Schiit (MultiBit) Bifrost

Could you elaborate on this? Are we talking lossy vs lossless? Studio recordings vs live? General recording quality?

 

If anyone is interested, you can completely bypass Windows for every bit of audio by just using: http://odeus-audio.com.au/Odeus/ASIOLinkPro. This will trick Windows in making it believe that it's using a sound driver, yet the driver is provided by ASIO Link instead: http://imgur.com/a/mCRzU. What happens here is that ASIO link essentially starts an OS level of exclusive mode (ASIO).

Downside is that you're stuck with one setting, it will always send 44KHz or whatever you put it on to your DAC, which is perfect for pretty much everything you use side high res files. So use this for streaming, web browser playback, movies and videogames. Then for high res files just use Foobar or JRiver and close the tool.

This worked perfectly for me, streaming quality improved which I'm very happy about. You can try the trial (stop 5 seconds for each minute) to test it out and I can honestly say people should try.

Anyway hope this helps!

 

Most modern pop/rock/metal is all made on computers and autotuned, quantized, sample replaced, and compressed to shit so that it has hardly anything actually recorded on it. Computer pop with EZdrummer samples and direct MIDI output from GuitarPro and no dynamics or emphasis in hte mix/master is not good for evaluating gear. You want to use real instruments and stuff in mixes with lots of pannings. Strings in general and electric guitars from certain amps and distortion pedals are better for evaluating mids than human voices. Fat ass, unscooped distorted guitars will occupy the entire midrange and bleed into the bass and treble too, even frequency masking the drums sometimes. The tone makes it easy to pick out holes and random bumps and bloom from the upper bass to the low treble.

Also many binaurally miced orchestral recordings are warmed over to hell and the mixers/masters will do stupid shit too which is why some people prefer treble spike headphones and bright as the sun gear for listening to them. Play those through decent nearfields, listen to what they really sound like tonally and it's gooey, maple syrup with few details presented. Not really different from some rock/metal record that has been totally overmixed to sludge; it's just done by the room naturally instead of a drunk behind a console.

 

Truth. I had to start changing my evaluation song list because I realized that some of the music I enjoyed listening to simply wasn't mastered well enough to let me evaluate anything other than rough frequency response of gear. In some ways, depending on your music preferences, there is no need for good gear.

This is also a big reason why I'm ok with budget-fi now that some really good tech and sound has trickled down. My ego still wants something big and beautiful like a ZDS or Balancing Act, but I recognize this and can properly place the desire on the priority list.

 

I have found that many of my oldest recordings are better than a lot of the current stuff. In fact I'm blown away by some of them.

 

Quoted for truth. It makes me sad that more recording aren't done full analog

 

A couple weeks ago I bought pile of cds from a store that was closing out. Most were older titles that I wanted to add to my collection. Many from early 70's along with a few Rudy Van Gelder remasters of 50's and 60's era John Coltrane. Stunning is the word that comes to mind.

 

As someone who recently had to unsubscribe from r/headphones after it nearly gave me an ulcer (specific objectivist users who seemed to have a personal vendetta to tell me everything i posted was worthless), I thank you for putting up a good fight.

This thread is so much more relaxing. I think I have PTSD from DAC arguments on there.

 

he trashed the Beyer T90's. and i mean trashed - he has no clue what he is talking about.

 

indeed you are very correct. having come from the Geekout V2 and the Oppo HA-2 spending the 1200 on the Gungnir Multibit was out of the question. so i went with a Burson Soloist SL Mkii amp, the Bifrost Multibit and a pair of the T90's (to go along with my HD600's and FLC8S IEM's). my next upgrade of 1200 will definitely be on the HD800S, which i believe would make a much greater difference than a new DAC at this point - but then eventually something like the Gungnir Multibit but i think for the $2000 i spent i got a nice mid-fi system aka Bifrost Multibit>Soloist SL Mkii>T90/HD600

i use the T90's with the Angled memory foam velour pads from Brainwavz.
JVC Kenwood Victer stereo headphones HA-SZ2000 japan import are coming soon for those basshead listening optionsl

 

I beg to differ. I seem to be using foobar with ASIO and AK100II as DAC/amp with UERM and I don't hear a difference between 320kbps mp3 vs lossless. I'm also pretty sure Chesky and/or Sheffield Labs records should be sufficiently well recorded.

 

I'm not saying the differences are very noticeable at all. All I'm saying is that there are differences between mp3 and flac. Whether one can hear them is an entirely different matter (loss of high freq hearing,etc....)

 

@Ash1412 to be honest, on ASIO I feel the differences between a proper LAME (or other good encoding options) MP3 and FLAC is, at least to my ears, nearly indistinguishable. On Directsound that difference almost made me go mad "how can people not hear this?", until I started going for full OS ASIO, now even streaming audio seems to just sound better and very hard to distinguish from vs. regular FLAC.

After fumbling around with it a lot, I think Directsound always resamples no matter if it's the same file or not. It's just very hard to A/B, might pull one of my friends's leg to help me out with it on Tuesday when I see him. We were gonna do some DAC playing anyway (he loves NOS DACs and I'm curious how much better the Bifrost Multibit is vs. Metrum HEX he now owns), might as well try that as well.

 

You seem to have missed my point. I for one am not fully convinced that there IS a difference between LAME 320kbps mp3 and lossless encoding. Maybe my ears are not trained enough.

But I wholeheartedly think that DirectSound is one of the most sinister elements in PC audio.

 

Says a T90 owner.

I find "Zeos" to be tiresome and highly overrated, but I don't doubt he knows what he hears.

 

Those RVG Coltrane remasters are abominations. Squashed dynamics and questionable EQing. I compared the RVG Blue Train with a Japanese release and the former sounded so much worse.

 

That certainly isn't my experience with them.

 

Well, if there weren't any difference between them, they wouldn't show up at all in measurements, would they? 320kbps mp3 deletes data above somewhere around 20-21khz (can't remember) while the only roll-off in FLAC occurs due to A. The original recording not having any data above a certain frequency (few recordings have this) or B. The mic picks up less sound as it goes up in frequency due to physics (All recordings have this). However, most songs have 20khz and above at around minus 80-100 db so you won't likely be picking it up on any recording with a dynamic range of 10 or below. As far as I know, most modern audio compression algorithms either delete the ultra-high frequencies or focus their lossy compression on those frequencies the most, as they take up the most space while not offering any meaningful data (most transducers in the consumer range can't reproduce these freqs properly to begin with, not to mention hearing loss). This combined with Windows resampling can cause artifacts to become even more noticeable.

An analogy of this is when you upscale two different versions of a 720p movie on a 4k monitor. The version with the less lossy compression will result in few artifacts, noticeable but tolerable, while the really lossy version will result in terrible blocking, aliasing and other artifacts, now made even more apparent by the scaling algorithm. This is why photographers edit their photos in RAW once and then convert it into JPEG. This is why colorists and video/movie editors edit their videos/movies in RAW and then convert them to Blu-ray (lossy)/Youtube. The optimal way is to do the least processing with the most amount of clean data available using the highest-quality algorithms so as to preserve the most out of the original source.

I entirely support the idea of using 320 kps MP3s, as long as the upsampling algorithm is clean of any artifacts.If you're using WASAPI, my guess is that all processing is handled by the DAC (high-quality algorithms) which should keep any artifacts at bay. Loss of data, however... If you don't notice any loss, then good for you. Enjoy your free disk space while others use 100% FLAC in order to satisfy their OCD

 

I don't want to derail the thread, so I'll just leave this as an example.
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/dr?album=Blue+Train

I also remember LFF being very critical of RVG as a remaster-er on Changstar.