Other than buying and building the Crack, which has transformed my HD800s, the greatest improvement in my music listening experience has been
getting away from my computer!!!
Getting to this point has been nothing short of a revelation. I'm not sitting upright, staring at a computer screen, distracted by the Internet, surrounded by papers and various bits and pieces of office crap. Instead, I'm relaxed, in an armchair (with a footstool), in my study, with nothing but low light, either reading a physical book or just enjoying the music with my eyes closed.
The ipod Touch coupled with Spotify has made it possible. Here is my setup:
ipod Touch -->
Cable Jive Dock Extender -->
Pure i-20 dock -->
Blue Jeans Cable coaxial cable -->
Audio-Gd Reference 5.32 --> [From here it splits as described below]
RCA outputs on Ref. 5.32 -->
Mapletree Audio Design LR1 line router --> [See switch positions below]
1. Bottlehead Crack
2. Bottlehead Smack
3. Mapletree Audio Ear+
4. Brocksieper Earmax
5. Emotiva mini-X a-100
XLR outputs on Ref. 5.32 -->
Mapletree Audio Design LR1 Pro line router --> [See switch positions below]
1. Violectric V181
2. Little Dot Mk VI+
3. Audio-Gd Roc SA
4. Balanced AMB M^3
This system is great, because the storage capacity of the ipod Touch isn't a limiting factor. With Spotify, the world is my oyster. The Pure i-20 dock extracts the digital (
not analog) audio stream, and passes it to my external DAC, which in turn feeds all of my amps. No computer and no NAS needed. Just WiFi, and ipod Touch and a Spotify account.
This is obviously complete overkill, but at it's most basic, here is what I recommend:
ipod Touch -->
Cable Jive Dock Extender -->
Pure i-20 dock --> Bottlehead Crack.
The Pure i-20 also has a built-in DAC that is surprisingly good (or, for anyone who has heard my private views on DACs, perhaps not-so-surprising). You just use the RCA outs instead of the coaxial out. And it will charge your ipod while you're listening. For less than $100, it is very hard to go wrong. I have 3 Pure i-20s, and I consider them the Swiss army knife of audio gear - incredibly versatile and shockingly cheap for what they do.
FWIW, the Cable Jive cables are ridiculously overpriced. Unfortunately, they are also the best cables of their kind that I have seen, and therefore recommended. Note that when I say "best", I'm not implying that they have any effect on sound quality, it is just that they are very robustly built and I find most ipod cables start to crack shockingly fast. The Cable Jive cable lets me hold my ipod Touch in my hand when selecting music, rather than trying to awkwardly manipulate it while it is plugged into the dock itself.
Best regards,
Adam
