HeyWaj10

Listen with some lower midfi gear for a while. This might reset your baseline. Also, sometimes you just need a break.

Echoing recommendations from @Lyander and @Armaegis -- Clear and clean your space. Dust/wipe down everything. Organize your cables. Rebalance the rack if it's on a desk or floor.

Also, find new music. Expand your genres. Songs you've heard before become predictable and your brain develops burn-in. Hit the puree button on that mix for a week, then come back to your favorites.

Mood (and other body chemistry) can have a great effect on listener satisfaction. As others have mentioned, having an alternate system is helpful to reflect and re-calibrate.

...and then you swap tubes to something different, and it gets substantially BETTER. WTF y'all...

It’s a disease/money pit at its worst and super fun at its best. If you’re a tweaky kind of person, it’s hard to beat dialing the sound in with different toobs.

And yes, it does a lot even at 192 kHz. :) But I admit that one reason for keeping my eyes open for other DACs is that nervosa says it might be even better with a DAC that can swallow higher rates.

I should also add that with the RU6, the difference between Roon and HQP wasn’t as big by far as with the Daccord, although it does 384 kHz. My guess is that the clock must be good in order to be able to appreciate the difference, but that’s just speculation.

Not to hijack, but I tossed a few of my own queries over here:

https://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/the-hqplayer-thread.11376/page-3

upload pic to imgur; open that image in a separate tab, so that the url ends with .jpg or the like, then copy/paste that url into the prompt here

Thank you, @Tchoupitoulas

I'm keen to hear one, too, even if the amp requirements are a little unusual

The sonic characteristics described by some folks on HF seem to align with my preferences (on paper) - and that price point is just so darn intriguing. But to your point, the concern would be with amp pairing...not sure if my Lyr 3 would be something sufficient to drive it!

It may take a while before we see impressions with a variety of amps, given the apparent high demand and small operation making the Tungsten