A Geek Goes Flying

Weighing the Hel 2E for shipping I have a Schiit Hel 2E ( introduced in 2021 with “ a 3-year warranty ” (but see below)) I got second-hand this past summer. It’s served light duty, maybe 2-3 days/week for a couple of hours each of those days, as a headset interface and for music listening, on my office computer. After working perfectly for months, including on that Monday, I came in on Tuesday morning to find it dead. Well, it turns on (the internal red light is on), and it’s seen by the computer, but there’s no output, on two different headsets. Hrm. There’s no support email address on Schiit’s Contact page , just a form to fill out for “Help & Suport.” So I did that, on or about January 17th. The form states in prominent text:  “NO WORRIES. FILL OUT THIS FORM AND WE'LL [sic; “GET”?] BACK TO YOU ASAP. “NO, REALLY—WE WILL!” (Caps original.) A week later (January 24th), having heard nothing, I resubmitted the form with some new information - I’d brought in my Fulla E from home...

Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter for DAC / Amp Connection Picked up a “used – like new” Apple Lightning to USB3 Camera Adapter , which is specifically recommended by, e.g., DragonFly (“[i]n our tests, Apple's Lightning-to-USB 3 Camera Adapter (with charging port) sounds better and is more reliable than Apple’s less expensive Lightning-to-USB Camera Adapter, while also providing the ability to charge during playback”) and Schiit . Photos show, e.g., the DragonFly being used without external power, but mine won’t. In fact, basically nothing worked: Cannot Use Accessory AudioQuest DragonFly: This accessory requires too much power. Cannot Use Accessory SanDisk 3.2Gen1: This accessory requires too much power. The Schiit Fulla E, even when connected to a beefy USB-C power supply, just clicked in the headphones repeatedly, or every second would play a tone for a fraction of a second, click softly, go silent, and then repeat. Hooking up an external USB A to Lightning cable to provide po...

Looking at FLAC players for an old iPhone I want to repurpose into a listening station (that I think I’m going to build around the JDS Atom 2 stack ?). Quick synopsis of the few I’ve looked at so far: VOX . Premium features, including basics like a parametric EQ and EQ presents, an ad-free experience, gapless playback, etc., are locked behind a subscription. $49.99 yearly or $4.99 monthly. Once I saw that pricing I stopped looking at it. Flacbox . Natively connects to WebDAV, SMB, etc. servers, along with the usual litany of cloud services. Premium is a lifetime purchase of $14.99 (with a free trial), and includes ad delete, an unlimited number of cloud services, downloading albums and playlists, an unlimited number of playlists and songs in a playlist, etc. Has a 10-band EQ with precise ± decibel settings per octave. A contender. Doppler . A 7 day free trial and then a one time $9 charge. Doesn’t connect directly to servers but helpfully links to instructions for how to mount servers ...

Was listening to SiriusXM on my Mac, using the web interface . SiriusXM web interface playing Korn. Listening casually at not a high volume, I noticed a little harshness, likely compression artifacts?, in the sound, using my Loxjie A40 powering Klipsch B-100 bookshelf speakers. I’m new to this combination, so I started to worry a tiny bit - is the A40 a lesser quality unit than the A30? Did I maybe get a bad one? What’s going on? A short while later I was watching a YouTube video of Biden giving a speech regarding student loan forgiveness, and it was definitely clipping. WTF?! This isn’t good ... But, wait. I downloaded the clip using a Firefox plugin and copied the audio track out into a stand-alone file:  % ffmpeg -i President\ Biden\ gives\ remarks\ from\ Culver\ City.mp4 -acodec copy President\ Biden\ gives\ remarks\ from\ Culver\ City.m4a A peek at the audio track in Audacity showed what I kinda thought it might: Blown out audio. Audacity showing clipped waveforms. Just to be...

(With apologies to Thanos. Cute idea for a headphone stand !) Thanos bust headphone holder I recently picked up the Drop 2.5mm to Sennheiser headphone cable (for $19, I wouldn’t have at $50) (the 3.5mm single-ended cable that comes with the Sennheiser HD58x Jubilee headphones is hilariously long; the balanced cable is only slightly awkward in comparison). I’m using it with my EarStudio ES100 MK2 portable Bluetooth DAC/Amp, and it does seem to make a difference - the headphones seem “punchier” with the balanced connection, and can be set at a lower volume for an equivalent sonic experience. Liking it. So of course that set me down the rabbit hole of DAPs with balanced outputs. The least expensive seems to be the $130 SHANLING M0 Pro , but to use a 2.5mm connection with that you’ll need their $14 3.5mm to 4.4mm adapter , plus another $10+ 4.4mm to 2.5mm adapter like this , and now you’re at like $160 for the audio player, and you have something akin to a Rube Goldberg machine sticking...