morphsci

RIP Trini. I forgot he was in The Dirty Dozen. Great movie, I am going to rewatch it soon.

I am going to try something new to get back into dynamic headphones. Rather than jumping headfirst into the shallow end of the pool, I am going to start out a bit more slowly. So my first trial of a “new” headphone (my current newest model headphone is an HD 650) will be a Focal Clear. Looking forward to it.

Pretty sure I actually have a pair around here somewhere.

My HeadAmp GS-X arrived back from a check-up at its fathers shop. All hooked back up for listening with the Mytek as source. The only problem is what new headphones should I buy?

You should build one with the 7” touchscreen display. It displays the album title, song title, artist name and album art when you are using it and displays the time and date when you are not (unless you disable it). No, sorry. Only USB 2 or 3 out.

Yesterday I built two more Pootie Pies, one with a display and one without. So I now have four total. Using one of the display units in the bedroom with the SMSL stack and the other with the DAC Magic Plus on my desk. That gives me two headless units to use for testing purposes. If anyone wants to try one out, I can send it your way. All the units use RopieeeXL, so you do not even need Roon to use them as you can turn on DLNA, Airplay or Spotify to stream.

I like the Parasound A23+ with the Moths. I briefly considered the A21+, but with these speakers even the lower powered amp is overkill for power output. I like the independent channel gain controls On the Parasound amps and it has been more useful than I initially thought. The ATC amp has more power than a single Parasound, but for the price of the ATC you could buy two Parasounds and run them in bridged mode @500W per channel. Seems like a good problem to have.

Good Riddance to (very) Bad Rubbish.

Happy Birthday, Todd!

Yes, but it is not a RAAT endpoint like the Mytek. I want to try using one but I got rid of all mine. May have something in the works. Here are The Roon Endpoint Types Not me. Seems more expensive than using my Mac mini. I have no problem using a dedicated mini to run just the Roon Server.

I didn't know Colin had a band.

Thanks Bryan. That is pretty much what I came up with. Just trying to make sure I didn't miss something.

So a question for the Focal mafia: Is there any difference, other than cosmetic, between the Clear and the Clear Pro? Asking for a friend.

Happy Birthday, Dom HiWire!

Since I could not visit Chicago this year I went on a Chicago music journey. 1.) 2.) 3.)

Earlier Now

I loved Watchmen, but is it that good or does everything else just suck?

So I decided to explore the Topping and SMSL offerings. First of all they are not exactly comparable to the Project as neither has a built-in headphone output. To get that you need their separate matching Headphone unit. For the Topping that will set you back $170 (Total $420) and for the SMSL that will cost $190 (Total $440). I actually decided to try the two matching SMSL units as the DAC (SU-8) has balanced outputs and the headphone amp (SH-8) has balanced inputs and a 4-pin balanced headphone output, which to me is worth more than the additional $20. So here they are: Initial impressions are very good. At least as good as the Project, plus I can slip my GSX in when it returns from the manufacturer (Ahem ...). I'll probably stop here for a while since I now have a Dinny level of DACs and I need to decide on what I want to compare next.

I wish now that I had not sold all of mine

Todd has a very good description of the system. I run Roon on a MacMini that was already serving music server duty and it is always on running the Roon core and indexing my library on a directly connected disk. I became interested in Roon when I bought the Mytek Brooklyn Bridge and was getting pissed off having to use three separate apps to listen to my local library, Tidal and Qobuz. Roon integrates all three under a common interface. It does not do Spotify, which can be a problem for some. The other thing it does is make the recording format (bit depth, frequency, PCM vs DSD) a non consideration as every endpoint will receive a stream it can use at its maximum resolution (assuming the endpoint is set-up correctly*). How powerful a server you need really depends on how much DSP you want Roon to do. In my case the only DSP I have it do is any necessary format conversion for the endpoints, so my server is pretty much overkill. In most cases the server is less likely to be a bottleneck compared to your network configuration anyway. So if you have any reasonable computer available (Windows, Mac or Linux) it should work fine. There is tons of information available on line for what is required for Roon in terms of both computing power and network infrastructure. As Todd said if you are only interested in streaming services to one or two endpoints then Roon is likely overkill. For me the longterm configuration simplification alone is worth the price of admission. *If the device is Roon Ready or Roon Tested then it generally works fine with the Roon defaults. If not either of those then you may have to play with the device configuration. I have had to do that a couple of times, but it is not too hard even for me.

Happy Birthday, Antonio!

I would focus on the software you want to use. The hardware is secondary. I was very antiRoon before the time of Covid. Once I actually learned how to use Roon I do not see myself going back to anything else. That makes my hardware choices simpler as it just has to work with Roon. It is not super expensive, about $120 year (or $699.99 lifetime), but not insignificant either. There are less expensive choices like J. River Media Center which I use at work and is fine for a one room system but it does offer more video support. I only wish I had listened to my own advice sooner so I did not waste as much of my time trying to get Windows to be useful.

The Pootie Pie is a streamer, but I am not sure how that would really differ from a wireless sound card. If you use Roopiee XL You are not restricted to Roon. You can use it any way you use an Airplay, DLNA or Spotify endpoint. So you basically hook it up to a DAC and push music to it using any DLNA or Airplay compliant app.

I fixed my post above.