You're not very good at detecting trolls, HPiper. I just don't believe in the same things you do.

I can't speak to anybody else's setup, but when I compared some SR80s at a dealer, first out of my ipod classic, next out of a $3,000 Rogue Audio amp, on a scale of 1-10, the difference was about a 10.  

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woophoria said:

I can't speak to anybody else's setup, but when I compared some SR80s at a dealer, first out of my ipod classic, next out of a $3,000 Rogue Audio amp, on a scale of 1-10, the difference was about a 10.  

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That's exactly it.
 
CrystalT, what is your setup? 
If you've a very decent audio player, amp can make very little difference, but it can also depend on the amp you've tried.
 
with my iPhone 4, an amp would make a great difference, but with my iPhone 5, it sounds better un-amped.

I compared them to my rockboxed clip zip through hpo, my laptops hpo, my laptop with focusrite vrmbox (underrated dac. Very capable cirrus logic dac/amp) and through my pioneer vsx9900. The only difference was that the laptop was noisy through headphone out. There was no perceived coloration in any of the sources I used. The only benefit to an amp is that I hit acceptable listening levels easier.

I just don't hear what you guys are.

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Quote:

crystalt said:

I compared them to my rockboxed clip zip through hpo, my laptops hpo, my laptop with focusrite vrmbox (underrated dac. Very capable cirrus logic dac/amp) and through my pioneer vsx9900. The only difference was that the laptop was noisy through headphone out. There was no perceived coloration in any of the sources I used. The only benefit to an amp is that I hit acceptable listening levels easier.

I just don't hear what you guys hear.

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That's certainly one of the benefits. This is the core functionality of an amp. I found that the PA2V2 increases the highs on my RS-2(and i didn't like that much) but all with all it's really about giving that extra power to needy headphones.
 
 
-CH23

CrystalT, how have you survived here on Head-Fi? If you can't hear a difference, that's just you! Everyone hears different things. I myself haven't tried high-end cables, but that's just one example; some people can hear differences in cables, some say it's just the shiny-new effect. I, personally, hear a MASSIVE improvement in my Grados (SR-60i, the lowest-end model!) amped, and when playing lossless. The other day I was listening to Absolution by Muse through my Grados. I was enjoying the album, but something didn't seem right. My suspicions confirmed, I checked the bitrate of the file, and for some reason, I had ripped that CD in lossy MP3! I buy CDs and LPs because I can hear a difference, but if you can't, then you can buy your music off of iTunes/Amazon and have a good time. I hear the benefit in a good amp/DAC, but if you don't, then you don't need one! A lot of people stop buying headphones after they get an HE-500 or HD 650 because they've demoed higher-end headphones and just can't hear a markable improvement. Out hearing is so variable, we have to buy our audio gear on a person-to-person basis. One size does not fit all in this journey! 

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wes008 said:

CrystalT, how have you survived here on Head-Fi? If you can't hear a difference, that's just you! Everyone hears different things. I myself haven't tried high-end cables, but that's just one example; some people can hear differences in cables, some say it's just the shiny-new effect. I, personally, hear a MASSIVE improvement in my Grados (SR-60i, the lowest-end model!) amped, and when playing lossless. The other day I was listening to Absolution by Muse through my Grados. I was enjoying the album, but something didn't seem right. My suspicions confirmed, I checked the bitrate of the file, and for some reason, I had ripped that CD in lossy MP3! I buy CDs and LPs because I can hear a difference, but if you can't, then you can buy your music off of iTunes/Amazon and have a good time. I hear the benefit in a good amp/DAC, but if you don't, then you don't need one! A lot of people stop buying headphones after they get an HE-500 or HD 650 because they've demoed higher-end headphones and just can't hear a markable improvement. Out hearing is so variable, we have to buy our audio gear on a person-to-person basis. One size does not fit all in this journey! 

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+1, if you hear something that sounds good to your ears. then thats all that matters!

the subject of acceptable volume raised a good point... for me, it wasn't out of the ipod classic. of course, there are are probably many applications when you don't want a WOO WA-6SE strapped to your belt if you are on a hike, but for home applications (based on the dealer audition, still waiting for WA7), i think i will appreciate the option to hear PS500s amped.
 
for me, it was PRECISELY the fact that some of the ordinarily submerged or hard to hear sonic details became more manifest was what i appreciated about the boosted power.
 
i have to resort to analogies (that is what a meta's phor ), but at first, unamped, abbey road sounded outstanding. it was only after listening to them driven by the tube amp, IN RETROSPECT, it was like unamped the music was a partially inflated passenger balloon that could only skim a few feet off the ground, whereas amped variant enabled it to soar and offered a more panoramic vantage point. but that was my experience, if other people can't hear that, given the in some cases great variance of what different people perceive, sense, feel (this includes all the sensory modalities, not just hearing), it would not only be absurd, but missing the point, to presume i was "right" and others that can't hear what i can are "wrong".
 
but getting back to A/B comparison above, in above instance, the before was like the way i saw things before seeing an opthamoplogist and discovering i had a previously undiagnosed stigmatism... i just thought the way i saw things was the way the world as seen through my visual field was the way things were supposed to look. it was only through comparison afterwards with a series of different corrective lenses that i had an aha, revelation-type moment and realized, THAT was how things were supposed to look. things were much sharper, clearer and had greater detail. this became especially obvious after rotating back to baseline, and the edges of things, that had formerly looked "normal" to me, now seemed almost comically fuzzy and poorly resolved.
 
in the domain of fantasy football and amateur scouting, i initially used to be stupefied that people could look at the exact same film highight, and not only come to completely different conclusions, but have them informed by completely different details they had noticed. eventually this became so routine i would have been dense to not realize this was normal and even to be expected. even a seemingly simple and unambiguous highlight clip could potentially include myriad things to attend to do, and therefor different possible interpretations (based on selective perception and attending to some details at the exclusion of others - there might be dozens, hundreds, thousands of things to potentially notice, making it effectively impossible to see EVERYTHING). again, given this state of affairs, it would be a much bigger shock if people DIDN'T see things differently.
 
or germane to this discussion, hear things differently. and to extend this observation/thought further, this seems to be a good thing. wouldn't it be terrible if after an initial post, every post that followed a new thread subject header stated, yep, i heard the exact same thing. certainly in the case of football scouting, this was a positive in that others have pointed out things i missed, and perhaps vice verce. but sometimes, with virtually no amount of follow up, can i see what others do. and i'm OK with that, since it is a package deal, occasional disagreement (agreeing to disagree) is a more than acceptable tradeoff for the opportunity to potentially expand one's horizons and see/hear/learn new things through being exposed to different subjective impressions and interpretations. 
 
it seems like in other human spheres than art (certainly it isn't controversial to suggest that different people might see different things in a dali painting or a frank lloyd wright building) where different camps take rigidly demarcated and delineated positions not accounting for human subjectivity that a lot of mischief and worse has been created. and sometimes there are elements of the audio world, there can be an almost religious fervor and proselytizing aspect in terms of how the dynamic of the collective conversation unfolds (tubes vs. solid state, etc.). but in general, as long as different subjective impressions and interpretations are exchanged with recognition of what they are (and aren't) in mind, and in a civil manner, as generally seems to be the case here in my short time at head-fi, than that seems to me healthy and constructive.                            
 
on the bonus plan, if a couple of dixie cups and a string sound as good as stax 009s to some listeners, that could save a lot of money! 

I'm able to hit critical listening levels on my clip zip with most headphones in the $500 and lower range. My hearing is pretty good, and listening in a quiet environment definitely helps.

As for mp3 vs lossless/raw: with v0 I was not able to determine between lossless/cd and v0/320 vbr besides through sheer guessing. Honestly, I'm more inclined to believe that the people who claim to hear a difference are just experiencing expectation bias, or something similar. To each their own.

I survive on head-fi because despite all the many things I don't believe in, or agree with, there is a lot of good information around. Plus it's fun to discuss stuff. Also, yknow, audio gear is love.

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Quote:

crystalt said:

I'm able to hit critical listening levels on my clip zip with most headphones in the $500 and lower range. My hearing is pretty good, and listening in a quiet environment definitely helps.

As for mp3 vs lossless/raw: with v0 I was not able to determine between lossless/cd and v0/320 vbr besides through sheer guessing. Honestly, I'm more inclined to believe that the people who claim to hear a difference are just experiencing expectation bias, or something similar. To each their own.

I survive on head-fi because despite all the many things I don't believe in, or agree with, there is a lot of good information around. Plus it's fun to discuss stuff. Also, yknow, audio gear is love.

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Ohhh boy here we go again..

i have heard disagreements about things like cables and power supplies, whether thay make a difference or not.
 
that said, the highlighted sentence and the one that follows immediately above seem to have almost opposing connotations.
 
expectation bias implies doesn't exist and is in people's heads...
 
to each their own implies honoring the fact that other people may have different experiences than us.
 
i don't know if i will be trying fancy/expensive cables or power supplies. if i did, and couldn't hear a massive difference, i wouldn't assume that if other people claim to hear things i can't, they are probably "wrong".
 
i can see the flip side of this, and if cables/power supplies DON'T make a difference, somebody declaring the emperor has no clothes, albeit probably unpopular (you mean that stuff i spent a lot of money on is superfluous?!?!), could actually provide a community service and help save money.
 
i remember peer pressure pschology experiments which i found to be shocking (no pun intended in case of milgram - but more to the point, i'm thinking of the ones in which a group of planted ringers could seemingly get an unsuspecting subject to ignore what he initially saw correctly and conform to a wrong "consensus" about the length relationship between two lines, same, different, whatever - i forget though if subsequent interviews revealed they actually doubted their senses or were just going along... but i think the former?)... 
 
generally though, i'm uncomfortable with the idea that if i can't hear something, it probably doesn't exist... to use another example, it seems commonplace that some might have more acute hearing and could hear a different part or more extended frequency range in either or both directions.
 
as noted, though, there would seem to be a scientific way to test whether claims to hear difference in 320 or higher "lossless" sources are real or so called expectation bias. i haven't tried to explore this kind of sonic experimentation, if it has been done, but would be interested if anybody has any cites or references (of course, if some clearly can hear a difference, they may not have been motivated to research something that is to them self-evident, like it may not occur to a fish whether water was real or not)... in a blindfold test, either some people can tell the difference on a consistent basis or not... if so, what is the percentage of the population?
 
but in the absence of being made aware of this kind of research, if it exists, i wouldn't assume others can't hear something just because i can't (see above, but due to my profound appreciation and respect for in some cases massive differences in perceptual acuity in the population, and what defines the range of possible human experience... which may, and probably does, exceed my own, in some cases, perceptually, ie - sonically/acoustically speaking).      

Here we go again? Have I done something wrong?

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woophoria said:

i have heard disagreements about things like cables and power supplies, whether thay make a difference or not.
 
that said, the highlighted sentence and the one that follows immediately above seem to have almost opposing connotations.
 
expectation bias implies doesn't exist and is in people's heads...
 
to each their own implies honoring the fact that other people may have different experiences than us.
 
i don't know if i will be trying fancy/expensive cables or power supplies. if i did, and couldn't hear a massive difference, i wouldn't assume that if other people claim to hear things i can't, they are probably "wrong".
 
i can see the flip side of this, and if cables/power supplies DON'T make a difference, somebody declaring the emperor has no clothes, albeit probably unpopular (you mean that stuff i spent a lot of money on is superfluous?!?!), could actually provide a community service and help save money.
 
i remember peer pressure pschology experiments which i found to be shocking (no pun intended in case of milgram - but more to the point, i'm thinking of the ones in which a group of planted ringers could seemingly get an unsuspecting subject to ignore what he initially saw correctly and conform to a wrong "consensus" about the length relationship between two lines, same, different, whatever - i forget though if subsequent interviews revealed they actually doubted their senses or were just going along... but i think the former?)... 
 
generally though, i'm uncomfortable with the idea that if i can't hear something, it probably doesn't exist... to use another example, it seems commonplace that some might have more acute hearing and could hear a different part or more extended frequency range in either or both directions.
 
as noted, though, there would seem to be a scientific way to test whether claims to hear difference in 320 or higher "lossless" sources are real or so called expectation bias. i haven't tried to explore this kind of sonic experimentation, if it has been done, but would be interested if anybody has any cites or references (of course, if some clearly can hear a difference, they may not have been motivated to research something that is to them self-evident, like it may not occur to a fish whether water was real or not)... in a blindfold test, either some people can tell the difference on a consistent basis or not... if so, what is the percentage of the population?
 
but in the absence of being made aware of this kind of research, if it exists, i wouldn't assume others can't hear something just because i can't (see above, but due to my profound appreciation and respect for in some cases massive differences in perceptual acuity in the population, and what defines the range of possible human experience... which may, and probably does, exceed my own, in some cases, perceptually, ie - sonically/acoustically speaking).      

Click to expand...

There were some tests a few years back on head-fi where someone used a spectrogram to analyze lossless and v0. The compression artifacts were far above the range of human hearing, supporting that lossless and raw formats are empirically indistinguishable from a good v0 encoding. It got derailed quickly, and faded in to obscurity.

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Quote:

crystalt said:

There were some tests a few years back on head-fi where someone used a spectrogram to analyze lossless and v0. The compression artifacts were far above the range of human hearing, supporting that lossless and raw formats are empirically indistinguishable from a good v0 encoding. It got derailed quickly, and faded in to obscurity.

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Ah dude, you can argue your case all you want, but the majority of people here can hear a difference. As I said in my post I could tell that there was compression on the album even though I thought I ripped it in lossless. Even if something is outside of measured human hearing, it still affects us, even if it's subconsciously. I don't think we'll ever be able to accurately study human hearing, because it's so subjective and variable. It's amazing though.
 
EDIT: Sorry for responding to troll posts. Back on topic! So, how 'bout them Grados? 

Just bought my first set of grado sr60i. Planning on picking up some l cush from amazon and saw ear zonk brand cushions as an alternative. Anyone using these?

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