Just pop the top lid and check the two fuses. If they are OK, time to draw on your ten year warranty. I had a power inverter go in mine, it was fixed in two working days at no charge by their local rep.

Just in defence of 'good' Australian distributors, with a very satisfied story. I live in New Zealand. A couple of years ago I brought my Moon 430HA headphone amp. It came with a ten year warranty from the then NZ distributor (but if you go to the Canadian Moon website this is at the...

Well the 430 integrated DAC is great value for its additional cost, but there are better DACs. Importantly, if you want to fully unfold Tidal Masters to get the full HiRes sound you need a DAC that has MQA incorporated in it.

While I now use a Moon 430HA, which is somewhat overall better sound-wise than the Taurus II, but the 430 HA is a physically big HP amp and quite a bit more expensive than the Auralic HP amp. The LCD-4 (both the original 100 ohm and 200 ohm versions) does works very well with the Taurus II...

No problem, I do enjoy your pragmatic contributions to the threat.

Gregorio, just for the record, I think you are mixing me up with someone else here, as I have made no post about a $150 USB cable that did not make specification, but I take your point.

I claim no expertise here on audio science or trained audio listening. Unlike Gregorio or Amirm, indeed, I would probably have difficulty testing correctly above the Harmon band one, if even that, no matter that I have been an audiophile for 40 or so years. But even if I cannot consciously...

Exactly! Hence I use my Utopia in great pleasure when wishing to critically listen. In contrast, I tend to listen to my LCD-4 when I just want enjoyable background music when I'm reading, or surfing the net, etc!

It sounds good out of the box, but with a few hundreds of hours of burn-in it improves considerably and especially looses some of its initial irritating higher frequency brightness/brittleness that occurs on the occasional cut.

I use a 2.5 TRRS adapter cable to sometimes drive my Focal Utopia with my little AK70 in balanced mode. It looks a little silly but works a treat!

Agree it was not a DBT or follow the ABX protocol, but I did not wish to rub the Science Forum supporters noses the wrong way who were contributing to the thread (before it was re-located) by pointing this out, when they suggested the methodology, or at least did not raise this as an issue...

Not necessarily, Gregorio and others, suggested that I double blind test USB cables which I did, even following (until it became too tedious) his detailed protocol. See: Guess what? Right from the start of the DBT I could readily and repeatedly hear and identify the difference between the...

Only when the discussion thread goes back to the sub-forum area where it correctly belongs, but you as everyone else are most welcome to come along, because discussion on this threat does not foreclose diverse beliefs and perspectives. Also, you have also demonstrated a sense of humour, as well...

Its not magical thinking, its simply the better music created by the audiophile ethernet connections to the Tree of Souls. Which, by the way, is made out of unobtainium. PS I see how you can easily run up 15k+ posts in 13 years!

What, shipped all the way from Pandora?

What a free bit-perfect USB cable?

No thanks, I think I would rather go to dinner at the White House, at least the conversation there would be more intellectually stimulating.

The name of this thread is: Why do USB cables make such a difference? I was under the understanding that this was the 'DBT free part of the forum', at least according to the Moderator: Yet now this appears to be moved to the science DBT subforum section. We all have are entitled to our...

All uses of language in a discourse have an effect/affect on the Other, so they are inherently a semantic argument (Lacan 2007).

There is in no high fidelity, or absolute sound, in reproduced music. There may be a crude, so called ‘high fidelity’, defined by positivists and that you can crudely and pragmatically measure as sound by frequency response and a few other relatively easy to measure characteristics, but that...

If an $80 Pro DAC, regardless of how it looked, sounded as good as a mega-dollar DAC, like a Dave, don't you think that market rationality would prevail, at least for most of us, and we would all be using these $80 Pro DACs! But of course we don't because the (likely) accurate analytical sound...

What about putting some solar panels on top of the bunker then? Do solar flares cause noise?

Makes sense, any ideas how best these Faraday cages be properly grounded and isolated from the RF/EMI noise of mains power?

Thanks as always for the insightful knowledge you impart in your posts! Agree with your comments about the limitations of HPs and the compromises that go with them, but they can still provide a very hi-quality playback, perhaps sound stage imagining aside, for relatively small expenditure, at...

Thanks Gregorio for your detailed and, as always, very informative post. I do note however that I only listen to music at home with HPs, so perhaps in doing so I am largely negating this area you identify at most in need of adequate audiophile address. As Gregorio actually implies in his post...