Swedish meatballs and a baby in the oven.
Hope everyone enjoys their weekend
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Pretty much. Shame calyx isnāt around anymore
Quick disclaimer, I am not the most technical person, I just listen to stuff and share my experiences, so Iām sorry if this is a mess of an explanation lol,
I guess to some extent, although more drivers doesnāt equal better either, thereās a point where cramming more in there is detrimental to some extent
But thatās an apples to oranges comparison. BA drivers are inherently limited as full range drivers, and basically designed at this point to be used with multiple drivers, and (most) iem with multiple ba use a crossover network to assign drivers to cover a specific range of the iem (which requires masterful crossover design, shell/enclosure design, and quality drivers to sound coherent imo). So they are by design typically supposed to be in multiple driver configurations. Whatās the ideal number of drivers or type or configuration? I have no idea, but I do know that single ba iems have sucked from my experience, I guess the er4xr is great but thatās more an outlier than an exception, thereās a reason why most all BA iems these days have more than one. Side note, more drivers can also come with drawbacks. Quick speaker comparison, but some of the tightest imaging Iāve heard has come from single driver speakers, when you introduce multiple drivers, you now have to make sure those drivers are time aligned and donāt fuck up the time domain which imo is pretty critical for accurate spatial recreation in general. Not iem related, but I havenāt really spent as much time with iem design than Iāve seen with speakers. All depends on how well those multiple drivers are implemented.
Now, when it comes to dacs, the chips are designed to be perfectly capable on their own and not require multiple chips for different frequency ranges, they are designed to be the whole dac, not part of a dac. From a spec perspective, going from 1 single chip to dual chips does improve crosstalk and dynamic range and be easier on the output stage, but if thatās actually audible depends. If youāre talking fully dual mono as in each chip with itās own separate psu and output stage thatās a different story because now youāve brought in other aspects of the dacās design to influence that sound. Itās not always all positives though, because now you have added cost and complexity in the design, you have to make sure that the clocking between the 2 chips is exactly the same and also make sure they are balanced level wise on each channel, and might also cause some complications when it comes to the output stage and the input digital stage, all also depending on if this is full dual mono or not. Also with multiple chips, generally itās a good idea to keep your signal traces/runs as short as possible, which is now likely longer than a single chip. But in theory, thereās more upsides than downsides Iād say from what Iāve gathered.
Another potential benefit to multi chip designs is that you can now have fully differential dacs with balanced output into their output stage, so if you want to, 2 dacs per channel, one dedicated to the plus and minus for each channel, so 4 total, but thatās dual differential and not just differential since iirc this can be achieved with just 2 chips, one per channel using the 2 channels of said dac. Or modern chips with multiple channels could do this in one. Like always thereās potential downsides to doing any of these as well (some mentioned above, some new, and plenty for all of these that I missed).
When you get into more chips than that, youāre likely going for a parallelization approach (which is what the dac I mentioned beforehand used, an aries cerat kassandra ii ref), but thatās more common on chip ladder dacs (to increase linearity, reduce quantization error, increase basic specs and decoding potential, decrease distortion, change the driving characteristics in current mode, etc) rather than sigma delta so itās not as commonly done (I guess you might reduce the potential strain on the output stage and less noise and get a few extra spec bumps, but thereās a reason you donāt see many parallelized sigma delta dacs but a ton of parallelized ladder chip dacs)
Main point being, comparing a transducer to a dac chip isnāt really comparable, adding more is done for a fundamentally different reason (sure, you could say that more evenly distributing the workload is a shared commonality, but you get what I mean), and thereās many equally valid and worthwhile ways to go about dac design (and this is only talking sigma delta chip based designs). And thereās a lot more going on inside a dac than an iem admittedly that can greatly influence the sound and itās performance (doesnāt mean they are any less difficult to design, although Iād argue itās likely easier to make an amazing sounding iem than a good sounding dac, but no clue, I couldnāt design either lol just guessing off my own experiences). There are tradeoffs to any design, sometimes easily spotted and sometimes not. And also, you know, one of them is converting digital information to a low level analog signal, and one of them is converting an analog signal to mechanical energy aka sound our ears can hear lol, so thatās another big difference.
There IS one dac I have tried that actually did use different dac chips for different frequency response regions (from what I could gather), and that was a waversa wvdac mkii. IIRC, it would basically jump through many digital processing hoops with quad ess chips to separate different frequency bands for the different chips and channels with those chips, than recombine them at the end? I genuinely have no idea what they were doing, their explanations were fairly cryptic. The dac was super impressive, although I did feel like the way it staged was somewhat as cryptic as the marketing/explanations, it was really cool, but not realistic, but I can see it being amazing for some. Great dac, but wasnāt for me, anyways beyond the point, main reason I brought it up was because that was an edge case where a mfg used dac chips almost like ba (but even then itās still a stretch).
I guess in one sense I could agree with you when it comes to 2 chip dual mono being best in theory, but really itās more only because some of my favorite sigma delta dacs have that configuration (berkeley alpha reference 3, bricasti m1se, and pacific microsonics model 2, all of them funnily enough happen to use 2 ad1955 chip (perhaps not the PM), and all sound pretty different from each other lol), so I can at least see a trend. IMO some of the best DAC mfg have at least minimum dual chip/dual mono designs for sigma delta designs (although recently my favorite sigma delta dac would likely be the lampizator horizon, but no clue what that uses outside of that it is sigma delta). If you were going to make the claim that dual chips was better than single, Iād at least widen the net to just say itās better overall rather than only exclusively stage imo, since thereās likely more benefits than just stage (your description of blissful floating unattached sensation of notes is likely not only spatial recreation, likely involves a greater sense of microdynamics, speed, separation, background blackness, etc).
Although in the end itās still down to my ears for me, Iām not really attached to what dac chip something has or even the topology, at this point I donāt really care since most of the dacs I listen to end up being wildly different from each other even if they use similar designs. So itās not worth fussing about in my mind, since thereās clearly plenty of ways to make a quality dac with a single chip, or multiple, and I wouldnāt immediately go out and say one type is inherently better than the other without listening and confirming that first, because just because something checks out in theory doesnāt mean it can feasibly or properly implemented in reality, and it also doesnāt mean itās automatically the best option depending on the design. Thereās so many things that are over my head when it comes to dac design, I feel like I know nothing after seeing all the different potential outcomes of designs and products, so I just listen now and let my ears decide rather than worrying about the insides lol (better results that way for me lol). Point being, I wouldnāt make the assumption that more is automatically better, since thereās plenty of ways to fuck things up, and thereās likely single chip designs that could offer similar or greater performance if you really wanted. All comes down to the skill of the designer and quality of implementation of those designs imo.
TLDR: Thereās a lot more that goes into a dac than itās chip, thereās more than one way to skin a cat, listening to it will always be the final judge. IMO itās not wise to try and make assumptions on how something will sound by how many dac chips it has since that doesnāt really tell you much about itās sound from my experience
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Lol! Justin Bieber āOficialā 
I got a lot of those requests as well, only as friend request though. Once I see that word ācryptoā I automatically block it.
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If you donāt have twitter you can go direct to widget:
https://gleam.io/scWwO/qkz-x-hbb-earphones
Titanium Dome driver
Will send HiFri to open. Itās a good driver in general and great at its pricepoint
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That is the 20 dollar set w/silicon tips. i gotta update name tonight 
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Olina never got a vid 
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It looks like a ZEX with the gain fixed, the 5k peak removed, and some extra sub-bass. I am definitely up for that combo, even more so at the $20 price point.
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Are they available yet? Iām definitely picking them up.
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From tonight. And thanks
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Let me get that link, papa. Buying them rn 
Will be live in a few hours
QKZ sent me original hi res ver of that vid
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Sorry for asking this here
Tangzu zetian vs S12 Pro/Z12? Around same price, is there clear winner/superior? Or is there something new in the radar that I should wait for?
Current rotation, Mele (better Blon), Tri Kai (warm), Olina (perfect mid/timbre, lack treble detail/extension), Legacy 4 (luv treble air/extension/detail, suction seal makes wearing/putting it on painful), Truthear zero (great sub bass, bland mid). So this will be my first Planar 
Library consisting acoustic, some jazz, vocal pop, electro swing, few classical/soundtracks/rock
@hawaiibadboy @Rikudou_Goku @nymz others?? 
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I would wait for 11/11
Everything available now will possibly be in a discount
There may be some new sets in your price range that surpass the current sets
That is what i would do anyway
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Do they often release new sets on 11.11?
Autumn in General is a very active season. Extra stock is off lifted via 11/11 sales and new stuff is announced by 11/11 and may drop just before Christmas and CNY. It is a really active 3 months
(Oct-Dec)
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Nice, good to know, thanks! I guess Iāll wait too and rock my S12/Olinaās until then. Looking forward to a higher tiered planar (maybe a Timeless v2?)
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