3W, 2A3, SET paired with 105db speakers here and... if I set the volume knob beyond 1/3-1/4 the walls start shaking
Not sure where you got the idea that upsampling a crappy, loudness mastered and dynamic range compressed recording will somehow make it better? Garbage in, garbage out. You can take a picture of a turd with a 50mm lens or you can take a picture with a 100mm lens, it is still the same turd in detail..
The problem with dynamic range compressed source is that the peaks have been clipped. The damage has been done. Upsampling is not going to fix that. Back in the vinyl days, the recording engineers could not abuse the system too much, with the digital age they can and do because a louder CD used to sell much better to the unsuspecting consumer and that's what the artists wanted, to sell albums. With the modern era of digital streaming, there is hardly a need to do so but many of the recording engineers still do it. Read up on "Loudness Wars". Of course the higher resolution gear only makes things worse as the lower resolution MP3 files actually do not sound as fatiguing on mid-fi consumer devices. One does not get fatigued as easily listening to music in a car or on a mid-fi Sonos speaker for example. We all want the best sound but blame the gear for the crappy sound where the source of all the problems is the actual music we feed the high resolution gear.
I guess you will be swapping gear for a very long time chasing that elusive solution then. Distortion at some inaudible level, way below what your ears can hear and the dynamic range vs the system noise floor and ambient noise floor of the room itself with say open headphones, is of no consequence to anything meaningful. Tubes or SS, great tubes sound like solid state and great solid state sounds like tubes, tubes are not the magic solution unless it is a very poor, bandwidth challenged design that colors the sound drastically. As far as distortion at some levels way below the actual dynamic range of your ears and system, it sounds great on paper and for marketing purposes. Test your headphone system and see for yourself if the dynamic range will allow to be concerned about some -110dB distortion levels. http://www.audiocheck.net/audiotests_dynamiccheck.php
I was not suggesting one needs to change their music, simply seeking out the better recordings which often is simply not possible. We have gotten way off topic here though and this thread is for the Chord Qutest which I do intend to audition if I get a chance. I will be using it for my 2 channel audio system and will of course try it with my various headphone amps to see where a better fit for it would be.
Can't argue about the benefits of a Chord DAC since I do not own one. I have owned many DACs and now riding the Schiit train of sonic goodness. Their multibit R/2R DACs are keeping me happy at the moment. I would love to try a Chord DAC for a comparison in the near future.Since it's been available for audition and purchase in the UK for some time now, I'm surprised impressions haven't started coming in.
So basically, you're saying that it's not difficult for a speaker system to get as loud as an orchestra, but we can't get it to sound as good. Quantity vs quality. That should go without saying. I've performed in orchestras and so on and have all sorts of experience as a musician. I don't think audio equipment will ever be able to fully replicate the experience of live sound, though some people may not always notice the difference. But yes, the right equipment can certainly get you closer.
This. The music you love is what's important; far more so than the quality of the recording. Check out my quotes later in this post.
You can find a used Mojo for under $400 nowadays. I owned it twice.
Hmm. Sounds like you should try a Chord DAC.
To my (and countless others') ears, they make all music sound better.
They do far more than just upsampling. Software can be programmed to do extreme upsampling, but it won't sound nearly as good as a Chord DAC and won't do even a fraction of all the things they can. (This has been covered before, but for those whose goal is fidelity, software upsampling should be avoided with Chord DACs because it interferes with their advanced digital processing and results in lower fidelity sound.)
How all this works gets very technical. You can learn a lot by reading @Rob Watts' posts.
Without going into detail, you get accuracy that is orders of magnitude greater than other DACs when it comes to timing precision and noise shaping, along with zero noise floor modulation and jitter (which, as far as I know, has never been achieved with non-Chord DACs), ultra-low distortion and output impedance, high dynamic range, and more transparent analog circuitry.
Just because a recording isn't perfect doesn't mean the DAC can't get you closer to reproducing the original analog waveform and give you better sound.
This is a great point. Sometimes we are indeed listening to flaws in a recording rather than flaws in our systems...but not all the time. It's well-known that higher fidelity audio gear can improve what we hear. The factors I explained above combine to give you a more faithful reproduction of recordings, and sometimes they are higher quality than you may have thought.
As for the music itself, I would like to share some relevant quotes:
What's interesting is that, although it is difficult to tell things apart on that link (which I've visited before), it's incredibly easy for me to hear the difference between actual 128 kbps (or even higher) MP3s and lossless, even when I convert them myself with high quality software. Low bit rate lossy files sound downright awful in comparison in my experience. I'm not sure how they got 128 kbps to sound so good on that link. But come to think of it, I don't see any mention of the bit rate there, so it could be 360 kbps or something.
Different recordings are different music, so...
