Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

My email account has been 2FA for ever.

That doesn't actually guarantee that 2FA is needed to login - MSFT is the worst for this, as they allow API access to your email account with a password, predominantly designed for apps to be able to interact with your email.

i.e. you need 2FA to login, but the bad actor, masquerading as some form of client that is not Outlook/similar, doesn't.

This is nuts, seems like it would be faster to count the number of people who had not had their Spotify account hacked

Just had a little look around and seems like both Spotify and Tidal acccounts are for sale on the dark web. You can even find them on ebay.

And it looks like Spotify were hacked several times but continue to refuse to acknowledge

Hello Deezer

basically Plex is the poor man's Roon, and whilst I'd love to be able to drop $500 on Roon, the incremental improvement in features seems marginal at best. Actually I can't see much gain other than multi-room streaming, and there are features in Plex (like streaming to my mobile device when I'm out of the house) which aren't available on Roon. The bigger issue is that to do multi-room streaming I'd need to upgrade all my end-points from £30 chromecast audios (96/24) to probably £500 bluesound units (192/24), which feels like a huge outlay for very little benefit. If I did that I'd probably skip Roon and use Bluesound's app.

Am i missing something?

But the more I read about Tidal the less enamoured I am with it. Setting aside JayZ's involvement, it's a US company (so my privacy is less secure) and also there's talk it will be bought by Apple sometime soon. I'd love Qobuz (French firm, EU only) integration with Roon but seems like this is being held up at the Qobuz end. That would be a killer combination.

Yeah, a few folk ive talked to have paid a tenner for lifetime spotify on ebay/internet and that definitely inst legal. Especially when they say 'its not in my name its randomly generated' total denial they are mooching someones else's account.

Im on amazon music for since its part of my echo setup in the house. playlists arent as good as spotify but i like the integration.

Pretty sure humans can’t hear the difference between 192 & 96 anyway (although it might make a difference at the recording/processing/etc point).

I'd love Qobuz (French firm, EU only) integration with Roon but seems like this is being held up at the Qobuz end. That would be a killer combination.

Why not Deezer?

Well I was humming along to this thread until I got to Obviously if you have a ten grand hifi. Am I still allowed to press into service my first-gen MotoG to play back from Mixcloud?

@Dramatic_Hammer - i agree, 96 is entirely sufficient. Not so sure about 16bit vs 24 bit though. Would like to run some tests sometime.

@mashton Qobuz's 24bit stream is roughly the same annual price as the 16bit service from Deezer. The ultimate hifi for me would be Roon + bluesound endpoints with a 24 bit streaming service going through a nice amp and pair of speakers. (I just got an email from Qobuz saying that Roon will be supported "very soon"). There's already a Roon server app for Qnap.

Saying that, I'm very happy with the pov solution of Plex + chromecasts and no streaming service. Probably Deezer would offer you more value as they have a family plan for £15. Then your kids can listen to the wiggly worm song without messing up your automatic playlists ;)

even on a decent hifi most people won't distinguish between high bit-rate mp3 and red book / 44.1 either.

Apparently you can train yourself to identify artefacts in mp3 but that's in the realm of people who can identify 300 different motorcycles by engine noise etc..

^^ I think I can tell the difference between CDs burned from flac versus CDs burned from 320mbps MP3s ... but maybe I'm just imagining it. Hard to be sure.

haha so no basis for my preference for Qobuz's 24 bit stream, even at the same price as Deezer's 16 bit stream :)

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2014/06/24-bit-vs-16-bit-audio-test-part-ii.html

As for the songs themselves, the song "Keine Zeit" where the lossy file measured with the most variance compared to the original lossless file (ie. the song most difficult to encode resulting in the most error), was the one where most preferred the sound of the MP3!

Was just a number plucked from the sky :-)

Any recommendations for someone to fettle a technics 1210?

Thinking of going for arm upgrade and getting the external psu which has been sitting on a shelf for years connected up. One LED is out as well.

Do you want to buy mine? I put a ad in a couple of hifi fora a few days ago.

A 1210 is a pretty ropey piece of equipment in terms of hifi. I assume you DJ ... do you?

I don't agree and no.

Yeah, I did see that. Kind of tempted but I the one I have is clean and I already have a timestep PSU just waiting to be connected.

I understand that a Rega arm works well on a 1210

Have you checked out Spiritland? They have some seriously upgraded 1210s there!

http://spiritland.com/

When I first got interested in 1210s, time step were doing all sorts of OTT upgrades. Even to the extent of SME arms.

The general consensus is that the deck itself is good. The areas for improvement are generally agreed to be arm and power supply, with some people also advocating changing the main bearing.

I quite like the look of the micro seiki arm but I've never heard one.

Fair play. There are lots of upgrades that you can do. I know they can sound great.

Spiritland used to detail all of their upgrades on their 1210s and the rest of their equipment. They have changed their website so many times that I can't seem to find the info now. They changed bearing, platter, arm, cartridge, power supply (external) ... it goes on.