A Geek Goes Flying

Shanling M1s being used as a DAC So I found a good deal on a used Schiit Jotunheim 2 , but it doesn’t come with a DAC. I expect I’ll pop in a $100 ES9028 card and probably splurge and pay the $50 to have Schiit install it. I’m positive I could do it, but Schiit will bump the warranty on the whole package to 2 years if I do that: “For out-of-warranty products, having Schiit install the DAC module re-activates the warranty on the complete product for 2 years.” But I haven’t done that yet. And I should be responsible and sell off some of the gear I’m not using to cover the cost of the upgrade. (I already sent a Schiit Hel off to a new home...) But I know me and I know I’m going to want to play with my new “toy” at least a little bit, which means it’s going to need a signal.  At first I was going to drop $25 or so on an Apple USB-C to 3.5 mm dongle , a USB A/C adapter , and a decent 3.5mm to RCA Cable , but then I screeched the needle off the record and realized how silly it was to s...

Got a smokin’ deal on a pair of lightly used Sennheiser HD600 headphones. They may not be “bass canons” but there’s certainly a robust low end, especially with a custom EQ (the closest I could approximate to the Oratory1990 Sennheiser HD600 (octave band EQ) settings; the M1s only allows up to ± 6dB adjustment). Listening to Little Earthquakes (FLAC rip of the CD I bought like 30 years ago), Happy Phantom just kicks. Great soundstage, very intimate. If there’s a “veil” I don’t notice it. Setup: Shanling M1s DAP FAAEAL HD600 Balanced Cable 4.4mm Sennheiser HD600  I will say the M1s struggles a bit to drive the HD600s ( 97.7dB/mW, 300 Ω ), and really exposes lower quality source material. (I’d have expected Taylor Swift’s Midnights to sound a lot better, frankly, and, e.g., the first part of Tool’s Invincible sounds incredible, but the second, more dense, part, and the Shanling starts to really struggle.) I really want to pick up a Loxjie A40 with balanced output to see how m...

On a whim I added the Meze 99 Classics to my Amazon cart, ‘cause they were “only” like $200. Then they reset to $309 and I forgot about them, moved them to “save for later.” A quick peak at camelcamelcamel showed they basically never went on sale, so I’d either imagined it or I wasn’t fast enough. Until... Burning the midnight oil the next day or so, I saw the pop-up that the price had gone down - to $219. There’d been some recent discussion on r/headphones that intrigued me, so I grabbed a pair. A couple of hours later they were back up to $309 and I haven’t seen them drop lower since. (An alternative: The Meze 99 Neo , specific for drop.com, are apparently indistinguishable from the Classics aside from the colorway, and are currently $179, down from $199.) (As of this writing, they’re $219 again; it’s 1:53 a.m., maybe there’s a pattern here?) I don’t have any closed back headphones I listen to regularly. (I use the Ultrasone Pro 580i for video editing etc., but they’re a little too ...

Shanling M1s on top of Kobo Elipsa 2E Got a Shanling M1s digital audio player (DAP), and a Kobo Elipsa 2E eReader, for Xmas this year. More as I dig into both, but some first impressions and notes: Kobo Elipsa 2E This trick still works to bypass the “download our software, create an account, login” hoops you otherwise have to jump through. I’m sure I’m missing out on some functionality but I can’t be arsed. I’m excited for the bigger screen and the stylus / notetaking functionality. Loading it up with my .epub (etc) library. It’s not waterproof. But I still have my Libra 2 for hot tub reading, which I keep saying I’ll do but never quite seem to get around to. I got this cover for it ( learned my lesson a while ago with these things). It has a slot for the stylus. It was relatively inexpensive, and it’s relatively cheap. Stay tuned. Shanling M1s I’m using these with this 4.4mm male to 2.5mm female balanced adapter and currently trying them out with my HiFiMan HE400se planar magnet...