HiWire

Very nice. I'll see if I can find some... I think they're out of production again.

I like the Super Jewel Box cases that come with SACDs, but it looks like they're getting hard to find (Acoustic Sounds still seems to have them). Also, I'm wondering if somebody makes good cases for regular CDs that fit the front and back (+ spine) labels properly. P.S. Has anybody heard the new Blu Spec CD2 discs? I'm thinking of getting Michael Jackson's Thriller in this format just for fun.

The Darkness – Permission to Land

I took a pass on the HD 6XX. I'll wait and see how prices go on Black Friday... not completely wedded to the Sennheiser sound.

Thanks for the update. I'm assuming the DSHA3 would work well with Grados, then?

Copenhagen, DSHA-2/3/4(?), L-3... that's a lot to look forward to!

Yes, but I've never been a fan of those Senn pads. I'll get the regular flat pads from TTVJ if the new ones aren't an improvement.

Guns N' Roses – Use Your Illusion I I haven't listened to this CD in a while... I had it first on cassette years ago. Now I think I understand this album a lot better, having had more life experience, relationships, broader musical knowledge, etc. It's an incredibly ambitious album, putting together larger-scale and more complex arrangements than their first hit album, Appetite for Destruction. I prefer the second album, Use Your Illusion II, because it has a bit more depth and emotional range. The first album is more straight ahead, showcasing a bunch of straight-up rockers with minimal filler. There is a bit of variety – Spanish guitar on Double Talkin' Jive, blues-rock piano on Bad Obsession and Dust N' Bones, and, of course, the symphonic strings of November Rain. Listen for the complex rhythm and accompaniment guitar parts going in an out in November Rain – they are often lost in the mix against the overwhelming vocals, lead guitar, and strings. Overall, it's an exhausting, intense experience, just the way it was meant to be. There aren't many slow or quiet songs other than Izzy Stradlin's laid-back You Ain't the First. The overall tone is aggressive and combative, often feeling conversational, as if Axl or the band was telling off a series of exes. There is a bit of sweetness in my favorite of the bunch, Don't Cry and November Rain, but the majority of the songs are unrelentingly in-your-face, until the album ends, appropriately, with Coma. The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long and all that...

Any updated impressions on these pads? The flat pads on my HP2 are crumbling a bit.

What about a Cyrus CD player?

The Raveonettes – Chain Gang of Love

LCD Soundsystem

Massive Attack – Protection

The new USB Audio Class 3.0: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10719/usbif-publishes-audio-over-usb-typec-specifications My issue with this is the fact that they are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic (in audiophile terms)... you're simply pushing the DAC outside your device to the external gizmo. At some point, you're still going to need a proper analog stage in an even smaller external package (e.g., your headphones), or a big box thing to do what was inside the other box thing to begin with. For mainstream consumers, it's fine, just fine. One less thing to require adapters once they've switched all their headphones to USB Type-C connectors, Lightning connectors, Bluetooth... and let's not forget charging the batteries for all these devices. Adding new digital formats doesn't magically make things sound better, for all the hype MQA is garnering.

Did anybody notice the posting of this new teaser pic? Estimated price of $499, $1,199 for UDP-205: http://oppodigital.com/uhd/ Some details from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2016/09/23/hands-on-with-the-oppo-udp-203-ultra-hd-blu-ray-player/ and more from Audioholics: http://www.audioholics.com/blu-ray-and-dvd-player-reviews/oppo-udp-203-ultra-hd-blu-ray-player

Same here... I like normal music more than "audiophile recordings", generally. It would be nice if more recordings were done at that level, but there is a stereotype of audiophile recordings (e.g., look at the catalogs of Mo-Fi, Audio Fidelity, Analogue Productions, etc.)... safe and predictable and old. They're all great canonical albums, but there's nothing new or surprising. Given the low sales volumes, that's a sustainable approach.

The Cars I finally got around to listening to this one (listened to the Elektra HDCD on my home system and my portable a few weeks ago for reference) – the Red Book layer of the SACD. There's a definite improvement – I'm hearing a lot more, period. The guitars are fleshed out with more body, the vocalists seem less "ghostly" (despite the ever-present reverb), the drums are deeper and more propulsive, the synthesizers are more detailed... overall, the sound is much less harsh. On the HDCD, the album is all leading edges, sharp and brittle. The Mo-Fi mastering is a lot deeper, soundstage and stereo image are far better defined and you hear more instrument/vocal resonances (missing on the HDCD) and it's easier to separate the bass guitar lines, for example, even while the synth is leading. On one of the later tracks, the synth seems to be almost in another key than the one I'm familiar with. The synths are a bit less loud and overwhelming, but have richer-sounding tones in exchange. Anyone who likes this album is in for a treat. Almost needless to say I'm picking up Heartbeat City right away. I seriously doubt the Audio Fidelity version will stand up against the new release.

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Blood Sugar Sex Magik (avoid the remastered editions):

Yes, that sentence jumped out at me too. It sounded a lot more like marketing copy than a serious analysis. Without measurements and technical descriptions, we fall back to audiophile mumbo jumbo.

A bit more information on why USB audio quality varies: http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2016/05/gordon-rankin-on-why-usb-audio-quality-varies/

That's annoying... in the Hydrogenaudio thread, the posters mentioned a lot of inconsistency in HDCD recordings (even coding HDCD on one channel!) and the developer, kode54 (as well as Charlie Hansen), wrote that a lot of recordings didn't use the Peak Extend function and virtually none of them used Low Level Range Extend. The more I read about HDCD, the more I find out what a mess it was in implementation by the recording studios. Also, people seem to fight about it a lot on the internet – so much noise for such a small, random assortment of albums. No wonder hi-fi manufacturers wanted to stop paying royalties for it. Looks like Steve Hoffman abandoned HDCD five years ago: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,87874.0.html

It's been hard for me to tell the difference between Red Book and SACD quality on various rigs... I think the hi-fi manufacturers are still chasing a moving target when it comes to optimizing digital sound quality. Ayre's apodizing filter of 2009 (apparently also in Meridian players) was news to me and Stereophile seemed to love it... my player uses an upsampling DAC and the previous Arcam players used dCS's Ring DAC. DAC technology seems to change very quickly and I don't think most of us are capable of understanding all the technology. At the end of the day, you still have to do a lot of listening to make a decision. I do enjoy Stereophile (and Tyll's) attempts to measure and quantify output, but a lot of what we hear probably can't be measured yet. Also, the manufacturers make a lot of noise about their DAC chips but you usually don't get as much analysis on the analog output stage or power supply, which are critical. I'm relieved the great jitter scare is over for now.

Ugh... hope you were able to get another player. I spent some time researching Ayre's C-5xeMP laser replacement last night, just out of curiosity. The Sony laser in my Arcam CD36 is still going strong. I don't put that many hours into it.

Your results might be a bit inconclusive (Lateralus popped up a few times in the discussion): https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,79427.msg716859.html#msg716859 and https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,79427.msg716795.html#msg716795 and https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,79427.msg787661.html#msg787661

The HDCD flag stayed on when I played Beck's Midnight Vultures, regardless of whether the feature was checked or not. The Audio Fidelity version of the Cars' Heartbeat City, which is what I was listening to when I wrote the first post, seems to have encoding errors. I could use foobar to check, as indicated in the Head-Fi thread. Microsoft is fairly unclear about what 24-bit audio does, other than to claim that HDCD will play back at "full audio quality. The audio quality of standard CDs is not affected." Speaking of the Model One and Two – it's interesting to see that Berkeley Audio Design's Alpha DAC Reference Series 2 still has a HDCD light and they advise converting DSD to PCM on the computer rather than on the DAC: http://www.berkeleyaudiodesign.com/alpha-dac-reference-series-2/ A paean to Keith Johnson's work: http://www.ultraaudio.com/features/20090201.htm The developer of the foobar2000 HDCD decoder says it will reduce a HDCD recording by about 6 dB: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,79427.msg734218.html#msg734218