@iFi audio thanks for your response. In the meantime, I have done some serious experimenting. RE: "not adequate" earth and both polarity and Earth LED red: I've measured the voltage on my wall plugs. I have 229V phase to neutral, 80V earth to neutral and 140V earth to phase. In other words, my...

Hello all, I've taken a dive into ifi accessories over the past year. I started with the iDefender & iPower 5V to inject a clean power supply to my USB DAC. I was very sceptical it would do anything at all but it turned out to be the single biggest improvement I've had to my system in terms of...

I've had similar experiences to you.   My dad has a whole load of vinyls at home and a few years back, bought a new record player just for nostalgia's sake, to play his collection again. I took an interest and soon found out, that almost without exception, his vinyls sounded better than the...

How does the Audio Technica ATH-CK7 shape up next to the ER6i and the SuperFi3?

Hello everyone and happy Easter, To my great dispair, I seem to have lost my Yuin PK2s while I was travelling last week. Probably left them in the hotel room or something. Grrrrrrr! Anyway, it's a good excuse to try something else. I'm very happy with my home rig but not too satisfied with...

Same questions for me when I was buying a small USB interface for my dad. Went for Edirol UA-1EX in the end: - better connectivity like RCA output - more features such as RCA in and out - sample rate set by a hardware switch (you control it) So far, he's very happy with it.

In my opinion, there is just no comparison. The K701 is in a different class to the K501. I have the K501 myself; my father has the K601. Even the K601 is straits ahead of the K501: on the whole less bass, but deeper and more impactful. The highs are less tinny; instruments have more body, just...

I don't think music can be made in an audiophile or not audiophile way. Music (or most of it anyway) comes from the analogue world with people strumming, plucking, blowing, hitting on things. Whether it is intentional or not, the resulting sound contains millions of little nuances which are...

Well, if your onboard soundcard has a coaxial digital out, the most obvious solution is to get a traditional DAC (not USB). I don't see how the digital out of your onboard soundcard could be flawed. There's the issue of the drivers and how your operating system handles the data (kmixer and...

You definitely need some kind of DAC. If you are using your laptop's headphone out, that means you're using your laptop's onboard soundcard and its DAC which is probably not the best thing out there. There are several types of devices which include DACs: - PCMCIA soundcards - USB/FireWire...

Hey up folks, My setup has finally reached a respectable stage which is going to be its final state, at least for a few years. My rig is a "computer as source" rig with an external Hard Disk storing the music as Lame MP3 VBR Standard connected via FireWire to a laptop running Foobar2000...

Don't know if you've seen this thread but it's pretty much exactly the same as this: http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f11/wh...phones-272941/

Well, to get back to answering the original poster's question, I'm quite aware of the "garbage in - garbage out" rule but I would nuance it a bit. Every element in the sound reproduction chain adds its own "garbage" to the sound, there's no element that will "clean up" the sound. So if you...

Hi, Here's a question that's been bugging me for a while: you can get DACs for just about any price, from 50€ to 5000€. What is the difference between a good DAC and a not so good one? For instance, I look at the expensive ones, e.g. Musical Fidelity X-DAC V8 which upsamples everything to...

Quote: Quote: Originally Posted by stephenm00 View Post What if our budget was less then 150.00? Would the M-Audio Transit give me better quality then the Audio Advantage Micro? Is it really worth the extra money to get the EMU 0404 usb? I'm very interested on this question. Is the EMU...