I was wondering if any of you have any component (headphone, mp3 player, amp, etc) that you know you shouldn't use because it has some sort of issue, but which you go back to for whatever reason (a sort of guilty audio component pleasure).
Mine is this MP3 player that came out in the early 2000s, the RCA Lyra RD1072. It has a surprisingly good sound (it has a SIGMATEL DAC chip, which was the rage back in the day). If you have heard any discussions about the Ipod Shuffle 1st Gen, I think it has the same chip. The sound is surprisingly full and detailed. None of that cheap bass emphasis or anything like that. It's only glaring defect is some electronic noise, in particular at around 3Khz. This is only noticeable in very quiet passages, and only barely.
One additional quirk is that that tone has a fixed volume (it doesn't change with the volume level of the player), so now I have taken to connecting the RD1072 to my O2 amp, and using the O2 amp as an attenuator with the volume almost at maximum level on the MP3 player so that the tone is absolutely inaudible.
The cool thing about this player also is that it runs on a single rechargeable AAA battery for around 15 hours.
Mine is this MP3 player that came out in the early 2000s, the RCA Lyra RD1072. It has a surprisingly good sound (it has a SIGMATEL DAC chip, which was the rage back in the day). If you have heard any discussions about the Ipod Shuffle 1st Gen, I think it has the same chip. The sound is surprisingly full and detailed. None of that cheap bass emphasis or anything like that. It's only glaring defect is some electronic noise, in particular at around 3Khz. This is only noticeable in very quiet passages, and only barely.
One additional quirk is that that tone has a fixed volume (it doesn't change with the volume level of the player), so now I have taken to connecting the RD1072 to my O2 amp, and using the O2 amp as an attenuator with the volume almost at maximum level on the MP3 player so that the tone is absolutely inaudible.
The cool thing about this player also is that it runs on a single rechargeable AAA battery for around 15 hours.
