A Geek Goes Flying

I can now confirm (with my shiny new iPhone 16 Pro in “natural titanium”), hooking up to something like a Schiit Jotunheim amp with an internal AK4490 DAC card via a USB C to USB B cable , is all you need to do to listen to the portable through the beefier amplifier. No “camera kit” or anything else required. iPhone screenshot

The Chair Back in May, in the middle of an organization kick, I had a KIA Nero EV rental for a few days, and used it to pick up some closet organization stuff at IKEA ( KALLAX shelving units ; DRÖNA inserts ). I’d been thinking about getting a reading chair that would be more conducive to reading and some work, vs. the IKEA FRIHETEN that provides all my living room seating. Somewhere in my reading, I stumbled across someone raving about the POÄNG chair, which has a bit of a cult following and a strong pedigree: No Shame in the Poäng Chair Architectural Digest Poäng: The Little-Known History Of Ikea’s Most Famous Chair Fast Company The Goddamn POÄNG Chair (“[T]he famously frugal IKEA founder and billionaire Ingvar Kamprad, who died in 2018, owned the same POÄNG chair since 1978.”) I wasn’t sure if it would fit my weird, lengthy proportions, so I decided to try one out during my IKEA visit. And, yep, it fits more or less perfectly. So I picked it up with the matching ottoma...

I upgraded from the Loxjie A30 (a gorgeous small desktop DAC/amp that uses an older DAC ( ES9023 ) and puts out a claimed 80Wx2 (4Ω), 40Wx2 (8Ω) into speakers, and only has a  ⌀ 6.35 mm headphone jack) to the Loxjie A40 . The A40 isn’t quite as nice (it’s more of a standard chassis with a faceplate), and is significantly bigger, but pumps a claimed 85W into my bookshelf speakers and ditches the wall wart for a standard NEMA 5-15P (left) to IEC-320-C13 power cable. And, most importantly, it has a  ⌀ 4.4 mm headphone jack for the balanced cables on my cans. Silly me, I thought it would have a decent headphone output. But. It is impossible to find specs for the A40’s headphone stage. It’s not on the Loxjie site or in the manual . An Amazon question “[w]hat’s the headphone power output?” got the non-helpful response: “Output Power:stereo 165Wx2(4Ω) / 85Wx2(8Ω).” The reviews that are out there so far don’t address this spec, and a question on one YouTube review has sat unanswe...