It's not an issue when the driver has sufficient mechanical damping, like orthos do. If you look at frequency response plots in this "Transient and frequency response of the moving-coil loudspeaker current-drive and voltage-drive method" paper mentioned above (which deals with full-size...

You can temporarily eliminate the ground loop by disconnecting either the computer or the receiver from the ground - just use cable with a two pole AC plug instead of a three pole one. This way you can find out how much of your troubles is caused by the loop and how much isn't. If you are...

1% of their avg monthly salary per card. Decent compensation for 5 minutes of work IMO. And this isn't even the craziest thing that happens in China. You may be interested in pages 5-7 (20-22 in the pdf) of this US Senate report...

It seems that somebody harvested stock opamps and replaced them with some incompatible ones. Also, I'm sure that my STX had few capacitors which were solid violet, but yours has none. The rest is probably genuine. Look for component lists or photos of other cards and compare.

This smells analog hardware damage. Do you have any other device to test optical input on this receiver? Also, check analog outs from the STX as it could be software after all.

As for the power, HDDs use few watts each, motherboard components a dozen or two and Core i3 less than hundred - pretty much every PSU is enough to run this setup. SS-400FL has silentpcreview recommendation and these guys appear to know what they are doing. If your case has some ventilation in...

Computer motherboard's "ground" is actually few millivolts above the real ground because there is a current flowing from motherboard "ground" traces to the real ground through cables which have some nonzero resistance. Apparently your DAC isn't designed to deal with being connected to two...

Be careful though, because you will probably get the same noisy surprise if you accidentally touch this amp's case with any other grounded object.

http://www.head-fi.org/t/650804/is-apple-lossless-real-lossless http://www.head-fi.org/t/650804/is-apple-lossless-real-lossless#post_9155654 :deadhorse:

But your bricks only protect the equipment from vibrations and cosmic rays, while the mat prevents laser light from escaping through back side of the CD and carrying microdetails away. IMO true neutrality and independence from the harsh environmental conditions we all are exposed to can only be...

Good one :) Does this thing seriously exist or is it just photoshop?

"High end" headphone amplifiers are often overpowered and based on ancient designs and technologies which are horribly inefficient. Tubes need bias currents. Class A constantly produces heat at rate no lower than 1.41 of it's maximal output power. High output impedance wastes further power...

New soundcards are flat enough most of the time. Any bass boost you may hear is likely caused by high output impedance (combined with highly reactive headphones) and could be reduces by external amp with low output impedance. Or maybe this "other source", whatever it is, has bass rolloff.

Make a 700MB zip archive with anything. Burn it to 100 different CD-Rs. Get some MD5/SHA1/whatever checksumming software. Compare checksums. They will all be the same. Now throw these CDs on the floor and walk over them. Compare checksums of copies which will be still fully readable. They...

Most stuff is released at 44kHz/l6bit because this format is used on CDs and because it's sufficient. Your OS converts all streams from all applications to one common format in order to mix them. Conversion of 16bit audio to 24bit is completely harmless. Sample rate conversion can be done in...

Take the suckers apart, it should be only one broken wire to replace. Or buy an Y-splitter and connect cables to both sides.

Yep, as far as headphones go it's like the difference between riding a pegasus or a unicorn.

You may look for something mentioning "audio streaming" in foobar output plugins, but honestly I'm not aware of any widely used protocol for pushing audio streams to DACs over network which could be implemented by both foobar and this mixer. If Pioneer created their own protocol and their...

To put it simply - somebody would need to find out how to talk to this box and write a driver. Probably it won't hurt to ask Pioneer, but IMO if they had such driver, they would include it with the device.

Most "frequency response" specs published by manufacturers are bogus. Almost everything produced in the last 50 years is claimed to have at least 20-20 range and recently some manufacturers started coming up with insane numbers like 5Hz or even 2Hz. Yet even in 2013 many headphones don't...

That's very simple, actually :) A soundcard analog output is approximately a voltage source, a resistor and (sometimes) a capacitor in series. If the capacitor is too small, it will reduce bass. If it's big enough (or not present at all) it can be ignored. We will ignore it from now. The...

Apple supports so called ALAC (Apple Losless Audio Codec) instead. Both ALAC and FLAC are lossless (an encode-decode cycle produces exactly the original signal) so you can transcode files back and forth between FLAC, ALAC and AIFF bazillion times without any quality loss. Some people claim that...

Both QC15 and AE5 have built-in amps. Another amp won't provide much function besides volume knob and some extra distortion (hopefully inaudible, if the amp is any good).

Onboard USB2. These are parts of southbridges shipped in millions of motherboards and as such are the most battle-tested USB controllers in existence.

Kinda. It seems to rely on high frequency cutoff detection and is easily fooled by configuring the encoder to preserve high frequencies even when it doesn't make sense. But it also appears to correctly identify files compressed with default settings and such files are probably more common "in...