I've been living with the uberfrost+valhalla+t70 combo at my office desk for a while now, and it has only grown better with time - but the sheer novelty of how amazing it is hasn't worn off one bit, and I still catch myself gazing at the valhalla's beauty.    My magni+modi+hd439 is now at...

  I can definitely tell V0/320 from FLAC on my Bifrost/Valhalla/T70 rig... on some music, but not all. Complex, layered death metal with synth bits and dual vocalists? Not so much. Well mastered jazz in an otherwise dead quiet room? Absolutely.   As I understood it, V0 shaved a bit off the...

To be fair, a 128kbps MP3 sounds like trash even coming through iPhone earbuds from an iPhone. I remember the blissfully ignorant days of Napster when it was shocking how amazing the quality we could fit into such tiny bits of space was, and 128kbps was mindblowing... not so much anymore.   I...

It's not a huge change from my last version, but I got a 1TB desktop external for the office, Previously, I was carrying a mini external 1TB to and from work every day, keeping it synced to my home machine with GoodSync. Now I have a copy of my entire collection at work, and I'm using...

Quote:   It's not pretty.   Muddy, low volume, microscopic soundstage. Makes my HD580s sound like $20 trash.  Makes the 600 ohms of the T70 sing like angels, though. It's an amazing amp, it's just really, really not for low impedance. 

if you believe in raw price to quality, I have a twenty thousand dollar diamond cored solid gold triple shielded usb cable to sell you for your dac   100% bitperfect, your DAC will forever be flawed without it

I listen to death metal at 12:00 on the Valhalla at work sometimes but that's about the limits of what I can take before I suspect my hearing would begin taking damage. Usually I'm somewhere between 9:00-12:00, and over the day I slowly rise from 9-12 as I adjust

I can read jargon about the effects all day, but, functionally from the perspective of a person who is listening to music... what does balanced do for the sound that unbalanced doesn't? I've never been entirely clear beyond "it's better/clearer" which can be said for basically every upgrade...

Quote: well, there is that but i already knew that   what i didn't know is just how horrifyingly the realtek mangles the output

Way back when, when I first became interested in this but couldn't afford anything, I thought that a nice DAC was the domain of the moneyed. In this hobby as in any hobby, the more you spend, the more you experience diminishing returns. I always thought a good DAC was that expensive last 5% of...

Quote:   Das T70 :) amped correctly, they're a work of magical art.

With me and a lot of other newer people I suspect it comes down to "The DAC just makes a clean signal conversion, if it works well enough, it's all about how I amp that signal"   What isn't apparent until you've heard the Modi and Uberfrost side by side is just how clean and powerful that...

Quote: usutsu shimasu...   (yes)

Obligatory picture of the Schiit I keep at work, now that it's endgame.  

My Modi evolved, and my listening station has reached The Endgame. Went all out and got it with Uber and USB. It is mindblowing. My desk at work is now even moreso one of my favorite places to be.