Which headphones of Drop's currently available?
I have some rewards points to burn but there's no obviously good options on Drop right now for headphones Contenders Ultrasone - maybe? I don't own any Ultrasones, so curious. Looks like garbage travel headphone which could be useful also. Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro. - Maybe? I have the DT 880 Good price point, really uncomfortable headphones but could be interesting to try the upgraded version. E-MU - strong contender but $400 is a bad price point for what it is. Which of the above would you choose and why? Nothing else on Drop is relevant to my interests, because Already own 6xx 820 800 s Ether cx Garbage / Consumer grade Meze 99 - garbage bass canons, hard pass No gaming headphones obviously Sennheiser wireless - no to wireless/bluetooth Hifiman - I have 2 of drop hifimans and they make really bad cheap shit on Drop, hard pass on HE-R7DX Aeon - I own the closed, Drop refuses to address #padgate so no reason to buy open Beyerdynamic 177x - wireless, nope Too similar 8x / 560s...
Mar 28, 2024
Was there any striking difference between R2R-11 and NFB 11.28 you noticed
The reality is that you can always buy the better product and use its features to tune it how you like, vs spending more money on an inferior product which is never capable of producing such quality.
Measured performance is critical for QA, R&D, and to ensure consistency throughout the workflow. If you want to further understand the value of measurements, there is a whole field called metrology. Certifying institutes like the NIST provide accepted references for everything from weights, to time, to voltages. This is necessary for the world to function as we know it.
Science requires no faith. For an instrument to be considered "accurate" in a laboratory environment, you are talking about accuracy within a defined range. This accuracy can be demonstrated through a validated chain of calibration certificates at the time of measurement that flows directly back to one or more standards body. EEVBlog has some great videos on this subject I suggest you check out.
Good measurements are critical for this design because it requires closely matched resistors with specific aging consistency. Nothing is so simple in life, everything is made of something else, and somewhere in that line a "rat lab" technician is ensuring that the ladder DAC you and others buy sound the same.
Its not about comparing apples to oranges, its about making sure all the oranges are similar enough to be interchangeable.
Don't take for granted the availability of high quality, consistent components to make sure your unmeasurable musical experience is a consistent one, and you get what you played for.
Consistent reproduction is all around you, and you never notice precisely because these calibrated systems have been developed over the decades.
All he does is shout nonsense and troll. He has done the same in other parts of the Airist thread already, he's been doing it for weeks.
I'm all for 'science', but what Jimster is promoting isn't science, it's just a cult of personality.
Feeding the trolls only perpetuates the ignorance and further confuses an already heavily subjective experience: the reproduction of music.
Using the pejorative "rat lab" is not necessary and cheapens your point. Let your ideas stand on the strength of their merit, not the crutches of derogatory and defametory name calling.
If you were speaking to a particular lab being disreputable (audiosciencereview), that message was lost in the dismissive tone towards science and technology in your previous posts.
After that I guess he ran out of money, or possibly observed diminishing marginal returns and decided he had heard enough. I wish he'd described his experiences with some of the half dozen not-Sennheiser headphones he tried, but it was that progression of improvement when paired with better other devices that convinced me to join this drop.
I appreciate that R2R may be a challenge to implement given the preciseness required of the R and 2R resistors, and deviation caused by temperature. Heck, it could be really really good, or not so good.
I'm in this drop to see if Airist can pull it off. If they do then $350 would be extremely good value.
https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/measurement-of-r2r-dac.2202/
John Novak’s 2015 RMAF presentation https://youtu.be/2V6YN-mshmY
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/philosophical-question-about-song.3146/
Regarding bias though, I've owned/reviewed/enjoyed many Audio GD products over the years, starting with the Reference 7 way back in the day. So I wasn't trying to "smooth out" anything for my "sponsor", which doesn't even make sense. I like the company and many of their products but thoroughly dislike the model in question. How is that not clear?
Its pretty obvious you are biased against him given that you do not criticize the others for not sharing their configs. If he is required to do it to be taken seriously, why arent the others?
It amazes me how people keep spreading this lie, there was a reddit thread where he said he would give his AP settings to people and in that very same thread there was a certain individual saying HE HAS NOT MADE THE FILES AVAILABLE WHAT IS HE HIDING!? Remarkable.
I got to tell you as someone who doesnt really have a dog in this fight, has bought and liked Schiit products before, I was full ready to say Amir was wrong...until I saw how the anti-Amir crowd acted. Constant lies, disparaging of his character, and claiming his measurements were all wrong in spite of not providing any real evidence of this beyond "IT IS KNOWN KALESSI!"
Its pretty obvious to me which side is trying to be objective in their evaluation and which side is full of Schiit :)
As you see there, I show that the Yggdrasil DAC is poor performing using their measurements, not mine!
As to what I did at Microsoft, I mention that as totality of my experience, not the reason you should trust what I say. This is my full qualifications: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/a-bit-about-your-host.1906/
Who do you trust with measurements and where would I read their qualifications?
As to inaudible being inaudible, there is no reason to get equipment that is poorly engineered when there are perfectly good products at the same or even lower prices. No one talks more about psychoacoustics of measurements than me because that is part of my professional experience.
Ultimately you have to accept that out of thousands of desktop and portable audio products, there are many that are poor, and some that are great. My goal is to bring objective data that shows which is which. I do it all on my nickel with no financial support from any advertisers, sponsors, etc. A lot of gear is loaned to me by owners that want to know how to measure. The rest I buy myself including a bunch from this nice site: massdrop.
Be on the side of consumers. Don't dump on the only person who has your and only your interest in mind.
I read, enjoy, and learn from all three - ASR, SBAF, and Head-fi, and also others. But there is clearly, and definitely a cultural / attitude / bias difference that I have to filter out. And SBAF, for its many positive qualities and members I have to admit has many more negatives against it. The worst negative is the ad hominem nature of their arguments - go after the person if you don’t like the conclusion. The second is their old boys club mentality - your opinion is worthless unless you have properly proven yourself to the trusted inner circle. But they also have sufficient positives to keep me coming back; truly knowledgeable audiophiles with lots of good gear and history with it. Like a highly biased news network that still has excellent reporting, I go there for information, but turn my filters on very, very high. Yes, SBAF is a good site for subjective listening impressions, I just wish they would address their serious cultural issues.
ASR in general - not always - is much, much more out of the muck than SBAF. There are times when members go too far in attacking people rather than debate ideas. But I haven’t seen it be nearly as vicious, and it is much rarer. And I truly believe that Amir has no serious axe to grind. And when he gets it wrong on ASR there are other members with their own equipment and measurements that challenge him, and when warranted he edits and changes his results. That’s the nature of an objective argument - if it’s about the data then one debates the conditions the data was gathered in and debate how to interpret the numbers, but it is all very, well, dry, and helps to keep emotions in check. Subjective arguments can get much more heated because it involves people’s opinions with no way to measure the answers as right and wrong, and thus can get closer to individuals sense of self worth.
One last comment. Do objective measurements, in conjunction with subjective listening, matter? I believe so, and I will tell you why I think so. Ever hear of the quote "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?“ If someone outwardly behaves well, but is evil inside will they always outwardly behave well under all circumstances, or will they one day surprise you? With audio equipment we have the opportunity to pick great sounding stuff that we can be confident will continue to sound good as our audio chains evolve and grow if the underlying engineering of each of our components is excellent. What is so wrong with that?
I suppose what I and perhaps others were getting at was a critique of the "community reviews" process. Since these units aren't available to test out and aren't widely distributed for dozens and dozens of reviews like products already to market, we're left to rely on the folks you deem worthy of reviewing. I don't know anyone personally, but I'm sure they're all good people and very knowledgeable and all audio lovers. As you might imagine however, it can be tough to really trust these reviews knowing that the reviewers were hand-picked by the manufacturer to write reviews that would then be used on the manufacturers product page... With that grain of salt already in my head, I might be a little more prone to calling out what I deem to be "shillish comments".
With that said, I don't want to take away from what I do believe is a great product! The Massdrop model, while awesome in a lot of ways (saving those $$ and your dope collaborations), just leaves something to be desired (perhaps unavoidably) in the pre-drop reviews process.
In the end folks this is not about who is right or wrong, better, or worse. It is about each of us, in our own way, achieving whatever Audio bliss we can find for ourselves!
I for one love the old line - “I don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me!”
Seriously, though, why hang out only with people that agree with you? How can you learn anything new? Where’s the fun in that?
I only ask for constructive and civil discord. And that is, sadly, in short supply these days.
I don’t have a lot of experience with different DACs, but I do have the D50, the Audio-GD NFB 11.38, and the iFi xDSD. Of these, I consistently prefer the the sound of the D50. I purchased the D50 largely based on what I read on ASR and am very happy I did. No experience with any Schit products, though, and neither have I ever heard or used an R2R type DAC.
in the end measurements have to be taken as only one of N inputs... how something sounds to you based on your audio chain and your preferences has to be the most important input, of course. Let’s face it, there are reasons why some people like tubes - they prefer some distortion, and Amir’s approach eliminates anything that distorts... But measurements may help you identify any problems you haven’t run into and may in the future should you change your audio chain. But your listening preferences should always take precedence, with measurements supplementing that.
I would suggest you to consider why you like the Bimby - and dont like the D50 - and how measurements can help you identify why you like what you like and thus predict in advance other products you might like or not... You might like the effect of certain harmonics, for example. You might like a flat frequency response, or maybe something different. Amir looks for and likes/dislikes certain traits. Point here is that YOU - or anyone else - do not have to agree with Amir. But the information may still be useful to you. If the information is about inaudible imperfections, then by all means simply “filter it out”. Goodness, I can’t fire up my computer without being bombarded by largely useless information that I have to weed through.
It seems that the issue is that Amir talks badly about products that others love. For example, your comment about Amir ruining the Bimby... how could he have done that? One man, one relatively obscure website by comparison to the audio community and market... In my opinion, people are being very insecure... Amir‘s conclusions seem to challenge them in some way, as though their intelligence or sense of self worth in the decisions they made is being called into question - it is taken very personally. To that, I say, who should care what Amir (or anyone else) likes or doesn’t? Why can’t you derive from his work what is useful to you, and ignore his conclusions? Or just completely ignore him... but the sophomoric reactions to Amir make me think something deeper is at play than simple disagreement with conclusions. It is, somehow, deeply personal.
You have clearly stated you did not like the D50. I on the other hand like it a great deal. I don’t take offense in the least. Does that make one of us wrong and one of us right? No. Instead I applaud you for knowing what you like and don’t like.
Use your ears first and foremost. But also use your brain to see if there is extra information in the measurements that can help you out. And finally, don’t take any of this personally. Everyone, despite what you see in the media and hear on school campuses, is actually entitled to have their own opinion. Everyone else at worst should live with it, and at best defend their right to hold a contrary perspective to their own.
In my headphone land, i have the schiit mimby, audio gd R2R-11 andan incoming r28. Me likes. If I like the R28, then next is the R2R-7HE in a year's time.
Amir, i heard of him and only just got to read a review for the first time a couple of days ago... I also stopped reading, as i realise what he hears is different from what i hear, so there was no need to go on... nothing against him, just not a reviewer that suit my needs.
my desktop gear:
Audio-GD NFB 11.38 Aune X7s MD CTH MD LCX Little Dot Mk II Topping D50 Topping DX7s (on the way) MD THX 789 (on order) Really would love more gear ... why? ‘Cause it’s there!
as you you can see I proudly own an Audio-GD Product... in fact I spent much of this evening listening to my Audio-GD 11.38 playing through my Sundara, and to mix it up the rest of the evening my D50 through my MD LCX playing on my Focal Elex - I enjoyed the heck out myself ;-)
So please, try not too to paint with a broad brush, OK? ;-)
As to how the D50 sounds... it will sound different through different AMPs and headphones (in addition to the above desktop gear I have a dozen headphones so have done quite a few experiments). In my experience I actually found the NFB to be a whole lot more sensitive to the amp and headphone pairing than the D50...
Well, if you're supporting ASR via Patreon, you're now a member of a club that includes Jimster, who sells Counter-Strike:GO cheats online for a living. What does that activity say about character?
I also said I lurk on both sites :-); I chose to financially support ASR because I despise bullying, and that is what I was seeing more of on one site than the other. Before you respond note the “seeing more of”. A subjective observation by a fallible human. Still I stand by it.
Regarding equating Jimster and anything he may or may not do on the side with the merit or demerits of any other site like ASR... see my response a couple of posts above... don’t paint with a broad brush! Guilt by association is kinda lowbrow thinking, wouldn’t you agree?
Some sites such as SBAF and much more so Headcase have their share of infantile behavior, and sometimes it gets very nasty. But it tends to stay on those sites. ASR fans seem to have a need to keep trying to push their own infantile behavior into other parts of the internet- they are constantly trying to evangelize the their site on Massrop, Reddit and PC audio forums. But their message usually seems to be just pushing hate.
As to one person going uncivil on ASR and thus being the responsibility of those members to police that individual... well, I have seen pretty ugly personal attacks in the other site and... those posters attract likes and general Atta-boys for their postings. I think there is plenty of this to go around if you want to claim a site’s members are responsible for other members. To give credit where credit is due, I have seen moderators on all sites eventually step in.
I want what I would hope everyone else wants (but I doubt it is the case)... civil discord that can end in people respecting the position of the other party even if they thoroughly disagree with them. One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure has never been more true than in Audio where so much is going on that it is easy for different people to draw conclusions that are rational for them and different than everyone else... If I say X is garbage and you say it is great, and you say Y is garbage an I say Y is great, we are actually both right in each of those assessments within our frame of reference. It is not that people have different opinions is the problem, it is how people react to those different opinions that is the problem. For example, I have Senn HD6XX, Senn 660s, and Senn 58X, and honestly I can’t figure out what the fuss is about... but there are equally enthusiastic supporters of those cans and I am happy they are enjoying them but I would not be surprised if I was called a trogladyte for not thinking they are the second coming!
The name of the game is to agree to disagree. If someone goes off the rails and is uncivil or fails to put forward their positions constructively, it is best for you to just filter them out of your life as they are not worth your trouble. Don’t go into the dirt with them.
However, don’t just ignore people you disagree with - they are the ones you might be able to learn from... just ignore the ones that only bring poison and not ideas to the conversation. And I have no issue if you conclude that Amir on ASR or conversely his equivalents on SBAF do or do not bring something to learn from, or only poison.
My suggestion is to keep responses civil and constructive, or just simply ignore if you think it is poison. But responding by calling into question the motives, competencies, physical tributes, intelligence, and even worse, of someone you have never met is pretty inexcusable. And yes, when Amir (or anyone else on ASR) does it, that is equally inexcusable as when someone from SBAF does it.
You cannot taint the others on a forum for the objectionable posts of a few, unless they stand by for truly serious offences. Where online forums are concerned, barring someone seriously bullying another party, disclosing personally confidential information, or criminal behavior, and others stand by while it is done, that statement is simply patently not true. You cannot taint the others on a forum for the objectionable, but ultimately very banal, postings of a few. Of course that is different for truly serious offences, but point out one of those on this form, or ASR, or SBAF, that you would want the crowd to rise up against. You will find that a reasonable standard is a very high standard (unless you are a believer in safe places where you don't need to be confronted by those who think differently... then please go find your happy place and have a great life!!).
These are discussion forums, treat them like that, and stop believing that you are so right that others must conform to your beliefs. Have perspective. Respect what others say - debate it, but respect it. Live and let live. At worst, simply IGNORE those who bring nothing constructive to the conversation. Hint - "constructive" does not mean that they agree with you. I do not agree with you, and I suspect you do not agree with me, but I hope you see that in this post I am trying to engage you constructively and appeal to your better angels.
I look on forums across the internet and I also watch numerous news networks and what I see makes me fear for where our society is going. What happened to the basic tenet of Western Civilization and its fundamental freedoms associated with free speech, and frankly the right to be who and what you want to be - " I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it "? Think about just how fundamental that is to everything - not just the spoken or written word - that statement really implies. I will defend you, regardless of my personal opinion, because you simply have a right to be!!
While disagree completely with what you wrote, I believe you have your right to that opinion, and to express it.