Well that’s not the hard of hearing I was talking about, mainly old people hearing lol. And the loudness war is a different topic that doesn’t really relate to the claims of boosting high end. I feel that boosted high end is more characteristic of modern music trends. Also what are the problems with audeze, beyer, and hifiman? Also I have extremely good hearing (most in my family do as well) and I’m glad I don’t have something like tinnitus
That was a criticism of Resolve Reviews in one of his latest videos.
@ 12:30
While I would agree that beyers do (and sometimes hifiman), audeze lcd headphones are actually pretty dark sounding, and imo don’t really have any peaks when listening.
Huh, apparently I found a time machine and replied before you after you. 
What how lol.
The lcd4 are pretty much the exception. The lcd2 classic and regular two are pretty dark, the lcd3 as well. And the lcd x too
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Does Lcd4 shove everything in your face? Do you really need to eq them to make them sound good? Those two question made stay away from them.
Yes they do shove everything in your face. I don’t really think eq can fix that
Oh, and I forgot to ask some more stuff here. So how exactly does an amplifier provide the biggest difference in sound as you say? By the looks of it, an amp serves to power high impedance / sensitive headphones. You mention that DACs provide a cleaner line signal, can you elaborate on that? Are you referring to the signal being affected by the electrical noise produced by a PC?
A bad amp can be more detrimental (and audible) to a system then a subpar dac, so getting an amp that is good is going to be able to power headphones better, letting the headphones reach their potential. Some headphones are less or more dependent on quality amps, so it depends. Typically a good amp will only serve more power without coloring the signal, but cheaper amps can change the sound. There are lots of other things that go into how amps can effect sound quality more, but I suck at explaining them.
A dedicated dac is realistically going to have more care put into its output stage and is typically going to have an output with a lower noise floor and a strong constant voltage signal that will benefit the amp more then a less ideal one. And it might have a better more capable dac chip, but that’s less audible.
Everything I said here is way too oversimplified and probably not entirely correct because I tried to slim it down, so I would see if someone else could explain it better lol
So what I’m getting from this, is that the reasoning for getting a dedicated DAC and amp is to reduce the noise produced from internal audio systems, and improve the clarity of the audio itself through maintaining a stronger, more consistent voltage in powering higher quality headphones?
I get that it’s a bit of a oversimplification of all the science and engineering that goes into producing these components, but I’ve been scratching my head at these questions and I’m not exactly sure where else to search for answers other than here. That being said, if we’re also discussing audio properties that make a difference, how would something like bitrate factor into the overall quality of a sound?
Yes. Pretty much. That is how it realistically works
If you are discussing bitrate you have to take into consideration what codec you are discussing and weather that codec is lossless or lossy
Oh well alright then, glad to know I’m on the same page on that level at the very least.
In particular, I’ve been looking between some stuff related to Apple. They’ve been promoting these “Apple Digital Masters” which supposedly are completely accurate to what the original master would sound like, but looking at their requirements for creating in that format, they’re using the 256 Kbps AAC Encoder, not their lossless encoder. I have a couple of albums on hand that are in that, and they’re running at around 1k Kbps, and supposedly, those digital masters are meant to sound exactly like their lossless counterparts, or something of that sort.
Apple Digital Masters are basically masters put under a certain guideline to ensure the music sounds good in aac 256. It can sound pretty good, but imo it’s because of the way they master. Essentially they make sure it doesn’t clip or brickwall and sometimes put more care into the mastering itself
If you have some songs at around 1000kbps I would think they are alac, not aac
Also thing the apple digital masters used to be called “mastered for itunes” or something
Oops, yeah I forgot to mention that those 1k Kbps files are in ALAC. And last I remember yeah they were called “Mastered for iTunes”. Either way, I take it that bitrate doesn’t have nearly as big of an impact? Seems more like the mastering itself contributes more to a person’s perception weather a song is high quality or not than the numbers themselves.
Pretty much, but only to a certain point. With lower bitrates in lossy codecs you can start to notice the lower quality of sound. If you have 320kbps mp3 or 256kbps aac you should have more then acceptable quality. It’s when you dip into those lower ranges that you start to really experience the quality drop. But yes how the song was made and the mastering do play a large role.
I can hear and tell the difference between a high quality lossy and lossless file pretty easily with the right gear, but once you go into the super high res lossless formats I can’t tell the difference. If I can tell a difference, it’s because sometimes when they release a higher res format they remaster it and it might sound better (or different). That’s why I like sacd sometimes, it’s because sometimes they remaster and put more care into the master and it comes out sounding better then the original cd lossless. But sometimes high res releases are just upscaled 44.1 16bit lossless to 24 bit 44.1 or higher which yields no audible quality difference (unless you have a dac that for some reason preforms alot better at 24 bit or something super rare like that)
I see, so either way, it will always be better to grab lossless files in that there is no perceptible loss in quality with competent gear, no matter all the mastering that goes into a lossy file. That being said, I’ve never heard of SACDs before, I take it they run off the same principle that was mentioned earlier over what Apple is doing with AACs, but putting that improved mastering into a lossless file.
Well they are entirely different in how they reproduce audio, because they use dsd instead of pcm to recreate the audio. I won’t go into depth about this, because articles online could explain this more efficiently. Just as an example a traditional cd is 44100hz and 16bit. A sacd would be 1bit and 2822400hz. Also a cd track might be at something like 1000kbps, where a dsd track would be around 5645kpbs. There is constant debate for what is better regarding dsd, but the main takeaway is that sacds sometimes have better masters then their cd counterparts.
If you can get a lossless cd quality file, that would pretty much be all you would need. If you have to use lossy, a 256 aac or 320 mp3 is just fine. Also there is variable bit rate (vbr) formats of aac and mp3, so you have to take those into account as well, besides other lossy formats like Ogg Vorbis, ac3, etc.
I don’t want to discuss mqa, as when I compare it is worse then a true lossless, but better then mp3 or aac to my ears
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Looking at it now, the physical library of DSD offerings seem pretty limited. Where else would these same file formats be offered, and do those places offer them in the standard CD format of 44.1 Khz 16-bit file?
SACD’s were created by sony as a high end format. There are very few offerings because of the more niche nature of sacd, so you will not find modern music (usually), and be stuck with most genre being classical, blues, jazz, and stuff like that. You can typically find regular cd versions of these sacds.
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The issue I have with DSD is that it’s often mastered in DxD which is just super high bitrate pcm, and disappointingly not a lewd anime series in this context, furthermore afaik sony has been phasing out DSD instead pushing for DXD itself as another (imho) silly, pointless format designed possibly for birds.
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