I concur, jaddie, but you still aren't getting my point. I agree that most of the differences we hear are production quality, not bit rate or depth, then our own cans or speakers, then our own DACs and amps. But I'm filtering out all of that, doing my own downsampling of my own 24/96 source...

  I find HDTracks quality to be excellent, though some of the rock titles I've gotten from them don't seem markedly improved. But I haven't done ABX testing between their version and my old CD version, so that's all subjective at this point. My question, though, is whether it's even possible...

I've been exploring this, in response to a thread on the Head-Fi group on Facebook. I remember when I started buying 24/96 albums from HDTracks.com, I was amazed at how much better they were. After downsampling a few of them to 16/44, and being unable to distinguish the two in any way (with...

I have a NuForce µDAC2, which sells for $90-$100 an Amazon. Driverless USB up to 96KHz/24-bit, but no 88.2 KHz. Works well. It has pre-amp output on RCA jacks, controlled by the volume pot, and 3.5mm headphone amp output, but it outputs on only one of those at a time. If headphones are plugged...

On sale again at Amazon today for $80. Applied for an Amazon credit card and used the $50 gift card for a bottom line of $30.99, with free Amazon Prime 2-day shipping.

I'm running Snow Leopard (10.6) on a 2007 iMac with a µDAC. I've had a couple of times when the sound got weird. Unplugging and replugging the µDAC fixed it.

I use the cable that came with the µDAC. It appears to be in the neighborhood of 1 meter long, and it's curled up behind my monitor/computer (an iMac), tangled up with 8 other signal cables and 10 power cables.

The RCA out from the µDAC is a 2 volt, line-level signal. It is suitable for driving a power amp or powered speakers. The headphone out drives lots of different headphones, but see the rest of this thread for specifics. It works fine for my M-Audio AV40 speakers and Grado SR60i headphones. It...

What a firestorm. I don't have a high-end system, but the µDAC makes a big positive difference for me through my entry-level Grado cans and little speakers. And for only $99. I'll probably upgrade my cans and speakers before looking at another DAC.

Usually called an "M1 Garand". Don't know why I forgot that yesterday. The M1A also uses the Garand action. It has a box magazine, usually holding 20 rounds of .308. The Ruger Mini-14 & Mini Thirty also have the Garand action.

Quote: Originally Posted by regal What rifle is that? looks familiar. Looks to me like an M1, the rifle that won WWII. Holds an 8-round en-bloc clip of .30-06.

"Come Together" by The Beatles, from the album Abbey Road. 802kbps Apple Lossless

Sorry to hear that. Haven't had that problem myself. My first one lost it's right channel early on; infant mortality is fairly common in electronic devices. NuForce sent me a new one right away, with a postage-paid envelope to return the broken one. Second try has worked like a charm since then.

Same with the NE-7M. Good thing there's not a lot to understand, though I it would have been nice to explain in the manual that plugging in headphones turns off the RCA output, that the volume knob controls both the RCA and headphone output, and that turning the volume knob fully off disables...

I'll probably get the CD from Amazon, too, though I'm going to wait a day or two to see if I'm still interested. From the 30 second clips, my favorite is "Red House", a nice slow blues. "Sunshine of Your Love" sounded good too, and was the most popular on iTunes.

Quote: Originally Posted by rickdanger Could somebody please post a high res photo of the red uDAC? Can't decide if I want black or red There are a bunch of photos at the link below. Many of them link to higher-res versions. NuForce Icon uDAC

I, too, have only a 16-bit DAC, so I'm downloading the 16-bit version. $6 for over an hour of really nice-sounding tunes. Yowza!

Quote: Originally Posted by Skylab The sound is better on CD's 2, 3, and 4. (and it's 1978 not 1973 ) Duh. Guess it really is time to get some new glasses.

"The Closing of Winterland, December 31, 1973" arrived today. Four HDCDs in a standard thick jewel case. Nice little booklet, but nothing remarkable packaging wise. Nice recording. A little boomie, but better than the 1969 at Fillmore West recordings of yesterday. Have only listened to "Sugar...

I use artist and album, too. Occasionally, when I can't remember the name of something, but I know its genre, I'll enable the genre column to make browsing easier. I still have lots of compressed music on my disk, so I put " - lossless" at the end of the album title for all the uncompressed...

1969 at Fillmore West arrived today. Beautifully packaged. Three HDCD discs in a booklet containing a story and lots of photos. Recording is good, but not quite as good as one of the 1970-02-11 torrents I have. Performances are nice to incredible. Expecting Closing of Winterland any day now.

I'll deal with issue number 2. 192 KHz at 24 bits for two channels is 192 * 1,000 * 3 * 2 = 1.1 megabytes/second (where 1 megabyte = 1024 * 1024 bytes). USB 1.1 can do 1.43 megabytes/sec, so it's fast enough. USB 2.0 does 57 megabytes/sec and USB 3.0 does 572 megabytes/sec, so they're both...

I listened to a bunch of Genesis 30-second MP3 clips at Amazon. "Seconds Out" was good. I was tempted by "Invisible Touch". But I ordered Turn It On Again: Tour Edition. Ships today, slow and cheap. The 2007 remasters sound very good as MP3. Hopefully, lossless CD rips will be even better.