.  Check Analog Corner for reports.

 

I don't have a turntable or a collection of LPs, nor do I have any desire for either. None of my digital library is at risk for dust, none have pops and clicks and I don't have to turn anything over every 20 minutes.

[4est]

8 hours ago, bigbob said:

 

I think you were missing my point... he had it set-up in the hay loft of his barn. I am not interested in either a Altec or Western Electric tube amp, so, no I haven't been keeping up with their prices.

 

 

Oh, silly me thought it was his equipment that made it sound good...

[bigbob]

53 minutes ago, 4est said:

 

Oh, silly me thought it was his equipment that made it sound good...

 

It was the equipment that made it sound so sweet. He was a professional musician, and we only listened to classical, up in the hay loft.

 

Considering the Altecs came out of a theater as did the WE tube amps also was salvaged from a theater that had modernized. All I remember was friend taking me out to his barn, and I was gobsmacked--40 years before it was a word. It was if we were in the orchestra pit, and the musicians were surrounding us. I have yet to hear a stereo rig that does that.

 

I have another Audiophile friend that bought a weird teak sculpture, which is run by an Apple iPad-- to  "tune the room". He claims he can hear a difference, but he also has dots on the walls and pillows up in the room corners, all in an effort to adjust the room to optimum listen-ability. Some of it sounds like snake-oil was sold to a willing sucker.

 

My most recent upgrade was running a double strand of 16g copper wire from the cold water pipe under the sink, to the ground terminal on the receiver. This whole apartment doesn't have a grounded outlet--or at least the three prong outlets gave a false reading when the maintenance man check them out. It is a hack, but it works.

[bigbob]

During my career, I was a Photojournalist, working with Reuters, the British News Agency.

We knew that "A picture is worth a Thousand words" and everyone one of our images was seen by over 1 Billion persons globally on a daily basis.

Certain images are burned into minds, and are termed "iconic".

Nick Ut's photo of a Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack, John Filo's Crying Girl at Kent State, and Eddie Adams image of a Viet Cong suspect executed by a South Vietnamese police officer--those three images did MORE to end US involvement in that war that all the protests IMHO. They crawled into the psyche of the American viewer.

 

There are audio recordings that are 'iconic'. There are albums we go back to, every time we add a component or a tweak, because we have heard them so many times that they have become our standard references on which we gauge whether we hear a difference.

 

To be an Audiophile, we share a love for High Fidelity. We appreciate a well-produced, well-recorded performance of Music. That love transcends the "zeros and ones" of a digital file, and forces us to appreciate other parameters to describe our experience.

 

Many of you folks understand Music from the world of an Audio engineer, or an Electronics engineer, and reading some posts in the forums blows right over my head-- it would be like me trying to explain how angle of incidence affects the mood of a photograph.

 

The purpose of this post is to ask the Music lovers in our Community to list three albums from three artists which are your standard reference.

 

What are the 'iconic' recordings that you use to judge the sound and quality of your stereo experience.

 

I start with these:

 

1. Pictures at an Exhibition  is a suite of ten pieces (plus a recurring, varied Promenade) composed for the piano by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky in 1874.  I prefer the Karajan, Berliner Philharmoniker recording.

 

2. Meddle is the sixth studio album by English progressive rock group Pink Floyd.

 

3. Legend is a compilation album by Bob Marley and the Wailers, released in 1984 by Island Records.

 

All are 24/192 FLAC recordings, and sound beautiful on my "Computer Audiophile on the Cheap" system.

 

Now, list your three albums, because discovering new, good recordings is the fun of being an Audiophile.

[bigbob]

High fidelity (often shortened to hi-fi or hifi) reproduction is a term used by home stereo listeners, audiophiles and home audio enthusiasts to refer to high-quality reproduction of sound to distinguish it from the lower quality sound produced by inexpensive audio equipment, or the inferior quality of sound reproduction that can be heard in recordings made until the late 1940s.

Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has inaudible noise and distortion, and a flat (neutral, uncolored) frequency response within the intended frequency range.--^Wikipedia

 

 

^{Wow, what an almost year it has been for the Computer Audiophile on the Cheap.}

 

^{Everything has changed. The harman/kardon i330 was given away, and the Yamaha is now in the back bedroom.}

^{The living room /listening room features a Denon AVR 2805 with a pure direct circuit. The Advents are connected by a 1-meter pair of Nordost Valhalla speaker ribbons with XOT crossover transducers.}

 

^{I am testing an iFi iOne DAC with Bluetooth. It has the AMR Active Noise Cancellation built-in and has NO headphone amplifier on board. The Schiit Modi 2 is back with the Yamaha, and it has an iFi iPurifier2 on it.}

^{I am running those amazing $50/pair Dayton Audio AMT loudspeakers on stands back in the bedroom.}

 

^{I just bought the new quad-core Raspberry Pi to be my dedicated music server. I am waiting for a replacement remote for my Samsung Smart TV so I can tell it to be an HDMI monitor. I can install software and get the RaspPi ready for Volumio,  a headless app, that will give me control of the system from my Moto-g.}