Comments on Profile Post by lithium

Comes with practice and familiarity with what you have. If you're finding it difficult, don't sweat it and just enjoy your music.

I might not be good at comparing DACs, but I am great at enjoying the music. It was fun to give it a go anyway

Best way to do it is listen to one DAC long enough that you feel you can reliably recognize its sound. Then try the other DAC. Don’t switch mid song or back and forth. Then try to describe the difference when listening on the second DAC versus the first.

Yeah, it's not a trivial thing. I have some DACs on my desk (Callia and Original BF2) that differ in presentation... but the more I listen, the more I realize that some differences just aren't there in the way I expected to hear them.

Wait wait, you mean people don't just write down what they think appeals to confirmation bias to farm for upvotes?

Yeah often the biggest difference I notice with DACs is the presentation, depth/height of image, etc. Headphones pretty much eliminate those differences.

I wish I could like @crazychile comment more than once. I couldn't agree more with this

I'm a bit of a DAC skeptic. I find it real hard to distinguish many of them in AB testing and doubt my ability to do it blind. Lots of virtual ink spilled here and elsewhere about different outputs sounding different, etc. I haven't heard it personally, and I did a bunch of testing trying to. Could only hear the very very slightest difference between streamers.

I sort of feel the same about solid-state amps, tbh. At least for headphones. Solid-state speaker amps definitely sound different. But for HPs it can be real subtle.

I've settled for a Yggdrasil Analog 2 (I think), Matrix X-Sabre Pro, and a Gustard R26. I disliked an SMSL something or other I had in a system briefly. And I found the Bifrost 2 OG ultimately too dark. But among the first three, I'd probably struggle to hear major differences.

@crazychile I will say there's possibly some merit to the argument that folk who grew up with personal audio as their main means of recreational listening might be more persnickety about headstage vs conventional soundstage. At least in my case, I can be REALLY picky about headstage to the point of sounding like a lunatic, most can't give a bother.

DACs do also have differences in how they present transients, like how rounded impacts can be, how long trailing decays go on for (which I guess is part of stage...?), but yeah the differences are minute relative to amps etc.

@wbass have you tried any of the more sanely-priced Lake People amps like the G109 or G111? That one could maybe change your mind about SS amps being subtly different. They're weird.

@Lyander No, I haven't heard the Lake People, though certainly curious. And I should say that I have a Bryston BHA-1 that sounds warmer than most solid-state.

The interaction between amp and transducer does seem to vary on solid-state (less so than tube, naturally), but I'd maybe argue that, above a certain level of competence and meeting power requirements for a certain HP, a lot of solid-state has been pretty similar sounding to me.

@wbass now that I have a bit more context for stuff I think it could be an interesting listen for you. I do emphatically not care for it, but the staging has idiosyncrasies that could work for some, and now that I'm paying more attention to transient response as opposed to just voicing, I feel like that's another way they seem to stand out vs other SS amps.

It'd not make sense to compare Piety to Unity since the Piety is stylised, but betwen the Magni 3+ and the Unity I feel like there's a bit of a pronounced gulf, and both are arguably similar amps in intent. Mainly treble smoothness and sense of driver control with the Senn HD600s. But I could also be so far up my own bunghole at this point that the differences are exaggerated in my head.

Good speakers are cheat. Doing DAC comparison with average planar headphones is badass.