Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

Can't remember who it was attributed to but always thought this answer to what they thought the best upgrade was for £100 was spot on:

"Buy a bunch of records and a bottle of wine"

Ah yes, but what ratio cashwise?

boredom

Actually to be fair it’s more like curiosity.

New cartridge may prove more rewarding.

And then a new phono stage :)

Gah. Tbh on the rare occasion I’ve queued up the same track and switched between them, the record player doesn’t sound wildly different to 320kbps Spotify. Perhaps the Tannoys deserve more.

What then?

Goldring 1042 is worth a look.

Tidal hifi subscription ;)

Yeah probably. The TT (and rummaging through record shops) is probably more about the experience for me than a pursuit of hifi.

But then I have to do the whole DAC thing :/

Can anyone recommend somewhere (not amazon pref) / sometype of cable sleeve?
I'd like approx 10 metres of "stuff" that looks "alright" and won't get "moaned at". It's to keep the speaker cable that runs from the desk in the bedroom to the speakers tidied up. (obvs).
Bonus points for being able to be cut with scissors.
Additional bonus points for desk tidy cable management too.
Lockdown bedroom working is getting a bit.

Yes that's a rabbit hole of misery. Wish I'd started collecting records in my teens.

Has anyone used an Airport Express to transport audio? It looks like a good solution as I can attach a hard drive and send audio to a dac by toslink for my secondary system. Trouble is its already discontinued but it has recently had a firmware update to enable Airplay 2. I think Apple TV would do the same and is current, but it doesn't allow for attaching an external SSD and neither does my router without a NAS device.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B012S2NXJW?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

I have used this stuff. You may be able to find it elsewhere than Amazon.

Can anyone recommend somewhere (not amazon pref) / sometype of cable sleeve?

I'd pretty much come down to expandable braided wiring loom sleeve, widely available in all the usual market places under automotive/tuning in various sizes. Haven't actually tried it yet as the plague has deferred pretty much all non-essential purchasing.

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Anyone here have thoughts on the hype around the various THX AAA headphone amps on offer?

The massdrop one's back on sale and the last batch were fetching double the price on ebay.

There's an SMSL version of another THX AAA amp available in the UK now.

I'm not really in the market for another headphone amp, but I'm just curious as to why there is so much hype. It all seems to stem from the high power and low distortion spec and marketing feed forward error correction, which I understand isn't particularly novel.

Ikea has a bit of stuff like that.

That's what we use for sending itunes to our stereo. We have sets of (wired) speakers in the kitchen and living room (small house, 70sm or so).

I'm considering going back to CDs. I dug out my old Naim CD player and gave it a play. I'm not going to lie and say it was a revelation. There was very little difference to its vinyl counterpart in most cases. I now only really buy new music and I'm finding it hard to justify vinyl prices. I don't want to go full streaming as I still like having a physical product.

Naim CD player still pretty good and down in Salisbury they still have a stash of Philips transports, which is what fails. But...eventually they will run out!

I looked at it but (for me) it was more or less redundant as I already had a NAS set up. That meant I could support multiple DLNA clients both inside the house and also whilst on the move.

I imagine you could also look at upgrading your router - for under £100 you can have a wifi router with a USB 3.0 port that can share your files across the network.

Apple really f*cked it up removing the optical out on the ATV4; personally I'm pretty sick of their strategy of locking out the interesting hacks you can do with some of their kit for no reason other than to flog you an overpriced and under-specced consumer product. I'm looking at you, HomePod.

CCA's are good value if you want cheap multi-room audio.

I saw something on Amazon that's also at screwfix. It's called something micro trunking.

I'll see if I can find it

Good tips, cheers. I’m a fan of the CCA, maybe the router upgrade might be the way to go. Don’t want to have to keep plugging the SSD into my laptop, or even to have my laptop on.

I can only just tell the difference between Tidal HiFi lossless and Spotify 320kbs ogg vorbis. Guess I'm a cloth eared fool (using the Sonos and CCA DAC though, so that's maybe something).

Can't get Tidal MQA to play with a Chromecast or through Sonos, so it just doesn't suit the way we listen to music. Guess it saves a bit of cash anyway, not getting too caught up in incremental quality chasing.

Guess I'm a cloth eared fool

Probably not.

320kbs is generally thought to be where compression becomes hard to detect.

That’s what I’ve burned all my cds with, initially to save space and ultimately because I couldn’t tell the difference.

I can't tell the difference between them. However I can tell the difference between a poorly mastered recording a good master of the same album and that is all that matters to me...