Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

'Premium case work' 😂

To be fair the inside of it does look very impressive. But ya know. 25k.

You could buy 4 mono blocks for less than £3k

Less than $3k including the power supplies and assembly

I was allowing for premium casework.
Maybe some engraving and fine gilding.

I like the Hypex but they are not bullet proof reliable. That case does have a lot of smooth external curves though and making them in small quantities would be expensive.

Seems the same sort of thing is happening with streaming tech, you put a Raspberry Pi in a box with a touch screen and turn s**t to gold.

I dunno, if I'm spending $25k on a component I want all that money to have been spent on performance, not it's external curves and premium finish.... Maybe weird logic but if I was buying a $2000 all in one I'd rather that looks good and works. But esoteric specialist stuff? Aesthetics are at the bottom of the priority list.

Not that I'm spending 25 large on an amp.

See also the refusal to believe that a CCA does a fine job of streaming lossless audio.

This looks really nice.
I keep looking at the yamaha and thinking should I sell the pioneer I have.

Check Out This One Crazy Old Tip That The HiFi Manufacturers Don't Want You To Know About

CCA plugged into a home made hypex

This needs a @Maj Auth/lib, left/right analysis

The Yamaha sounds great too. There’s really not much improvement between that and the preamp / power amp combo.

Wanted to share cleanup of some almost-vintage Mission M-Cube satellites I was very pleased with. Did a bit of the old Retr0bright on the plastic, and fitted NOS grey wraps.

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Can anyone work out how to broadcast from the Sonos Amp to Headphones?
Or failing that- is there a BT amp that will broadcast from my Rega 1 plus?

Has anyone got their vinyl as a separate item on contents insurance?

I’m wondering whether to discuss it when I renew the policy. I’m also trying to figure out under which circumstances I’d likely claim and what I should expect.

Ideally should some catastrophic incident destroy my vinyl collection, I’d want a payout nearer the ‘high’ valuation on Discogs, factoring all the logistics of trying to buy most of it again.

Would I even bother? As much as it means to me, I’d probably have bigger worries and very little time for it. If it happened, would a broad conversation in relation to contents generally and a link to my Discogs collection secure a few grand to at least replace some?

We got flooded and I claimed for some vinyl - they offered a flat rate per record (£10-15, can’t remember) which I challenged successfully on some of the rare stuff. I was lucky in the end that a quick rinse and new covers were enough to salvage things though.

When you look into the Discogs higher figure there are many reasons why your entire collection would never fetch that. It's a fun dreamy figure to have in mind but having got into the details over about 10 years of selling I wouldn't expect anything like that even if you were to sell them one by one.

In the past I've had home insurance that required any collections to be declared at the time of insurance. When I've claimed in the past for books I did get a decent amount of money based on research and proof of value, however I was limited to insurance companies that would cover me for a good number of years afterwards.

It's a question I've asked myself a few times but I would certainly not dwell on the Discogs higher value unless you only have up to a few hundred rare records in mint condition. Even the mid figure is optimistic if you have a big mixed collection.

There's a vinyl junkies thread where you might get more answers.

Yes I only see it as useful in the absence of any other figure should I ever end up needing/wanting to replace them, and being subject to only having the choice of overpriced sellers and all the postage I’d end up paying.

Would the insurance company need to/accept a Discogs list as proof of ownership generally? If I were not to declare anything, but then ended up making a claim against general contents and submitted a Discogs list, are they just going to say ‘no that should have been declared’?

As far as I know you need to read the small print of the contract. You should be doing that anyway, some of the contracts I've read in the last few years are worthless in any case.

It's hard to know without knowing the figures involved but one of the basic ways they differentiate is household items (carpets/sofa/etc), electronic items and in some cases collections. Then you have high value items where a collection could be considered as a whole value or each item is covered under household items.

How serious is your collection? If you are worried about it being stolen it's not that big :)

anyone after a cheap valve dac? i have a xiang sheng dac 01a (with a WE valve) that i am about to move on. £120

You'll need to be insured by someone who is ok with collectibles/art and pays out cash.

Have a word with Hiscox.

But really the only events that threaten it are fire, floods and very severe storms (if the building is damaged).

Hey everyone, hope this is a good place to ask advice. I'm after bookshelf/ desktop speakers recommendations (Googled for a bit but it was overwhelming tbh was hard to focus once i kept getting sucked into intense audiophile forums). I'm not an audiophile but appreciate and can recognise good sound.

My music tastes are eclectic, i like listening to a lot of bass stuff as well (hip hop/ electronic etc) so they'd have to be decent at handling bass. Will use them with a computer for now but will get an amp at soe point soon. Right now my main listening is through Beyerdynamic dt770 pro 80 ohm (soo good)

What does everyone think/ recommend. (budget sub £100 maybe more for something special?) also open if anyone here has something they're selling.

Will use them with a computer for now but will get an amp at soe point soon

There's going to a big difference in suggestions between passive and active units.

Yeah thought about that as soon as i posted my comment haha. I think i'll want them to be active passive as their primary use won't be computer.

I'll want to use them for music listening so will most definitely be pairing them with an amp. I should say, the room they'll be in isn't massive (4mx3m i think)

Your messaging is confused. Active infers no amp. Generally speaking, active speakers have a amplification built into the speaker unit(s).

There are very few active speakers that you can separately power with an amp. The active part of the speaker is an amp. You might need to use a pre-amp depending on the main setup you're considering. For £100 I can't really recommend anything that I've heard.

You might get some second hand Q Acoustic 3020 (or 3020i). They are about £150 new, come in a range of colours and will do bass. You can pair them with any number of tiny cheap class d amps and have a decent monoblock setup for £80 more. Sorry that's a bit out of your budget but it's all I know in that kind of area.