I haven’t done much in my mostly-dormant audio hobby — except, of course, listening to music, which is fine. “Audio” means: getting good sound from machines.
Here is where things stand at present:
Headphones: Headphones are my “serious” listening choice. These are the Sennheiser HD600 — an old and still highly respected pair of cans, that still sounds better to me than some newer and more expensive headphones that are supposed to be better. But actually, they still have many fans today. It’s not just me. You can now get them from Massdrop (still manufactured by Sennheiser), for a very good price. Out of the hundreds of models of headphones out there, how many do you expect to see still on sale unchanged after twenty years? That’s a classic. I also have a pair of Audeze LCD 2, which are also good, for different reasons. My unchanging advice is: Get the Sennheisers, and then, if you find something you like better, great. But, don’t be disappointed if this never happens.
This is driven, as before, by the Metrum Amethyst DAC, straight off the line outputs and through a pair of volume autoformers from Intact Audio. This is just an autoformer (transformer). There are no active electronic parts. Since the Metrum design also uses a direct connection from the DAC chip to the outputs (this is unusual), we are effectively listening to the DAC resistor ladder itself, with no intervening gain stages. This is very, very good.
This year, there is a new product that deserves mention. This is the Pasithea DAC from Sonnet Audio. Sonnet was started by the founder and chief engineer of Metrum, to continue his investigations in the no-oversampling R2R topology. This DAC includes a volume control, and actually has an output impedance of 16 ohms on the XLR balanced outputs. This looks like it was specially designed to drive headphones directly off the XLR outputs. In other words, it does what my autoformer setup does, without the autoformer — and without some of the output limitations of my setup, which requires a regular amplifier from time to time. This is an expensive “state of the art” type of product from Sonnet, but it is something I would look into if I was in the mood to attempt to improve upon my present setup, while spending a lot more money. (It will probably cost about $5000 when it is available in 2022.)
I also have the Fiio M11, which is also “good enough” and very portable. In the car, I like to use this plugged directly into the aux jack, instead of bluetooth or CarPlay solutions. It is noticeably better, even on my very average car system. If you had something actually nice, like the Mark Levinson systems found in Lexus automobiles, it might make a big difference. Unfortunately, using it with Qobuz has been very crabby recently. I think Qobuz is intentionally throttling their “offline download” function to make it barely usable. So, I started with Amazon Music as a hires 24/96 alternative source. This works much better.
I tried using Bluetooth earbuds for serious listening, in particular some Jabra 75t. Combined with highres files from Amazon Music, this was a total dud.
Speakers: I have been dinking around with my speaker stack based around the Yorkville U215, designed by horn legend Bill Woods and including the Unity Horn invented by Tom Danley. If I had an urge to get my hands dirty, I would set things up for multi-amping of each driver. But, instead, being rather lacking in ambition, I “disabled” the ports by stuffing them with towels. This allows a better integration with the sealed subs, around 100hz. Among interesting offerings on the speaker front, Tom Danley himself is releasing a new consumer product based on his Synergy horn. This is basically a small synergy horn used down to about 80hz, combined with a twin 15″ sealed sub on each side in push-pull configuration. That is a lot of horsepower in the bass. (But, you would expect that from a guy who once got kicked out of the Orange County Convention Center because he brought a subwoofer that threatened to damage the building.) This is an integrated system, with digital processing and separate amplifiers for each driver, using FIR filters, giving flat frequency, phase and impulse response through the whole spectrum. This is sort of the Holy Grail of speakers, and you would have a hard time finding it from any other source, especially if you want all the advantages of horns including huge headroom and dynamics.
So, basically you can just add a digital input, maybe your smartphone connected to a hires audio service like Tidal or Amazon Music. My main concern would be that, since Tom Danley comes from the prosound side, I can imagine that the electronics are good, but not, perhaps, very, very good. But, for that kind of thing (multiamp setups with top-quality electronics throughout), you have to suffer. Anyway, when Danley puts a price on his new offering, it will probably be around $25,000 — which would be, actually, a pretty good value, especially when you consider that it includes the whole electronics chain, with all the extensive digital bits and four amplifiers per side.
For me personally, I have some RCA MI-9584 drivers from the 1940s, that I would like to pair with some nice horns crossed around 250hz. I would drive this directly from some push-pull 45 DHT amps (this is exotic!), using a multi-amp setup because the sound of DHTs directly connected to vintage compression drivers is a hell of an audio drug. I’ve had it in the past, and I still have pleasant memories. On the bottom, I would have some big horns for the 80-250hz range. But, that is not something I am likely to get to soon.
