The first thing I did was of course address Kingwa with this issue, to which he replied with saying that it shouldn't be audible on normal listening levels.
This leads me to conclude that it the hiss is normal to some degree, which does not correspond with a good number of you who claim that there is no hiss. I don't think it is necessary to continue with depicting the possible explanations, as I feel that I've made my point.
Moving on.
Never have I said that I
use it on 12 o'clock on high gain, I merely
notice it starting from 12 o'clock, for both gain options. This is why I prefer using high gain, as I don't come nearly as close to 12 o'clock as with low gain, on which I sometimes go past that, giving me a reason to be concerned.
No.
- Connected via the included USB cable.
- Foobar2000, see settings here.
- I attempted a blind test on this one, so bear with me:
- Method: I've downloaded a 320 kbps and a 24bit 192kHz version of each of the two tracks available here, and using my K7XX and K272 headphones, tried to guess which is which, 10 times for each pair.
- I've tried setting playback to random and shuffle, but in nether of them can the same track be played again. Fortunately randomly clicking on Playback>Random proved to be an effective measure, so I've set a shortcut for that in keyboard settings.
- To control for volume I've set the Processing to "apply gain" under ReplayGain in Playback preferences.
- After each guess I was checking which file res. I was listening to to write it down, as doing that after the whole 10 trials would have been more difficult than I can tolerate, and playback statistics weren't of any use.
- In between each trial, I've had one "unblinded" listen, so as to reduce confusion. After that I've manually skipped (using the above shortcut) an indefinite amount of times, to reduce the expectation bias at least to some degree.
- The screen was nowhere in my field of vision.
- The headphones were worn for a few minutes prior to testing with the tracks playing, for adaptation purposes.
- At times where I knew I wasn't analyzing but merely guessing weren't included.
- Initial results: Track #1: K7XX - 3/10 (W,W,W,W,R,R,W,W,R,R). Track #2: K272 - 8/10 (R,R,R,R,R,R,W,R,W,R); K7XX - 6/10 (R,R,W,W,R,R,W,R,W,R). R - right, W- wrong.
- On my last set of trials, which was with the K272's, I've thought of a method to compensate somewhat for the capacity of our auditory memory, which was to do everything as described above, but make the guess not on the first, but on the following track, so as to allow for some context. And what do you know, my the results changed drastically.
- 4'th attempt results: K272 - 10/10.
- Conclusions: Just look at what lengths I've went to to arrive at that last result, 'nuff said. Seriously though, I admit that at first I thought that I won't find any difference whatsoever, and rightfully so. But even though technically there is a perceivable difference, it doesn't mean it's significant. Maybe with better gear it is more easily discerned, but on a practical level I've made it clear, at least to myself, that there is no point in hi-res. Not to even mention all of those expensive DAP$.
- Comments: First of all, the obvious volume difference between the versions. Knowing this alone should be enough to get a sense of the validity of the difference between high and low res.. I've been keeping it in mind after volume adjustment as well, which could have contributed to my results. Then again, it is said that the increase in volume is perceived as an increase in quality, maybe it works the other way around as well
. Second is that despite all my efforts, those comparison attempts still felt like guesswork, even at that last attempt.
- Haven't tried other inputs yet, which could change in the upcoming weeks. That is, if I won't return the unit before that.
The only explanation I can think of as to why I don't hear any difference, aside from not having the "audiophile ear" of course, is that the NFB-15's DAC is off. But honestly it just doesn't sound plausible, no matter how I look at it.
Too bad I didn't hear that before buying it. Having the blue screens once or twice a day, but that's the least of what's wrong with the driver. Ever since I've got the NFB-15 my computer is much slower, sometimes I have extreme stutter when I watch Youtube videos on x2 speed, and Foobar's spectrum visualization has low framerate. Oddly enough, when I switch to, say, ASIO4ALL, the framerate goes back to normal, but all other "symptops" remain. Maybe it's a good idea for anyone who's still on the fence after reading this to just install the driver and see how their system behaves.
erformance?