Highly recommend the discovery thread and you will be bombed with numerous suggestions there. I don't think folks here are familiar with the IEMs within the budget you mentioned.
The Watercooler -- Impressions, philosophical discussion and general banter. Index on first page. All welcome.
- Thread starter Rockwell75
- Start date
Just dropping in to observe that there are 1000 guests visiting at the moment. And some time in the last couple days we hit 13 million views 
audionewbi
Headphoneus Supremus
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The value of this thread is long term impression of actual product users which no review can ever mimic. I always believed in long term impression and what this thread brings is the ability to be able to search all the impression link to a user and how those views matures over time.Just dropping in to observe that there are 1000 guests visiting at the moment. And some time in the last couple days we hit 13 million views
Talking about reviews... 
Nipo A100 got some attention during CJ SG together with R9 due to the MagSafe integration and I finally got an opportunity to spend a couple weeks with it (including a long flight trip). It is a really good piece of gear and MagSafe is something that should be standard now.
Nipo A100 got some attention during CJ SG together with R9 due to the MagSafe integration and I finally got an opportunity to spend a couple weeks with it (including a long flight trip). It is a really good piece of gear and MagSafe is something that should be standard now.
Hey watercooler pplz,
The iFi Valkyrie piqued my interest as a potential portable iFi Pro iDSD Signature replacement.
I'm keen to know if anyone has had and listening opportunities to compare the two.
In particular, without the tubes of the Signature, does the Valkyrie still hold up?
Does the DSD upsampling to 1024 sound just like the Sig when not in tube mode? I do like the DSD + GTO + Tube sound from the Sig.
Given the screen on my Gryphon gave out recently, I'm looking to replace my portable stack with something.
Probably the Valkyrie, or iBasso D16 / play the waiting game with the iBasso D17 Atheris and make a more informed decision then.
I'm a fan of both the iFi and iBasso sound.
I hope someone can give me a little more color than the generic reviews I see floating around right now.
The iFi Valkyrie piqued my interest as a potential portable iFi Pro iDSD Signature replacement.
I'm keen to know if anyone has had and listening opportunities to compare the two.
In particular, without the tubes of the Signature, does the Valkyrie still hold up?
Does the DSD upsampling to 1024 sound just like the Sig when not in tube mode? I do like the DSD + GTO + Tube sound from the Sig.
Given the screen on my Gryphon gave out recently, I'm looking to replace my portable stack with something.
Probably the Valkyrie, or iBasso D16 / play the waiting game with the iBasso D17 Atheris and make a more informed decision then.
I'm a fan of both the iFi and iBasso sound.
I hope someone can give me a little more color than the generic reviews I see floating around right now.
Last edited:
Checking in from my neck of the woods (aka Desktop land)
For context, my audio setup sits on a pretty massive Ikea Galant office desk in my room and opting to not have any extension cords and such had my steamer sitting far back on my desk even I was when seated against the edge. Combined with a relatively small 7in that the Official Pi Touch Display 2 was made for not a fun time selecting music. I could connect it to my network or set it up as a hotspot and control it from my phone yes, but I wanted local playback and not networking of any sort in the chain. So clearly the only solution was to get a bigger screen, which necessitated whole search on it's own and it's own set of requrements.
I was looking for a 10.1 screen with some sort of stand, but it had to account for the Pi and NVMe stack mounted on the back of it as well as the onboard power on the Pi feeding it rather than require a separate AC adapter for the screen as well. I ended up settling on a Waveshare 10.1 LCD IPS display with DSI out which solved the issue of the screen not requiring a separate AC adapter (unlike the HDMI options out there) due to a interesting design where it drew power from the underside of the GPIO pins, allowing me to reduce my thicc stack quick a bit as I could swap out the NVMe HAT for just an adapter and power it using the GPIO. But I had to get a separate stand as a result, managing to find a foldable tablet stand that would support the screen but not putting any force on the screen pcb and the mounted Pi stack as well.
Took a few days to get everything from Amazon, it was more 2 day delivery than Prime, but good enough.
That's when the "fun" started:
Thursday night: I replaced the screen and NVMe HAT and booted it up to get the screen working. After adding a few config lines and a reboot, I got it working again and decided to take an OTA to Volumio. Everything was still working fine and I should have stopped there but.....I needed to flip the orientation of the screen by 180 degree (It was in landscape by default already) as the out of box orientation would have my usb ports on the right which would have put unecessary strain on my Nordost interconnect
since some configurations are wiped after an update, I attempted to do the rotation through a configuration which persists across updates to avoid having to resetup everything when the time came and nothing came of it. I gave up for the night and head to bed, figuring it be a next evening problem.
Friday night: After consulting the Waveshare wiki, I decided to try the it way they suggested (for Raspberry OS, not Volumio...you know where this is going), making the tweak in a different location with the thought that if I had to redo this after each update, it's a small price to pay for not destroying my interconnect. Full out panic mode after a reboot when the fan runs like jet engine but nothing showing on screen. So I power cycled the Pi, hoping that it was just something in memory not cleared up and I it came to a "player is getting reading" screen with the fan running a jet engine. After numerous tries of getting in on SSH to determine where the issue was and finding that the Pi wasn't even getting to that point where I could do that to being. I was full on ready to buy a streamer at that point.
Saturday: My inner cheapskate wins and I decide to give it another try, popping in the micro sd to see if I could revert the display specific tweaks I had made to at least get it working again. To no avail, I decide to completely reformat the micro sd and start from scratch. After a few minor panic moments while the Volumio OS got setup, I went about setting it up again and then trying the display tweaks one at a time to figure out what was causing the issues. It turns out that change that Wavehare suggested didn't work on Volumio despite being the same base kernel as Raspberry OS, So I guess I just have to flip the display with a plugin in Volumio and live with the fact that the bootscreen is upside down until the kernel is updated for Volumio.
Having lost the mount for my NVMe, I had to figure out the mounts again....and promptly putting the Pi into emergency mode after a reboot. Which after multiple attempts and finding a software that mounted the ext partitions (as SSH wasnt accesible), was able to resolve by commenting out the mount. It took a few more tries before I realized I followed Waveshare's attempts to mount it as ext4 when I had formatted it as exFAT. Elated, I promptly rebooted and ran into emergency mode having typed in extFAT. Finally I was able to boot sucessfully and mount the NVMe.
Then the final boss came, no matter what I did Volumio would not read the NVMe (or did not see it), and having gotten it working prior I knew that something was in the details. After mounting in multiple locations, it seems that I had to mount it in a very specific location for Volumio to see the drive. Now the music's back, I gotta put some back unwind and finish up the Mother's Day card that I should honestly have done before this ride.
A Happy Mother's to the mums of all here! And of course happy listening!
- Have a Diana DZ coming in thanks to a sweet deal from Quebec Acoustique in maple land here
- GSX Mini finally shipped, tariffs are gonna hurt
- Some upgrades to my DIY Steamer (Yes, I'm still trying to avoid getting streamer and only about $500 USD in, but a lot of pain and hours in with Volumio and the Pi despite being a fairly well versed Unix user.
- Waiting for Mefisto
- Utopia and A90D are potentially on the way out.
For context, my audio setup sits on a pretty massive Ikea Galant office desk in my room and opting to not have any extension cords and such had my steamer sitting far back on my desk even I was when seated against the edge. Combined with a relatively small 7in that the Official Pi Touch Display 2 was made for not a fun time selecting music. I could connect it to my network or set it up as a hotspot and control it from my phone yes, but I wanted local playback and not networking of any sort in the chain. So clearly the only solution was to get a bigger screen, which necessitated whole search on it's own and it's own set of requrements.
I was looking for a 10.1 screen with some sort of stand, but it had to account for the Pi and NVMe stack mounted on the back of it as well as the onboard power on the Pi feeding it rather than require a separate AC adapter for the screen as well. I ended up settling on a Waveshare 10.1 LCD IPS display with DSI out which solved the issue of the screen not requiring a separate AC adapter (unlike the HDMI options out there) due to a interesting design where it drew power from the underside of the GPIO pins, allowing me to reduce my thicc stack quick a bit as I could swap out the NVMe HAT for just an adapter and power it using the GPIO. But I had to get a separate stand as a result, managing to find a foldable tablet stand that would support the screen but not putting any force on the screen pcb and the mounted Pi stack as well.
Took a few days to get everything from Amazon, it was more 2 day delivery than Prime, but good enough.
That's when the "fun" started:
Thursday night: I replaced the screen and NVMe HAT and booted it up to get the screen working. After adding a few config lines and a reboot, I got it working again and decided to take an OTA to Volumio. Everything was still working fine and I should have stopped there but.....I needed to flip the orientation of the screen by 180 degree (It was in landscape by default already) as the out of box orientation would have my usb ports on the right which would have put unecessary strain on my Nordost interconnect
since some configurations are wiped after an update, I attempted to do the rotation through a configuration which persists across updates to avoid having to resetup everything when the time came and nothing came of it. I gave up for the night and head to bed, figuring it be a next evening problem.Friday night: After consulting the Waveshare wiki, I decided to try the it way they suggested (for Raspberry OS, not Volumio...you know where this is going), making the tweak in a different location with the thought that if I had to redo this after each update, it's a small price to pay for not destroying my interconnect. Full out panic mode after a reboot when the fan runs like jet engine but nothing showing on screen. So I power cycled the Pi, hoping that it was just something in memory not cleared up and I it came to a "player is getting reading" screen with the fan running a jet engine. After numerous tries of getting in on SSH to determine where the issue was and finding that the Pi wasn't even getting to that point where I could do that to being. I was full on ready to buy a streamer at that point.
Saturday: My inner cheapskate wins and I decide to give it another try, popping in the micro sd to see if I could revert the display specific tweaks I had made to at least get it working again. To no avail, I decide to completely reformat the micro sd and start from scratch. After a few minor panic moments while the Volumio OS got setup, I went about setting it up again and then trying the display tweaks one at a time to figure out what was causing the issues. It turns out that change that Wavehare suggested didn't work on Volumio despite being the same base kernel as Raspberry OS, So I guess I just have to flip the display with a plugin in Volumio and live with the fact that the bootscreen is upside down until the kernel is updated for Volumio.
Having lost the mount for my NVMe, I had to figure out the mounts again....and promptly putting the Pi into emergency mode after a reboot. Which after multiple attempts and finding a software that mounted the ext partitions (as SSH wasnt accesible), was able to resolve by commenting out the mount. It took a few more tries before I realized I followed Waveshare's attempts to mount it as ext4 when I had formatted it as exFAT. Elated, I promptly rebooted and ran into emergency mode having typed in extFAT. Finally I was able to boot sucessfully and mount the NVMe.
Then the final boss came, no matter what I did Volumio would not read the NVMe (or did not see it), and having gotten it working prior I knew that something was in the details. After mounting in multiple locations, it seems that I had to mount it in a very specific location for Volumio to see the drive. Now the music's back, I gotta put some back unwind and finish up the Mother's Day card that I should honestly have done before this ride.
A Happy Mother's to the mums of all here! And of course happy listening!
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2004
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I think you are spot on! I did read a few pages in this thread and the bias is definitely to the upper end. So much for the title"....all welcome" haha.
Really all is welcome!
. It’s just this thread gravitates towards more costly gear, but I bet many here also own $20 sets and up! But the Discovery thread is the one geared towards more budget and less kilobuck stuff. I enjoy both threads equally
If you're using a neutral source, try switching over to a warmer source; as I found that it can effectively address sibilance issues, particularly in the consonants. Sources like any of the Cayin DAPs, can help reduce harshness in higher frequencies, and also using the Final Audio E-tips do help greatly.
Here's your daily fix of modern composition and Slovenian folk with incredible instrumentation @jwilliamhurst @RTodd @slumberman @maegnificant @SBranson @Scubadevils.
drftr
drftr
Nooseybear
New Head-Fier
The Ifi Valkyrie certainly looks like an impressive piece of kit, but with up to 5700mW of power it feels like overkill for a portable DAC amp? Especially when used to drive IEMs (which a lot of the promo photos are showing)….
audionewbi
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2010
- Posts
- 11,120
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- 7,194
Anyone else had a chance to use qobuz connect with their Sony, Hiby dap? I'm loving it so far.
I now have the ability to browse and send music to my daps using my phone/tablet.
I now have the ability to browse and send music to my daps using my phone/tablet.
Ever try Nostalgia Camelot? Could be up your alley
Yes, liked it quite a bit actually.
NOSTALGIA CAMELOT
Had some problems with driver flex, great balance, missing a bit of sub bass, vocals sounded a bit closed in, polite treble, sounding very musical, a little tizz in the treble, and could use a bit more air. Very good value for money.
drftr
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