The stock power supply for the Zen Can is cleaner and better. Stay with the stock PSU. But you have another use for the apple power supply! Generally, power supplied over USB is low quality. If you use the apple power supply on the Zen Dac, it seems likely that will give cleaner power than the...

To complete your reasoning I need to insert "never do what you fear" and also "never seek information from others so you no longer have fear". When I insert those two unwritten premises of yours, you're right, I shouldn't upgrade because I'm afraid of losing my sound signature. Because hey...

You didn't even wonder or meditate on it a bit? Did you reject CD when they called it lossless, and you later found out Nyquist can only losslessly resolve a single sine wave? And that when adding harmonics and overtones and other real musical content at the same time, that D-to-A is lossy? Did...

If you recall, every statement you ever made is about technical claims and your counterclaims about their correctness, never once talking about the signal chain that you tried it on, for how long you tried it, and so on. So that COULD lead one to assume your focus on MQA is coming from technical...

"I read somewhere it's an incorrect technical claim so now I don't like it" is a little bit different from "I carefully set up a signal chain based on research from others who are enjoying MQA, for what best reproduces it, and even then I did not like it." While I don't know which is true in...

Yes, but I did not assume your level of ignorance. It seems rather you are assuming that I assumed a level of ignorance. Do you have any idea how much of a pain in our side MQA was while it was relevant? How much it pained me to keep my mouth shut for the sake of the bottom line even while...

Correct, if it was originally compressed during the mastery. This includes the 25+ year period of the "loudness wars". What matters here is that the pillars that supported the loudness wars were weakened by the new MQA paradigm. Downstream compressions of the original master are ideally...

Don't hate what you don't fully know. Don't demand other people have the formats they want taken from them. Don't be hypocritical in judging something's flaws when the flaws of your own system are worse. Don't celebrate death, pain, or failure, with gleeful sadism, nor give into baser primitive...

No, I think your boxy square categories of "lossy" vs "lossless" are simply not refined. There are multiple different KINDS and DEGREES of lossy and some matter a lot and others (such as lossy in inaudible frequencies) simply don't deserve the degree of Procrustean sanctimonious judgmental...

Hello. I am now a new member of Club Gumby. I guess that means I'm now a Schiitizen. 😱 I bought a used A1 that has not received a USB upgrade and has no sticker near the USB. Not sure what Generation but it must be pre-Gen 5. How do I identify it? Or does it matter, I should just upgrade it...

We've reached the epitome of irony when people who can't tell the difference in SQ between Spotify and HiRes, get all self-righteous and indignant over an arguably theoretical lossyness in MQA while they go on listening to music which REALLY IS LOSSY with as little as 1/24th the musical...

What exactly doesn't work with Tidal connect? I'm shopping for streamers to get isolation from PC USB. So I'm a little concerned you're saying Tidal connect doesn't work?

I'm seriously thinking of some kind of USB Y-splitter to feed a used cheapie Topping D10 dac just to see the bit/sample rate. So far I can't find a way to look at it in sound settings because it only shows the default mode and not the current rate being set by apps with exclusive mode on.

Woo hoo, now if we could click or hover over it to see the sample rate, wouldn't that be nice? :relieved:

Holy Schiit, this is way more exciting than "the Apple Event" today!

Thanks for clarifying. I was referring to the output shown on the computer end. (My DAC doesn't have a fancy LED screen). I can see my comment was ambiguous now. But the two observations together now create a complete picture for those of us trying to get a grip on understanding all this stuff. :)

Remember that MQA format is "folded" so when it says 44kHZ or 48kHz you're likely getting 88, 96, 176, or 192 kHz. For all the little gripes, Tidal is still better than Qobuz in my opinion. Why I hold this opinion: 1. I'd much prefer having an MQA on Tidal than not having the track at all on...

The TIDAL app for iOS doesn't have MQA passthrough, so there's simply no way around it until TIDAL adds that option to the iOS app. You can, however, get MQB where the phone does the first unfolding then the DAC finishes the final rendering. The audio quality of MQB is comparable to MQA, though...

What's the cheapest way to get good digital input into one of these Gustard DACs? I assume USB cable straight from a PC sounds bad?

Would like to buy, pending questions. Please PM me.

Yes, the way it to join the protest movement and nag tech support with this. The more of us do it, the more likely we will get the information our hard earned money deserves to have. So please do it. Bother them!

First, they FORCE people to do MQA and hide it from you that you're not getting CD FLAC. And it becomes part of a PR problem that leads to a decent streaming format becoming notoriously hated (rightly or wrongly.). So much so they have to run from the format. Now they FORCE you to do FLAC...

Well, they disabled even being able to see if something is MQA or Masters. The only clue you have is your DAC showing it. Now you can't even selectively pick different cuts of the same album based on knowing whether they're MQA or not. This is a disaster, didn't they learn anything from being...

TIDAL now allowing you to hear both MQA and FLAC versions ... this will blow the lid open on Pandora's box for a whole new round of hundreds of thousands of pages of forum debates! Yay, how special and exciting! That's right, you can hear them both side by side. Disclaimer: in the past, I...