social.noyu.me

‪excited to see if i have to delete this because i'm wrong‬

‪the most hilarious thing in audiophile digital technology to me btw is direct stream digital. a technology that requires such an absurdly high notional sample rate that it causes serious ultrasonic noise problems, and has to be converted from pcm anyway so what's the point‬

@hikari oh so there actually are DSD-native production workflows and (as you might expect) they are basically just analog mixing workflows

since you can’t mix DSD, people producing DSD masters either produce entirely in DSD or record the tracks in DSD, convert to “DXD” (just very high sample rate PCM) to mix, and then back to DSD when they master

it’s hilarious

@hikari (the majority of DSD masters are going to be the latter because why would you do the former? okay i mean i would probably do the former but im weird)

@demize lmfao they're uninventing the DDD workflow this is incredible

@hikari to be fair I think it’s probably, like, three people in the entire world who produce anything that way

and the one of them I found said he usually prefers not to, he uses the DXD working copies usually (and I can’t say I’m surprised)

@hikari you’re not wrong. Some expense can still bring value if it’s a dac-amp and you’re putting in better components in the amplification stage. But the ones and zeros are what they are assuming the bit-depth is there.

Personally I’m surprised I haven’t heard of quantum dacs yet. Imagine the marketing of “take your music beyond ones and zeros!!!” You know like sound lol.

@hikari I do miss having a nice stereo setup with good speakers and multiple EQ modes tho.

@hikari The fact that it was expensive makes it sound better to them. 🤷

@hikari If you can get audiophile power cords, audiophile optical cables, audiophile network cables, audiophile SATA cables and audiophile NVMe SSDs, why not audiophile DACs?

@hikari meanwhile the DAC+amp in the USB-C headphone dongle apple will sell you for $9 are near-literally perfect

@rcombs @hikari Hm. How hard would it be to desolder it and attach it to an expert board :P

@mcc @hikari much harder than getting a similar chip for around the same price or less from ~whoever, or just speaking USB-C to the assembled device

@rcombs @hikari i hear speaking usb is pretty hard :(

@hikari ah, but the expensive DACs aren’t really for people who care about “authenticity”

that’s the secret about the audiophile community: it draws people in who think they care about “neutral headphones” and “authentic sound” and then it makes them realize no, that’s a terrible way to listen to music, and they figure out what they actually want (and usually that’s a V shape)

the high end headphones tend to want to sound good. high end DACs and amps tend to be fairly neutral, but they’ll never be totally neutral, and the people buying them don’t care. some of the high end DACs (like the one I use, though I personally haven’t noticed) are decidedly not neutral for various reasons, and a lot of amps are tube amps and tubes are anything but neutral (literally, since you can swap them out and different tubes will all sound different)

@hikari that said, most of the actual features of high end DACs are just format support and IO options, and if you just wanna listen to stereo PCM you’re not gonna get much out of any of them; they’re a particularly niche market within an already niche market

I got Schiit’s multibit DAC in the hopes that it would actually be different somehow, because if I was spending that much on a Jotunheim already, the multibit option wasn’t much more and seemed less boring

@hikari meanwhile apple's $9 USB-C headphone jack dongle is essentially perfect, and outperforms loads of audiophile bullshit

@hikari no literally 100% of the process is done purely on vibes and "what sounds good" to an engineer

no experience is the authentic experience, the most authentic experience is that one that sounds the best to you

- carrie

@hikari source: the multiple audio recording/live audio classes weve taken and are currently taking

like we're by no means a professional but we've seen enough different professionals at this point that i think its safe to say we're not completely stupid (just mostly)

- carrie