Post by Wß on Jul 12, 2018 17:21:56 GMT
I'll start by saying that I'm buying a new system, I haven't bought home audio equipment in years, yeah I got a receiver for the 5.1 speakers on the television but I'm talking a stereo system who's only function is to listen to music critically.
First thing is are you a critical listener? I've been blessed or cursed with good hearing. I more often than not recognize people on television by their voices more than by their faces. I can always tell which actor is doing voice over work on commercials and so on. So I can listen critically. Which means that shitty systems bother me and my enjoyment of music.
Here are a couple of good basic things you can do online to tell if you're good with hearing.
The first link is a great exercise National Public Radio did a few years back here in the US, you listen to three files and see if you can tell the difference between a Lossless file, a 320kbps MP3 and the original standard 128kbps MP2 which at the time of introduction was considered good enough to keep most of the quality of a CD yet compress the side of the data tenfold.
In this test I was able to pick out half of the time the Lossless file, and never did I pick the 128kbps file as the best quality. Meaning that I can tell the difference between poor and good quality, but also meaning that I can't tell the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and a Lossless file. All of my music is ripped at greater than 190 VBR (variable bit rate) MP3 so I'm happy that the time I spend doing that was because I could tell the difference.
The hearing test tells me that I can still hear sound a 13~14khz frequencies but I can't hear anything beyond that. Not bad for an old guy, but a young person with good hearing can hear 18khz and some people can hear up to 20khz. I also found that anything above 250 hz I'm either normal hearing or above 500hz or so I start to show some mild hearing loss. Hearing is something we lose as we age, so for my age I'm doing well to be where I am.
Why go through all of this process? Well, getting back to the original through, I'm buying new speakers and I'm pairing them with an amp to listen near field (meaning on a desk as my computer speakers).
I've settles on a pair Kef Q100 speakers and a Pro-Ject Stereo Box DS amplifier. I'm not sure if I'm going to use the DAC on the amp or if I'll continue to use the DAC on my sound card, but I'll test it out when I get the system
You can spend gobs and gobs of money on stereo equipment but like everything else, I love bang for the buck products because I'm like a drunken sailor with money and have to have my wife manage our household finances.
I know we've got a few computer geeks here, and computer geeks are good audiophile candidates as well so I figured we could have a chat here.