CEO Matt
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Nov 13, 2003
- Posts
- 48
- Likes
- 0
Hi all, i bet you're wondering what this nano meet is. well basically it was just me lugging my gear to my friends house for our first ever headphone/music meet and test. We're both still on the low end of the sprectrum, so i had to provide an amp for the session.
Firstly I'll go over the specs of our two systems. I'll start the list with my vintage Sansui QR-1500 4 channel reciever. Having the ablility to amplify four channels really helped, because it is built with a front and rear headphone jack. so we could both listen of the same amp. Sound quality from this amp is average, but i wouldn't listen to myself too seriously on that note because i really don't have any better equipment to judge it against. The amp also has treble and bass faders, which really aren't that useful when you're trying to compare anything, as they bias the sound. I stuck with the rear port which isn't affected and left the tweakable Front port to my friend.
For most of the time we were listening to my Flac collection through my dismal Vibra128 sound card. surprisingly it wasn't as bad as i thought, but i'll come to that later. All my music was decoded through XMMS on a linux-2.4.23-pre7-epia2 kernel, with ALSA sound drivers loaded instead of the standard 2.4.x OSS modules.
My headphones used for the session were the Sony MDR-F1's. they're my first pair of headphones with a jaw-dropping price, so they've been an ear-opening experience to say the least. Once again having heard nothing better i can't really fault these headphones. comfortable, airy, full-sounding and able to push an impressive soundstage i find them hard to fault. They are rather picky over how they're driven, but my amp handles them flawlessly.
On the other side of the room was my friend's source. He had my music collection for the afternoon, shared across the network. All music was played through Foobar2k running on WinXP. He had his audigy 1 feeding my other Aux in on my amp, which enabled some rather entertaining ABX'ing.
When i first arrived i challenged his soundcard as a joke. We all know audigy's suck for music but it's even more well known that any sort of PCI128 card (*Cough* mine) sucks more. so i gave him my shares and we randomly plugged in the plugs. One soundcard was on one input, and the other was on the other, though we didn't know which was which.
We played through a few songs, switching inputs to try and spot the difference. and of course before stopping the music we turned off the amp, because that spoilt the first round of testing, when i stopped my music and the amp was still playing something. One thing to mention is we had a top and bottom aux input, so that's how we reffered to each source. I'll list the songs we listened to and if there were any noticable differences.
Box Car Racer: In The End With You
This was real tricky, we both gave up on it, there was no change between the two.
Coldplay: Clocks
I really like this one, because i could hear a subtle difference in the soundstage. The top source had slightly more soundstage, and also was a little more prominant in the midrange. This was most noticable at the intro, but as the song got more cluttered instrument-wise that difference faded.
Dizzee Rascal: Round We Go
This one's just mentioned because it was a good demonstration of the soundstage of the F1's. During the intro and chorus the soundstage seems to be floating above your head. Needless to say it's a real odd feeling.
Linkin Park: Session
For some reason i've adopted this as a test tune, one that's used frequently now. That subtle feeling of a better soundstage from the top source was once again heard. at the same time we also deduced that the bottom soundcard had a tad more bass, and that the soundstage was closely associated with the more prominant midrange of the top card.
Rage Against The Machine: Wake Up
Being the less-mentioned theme song for the matrix, my friend quite likes this song, and i thought since we've both heard it a few times that we would be able to tell the two cards apart. Quite surprisingly we couldn't. They sounded pretty much identical.
Red Hot Chilli Peppers: Universally Speaking
This is one song i like the sound of coming through my headphones so it was added to the playlist next. Most of the music from this ablum has quite decent basslines, which should have been a breaking point for one of the cards. once again they both handled it equally. This was the first time the bottm card one though, because the bass seemed to be a bit better, which gave it the advantage on such a bass-crucial track. Once again it was amazingly close.
After all those tracks we decided to find out what was the top card and what was the bottom one. so i played my system and switched to the top input. hello music! So my vibra had the better soundstage... Needless to say it was an interesting comparison
Next came our real test, ABXing a wav and a MP3 of the same file(Radiohead: Go To Sleep). We settled on lame with --alt-preset standard and set up the test. using WinABX we were able to effortly and blindly compare the two files. This whole test was amazingly tricky, and it took each of us the whole song to gather enough of an opinion on what sounded better. However once it was done we were both able to pick the difference, however it was so close that it was almost impossible to distingush the two apart. The difference for me came down to one particular part of the song when they played one particular note. it was honestly that difficult. My friend could tell by the slightly different atmosphere in the singer's (Tom York's) voice. i couldn't pick that however.
Second was the REAL fun test. ogg -q6 vs wav. This one really threw me, and needless to say i'm not going to say what i thought was different because i picked the wrong version to be the ogg. I have no idea how to tell those two apart now. my hat is off to the vorbis developers for creating such a good lossless compression (granted it was one song but there was no way i could hear any difference). it may also interest you that the ogg came out at 5mb and the mp3 was 5.5mb.
Disappointed at the outcome of me vs the ogg vs wav we plugged in my friends D-EJ1000 and compared the headphone out with the line out. the difference was so clear it was laughable. This was a TOP END sony cd player with a heaphone out that sounded like i had my head in a box and the music was exterior to the box. I was really surprised how bad it sounded compared to the normal line out.
after that i packed up and went home, but not before we got some pics on steve's (the one i've been referring to as "my friend"
) camera.
PS be nice on my 128kbps DSL link, i need to use the internet too
First picture: My amp, steve's D-EJ1000 and our headphones (from left to right steve's F1s and then his Philips HP550, my F1s and my old MDR-V250's.)
http://route66.sytes.net/front-layout.jpg
Second picture: A bird's eye view of picture one. Everything's in the same place except you can see the sticker that i put on the front right of my amp (it's from my T610 phone
)
http://route66.sytes.net/layout1.jpg
Third picture: Here's the room where we setup, wirea and all. My comp's on the floor on the left, with the case open (it's a EPIA-M in a small case with a half-hight PCI slot, so once a soundcard's added the case won't go back on :/ ). Steve's Athlon XP is over on the left in the Lian-Li case. That's my foot on the left too.
http://route66.sytes.net/room.jpg
Final pic: Here's one of us. I'm on the right. i blame the hair on the headphones
:
http://route66.sytes.net/us.jpg
Firstly I'll go over the specs of our two systems. I'll start the list with my vintage Sansui QR-1500 4 channel reciever. Having the ablility to amplify four channels really helped, because it is built with a front and rear headphone jack. so we could both listen of the same amp. Sound quality from this amp is average, but i wouldn't listen to myself too seriously on that note because i really don't have any better equipment to judge it against. The amp also has treble and bass faders, which really aren't that useful when you're trying to compare anything, as they bias the sound. I stuck with the rear port which isn't affected and left the tweakable Front port to my friend.
For most of the time we were listening to my Flac collection through my dismal Vibra128 sound card. surprisingly it wasn't as bad as i thought, but i'll come to that later. All my music was decoded through XMMS on a linux-2.4.23-pre7-epia2 kernel, with ALSA sound drivers loaded instead of the standard 2.4.x OSS modules.
My headphones used for the session were the Sony MDR-F1's. they're my first pair of headphones with a jaw-dropping price, so they've been an ear-opening experience to say the least. Once again having heard nothing better i can't really fault these headphones. comfortable, airy, full-sounding and able to push an impressive soundstage i find them hard to fault. They are rather picky over how they're driven, but my amp handles them flawlessly.
On the other side of the room was my friend's source. He had my music collection for the afternoon, shared across the network. All music was played through Foobar2k running on WinXP. He had his audigy 1 feeding my other Aux in on my amp, which enabled some rather entertaining ABX'ing.
When i first arrived i challenged his soundcard as a joke. We all know audigy's suck for music but it's even more well known that any sort of PCI128 card (*Cough* mine) sucks more. so i gave him my shares and we randomly plugged in the plugs. One soundcard was on one input, and the other was on the other, though we didn't know which was which.
We played through a few songs, switching inputs to try and spot the difference. and of course before stopping the music we turned off the amp, because that spoilt the first round of testing, when i stopped my music and the amp was still playing something. One thing to mention is we had a top and bottom aux input, so that's how we reffered to each source. I'll list the songs we listened to and if there were any noticable differences.
Box Car Racer: In The End With You
This was real tricky, we both gave up on it, there was no change between the two.
Coldplay: Clocks
I really like this one, because i could hear a subtle difference in the soundstage. The top source had slightly more soundstage, and also was a little more prominant in the midrange. This was most noticable at the intro, but as the song got more cluttered instrument-wise that difference faded.
Dizzee Rascal: Round We Go
This one's just mentioned because it was a good demonstration of the soundstage of the F1's. During the intro and chorus the soundstage seems to be floating above your head. Needless to say it's a real odd feeling.
Linkin Park: Session
For some reason i've adopted this as a test tune, one that's used frequently now. That subtle feeling of a better soundstage from the top source was once again heard. at the same time we also deduced that the bottom soundcard had a tad more bass, and that the soundstage was closely associated with the more prominant midrange of the top card.
Rage Against The Machine: Wake Up
Being the less-mentioned theme song for the matrix, my friend quite likes this song, and i thought since we've both heard it a few times that we would be able to tell the two cards apart. Quite surprisingly we couldn't. They sounded pretty much identical.
Red Hot Chilli Peppers: Universally Speaking
This is one song i like the sound of coming through my headphones so it was added to the playlist next. Most of the music from this ablum has quite decent basslines, which should have been a breaking point for one of the cards. once again they both handled it equally. This was the first time the bottm card one though, because the bass seemed to be a bit better, which gave it the advantage on such a bass-crucial track. Once again it was amazingly close.
After all those tracks we decided to find out what was the top card and what was the bottom one. so i played my system and switched to the top input. hello music! So my vibra had the better soundstage... Needless to say it was an interesting comparison
Next came our real test, ABXing a wav and a MP3 of the same file(Radiohead: Go To Sleep). We settled on lame with --alt-preset standard and set up the test. using WinABX we were able to effortly and blindly compare the two files. This whole test was amazingly tricky, and it took each of us the whole song to gather enough of an opinion on what sounded better. However once it was done we were both able to pick the difference, however it was so close that it was almost impossible to distingush the two apart. The difference for me came down to one particular part of the song when they played one particular note. it was honestly that difficult. My friend could tell by the slightly different atmosphere in the singer's (Tom York's) voice. i couldn't pick that however.
Second was the REAL fun test. ogg -q6 vs wav. This one really threw me, and needless to say i'm not going to say what i thought was different because i picked the wrong version to be the ogg. I have no idea how to tell those two apart now. my hat is off to the vorbis developers for creating such a good lossless compression (granted it was one song but there was no way i could hear any difference). it may also interest you that the ogg came out at 5mb and the mp3 was 5.5mb.
Disappointed at the outcome of me vs the ogg vs wav we plugged in my friends D-EJ1000 and compared the headphone out with the line out. the difference was so clear it was laughable. This was a TOP END sony cd player with a heaphone out that sounded like i had my head in a box and the music was exterior to the box. I was really surprised how bad it sounded compared to the normal line out.
after that i packed up and went home, but not before we got some pics on steve's (the one i've been referring to as "my friend"
PS be nice on my 128kbps DSL link, i need to use the internet too
First picture: My amp, steve's D-EJ1000 and our headphones (from left to right steve's F1s and then his Philips HP550, my F1s and my old MDR-V250's.)
http://route66.sytes.net/front-layout.jpg
Second picture: A bird's eye view of picture one. Everything's in the same place except you can see the sticker that i put on the front right of my amp (it's from my T610 phone
)http://route66.sytes.net/layout1.jpg
Third picture: Here's the room where we setup, wirea and all. My comp's on the floor on the left, with the case open (it's a EPIA-M in a small case with a half-hight PCI slot, so once a soundcard's added the case won't go back on :/ ). Steve's Athlon XP is over on the left in the Lian-Li case. That's my foot on the left too.
http://route66.sytes.net/room.jpg
Final pic: Here's one of us. I'm on the right. i blame the hair on the headphones
http://route66.sytes.net/us.jpg
