A Geek Goes Flying

Shelf over the Schiit Jotunheim amplifier Bedside. I got a great price on an older Jotunheim (not the Jotunheim 2) with the AK4490 DAC card installed, that I couldn’t pass up. This is for more casual listening; music while reading before bed, maybe the occasional TV show or online lecture series or whatever before bed. (I know I maybe shouldn’t , but, here we are.) But my bedside table is getting a little crowded. At first I put this shelf over the amp, but that put my Belkin charger a bit too high for my iPhone in ___ mode to be effective, so I returned to the well and picked up another 10" square aluminum plate to build another small aluminum shelf to put over the amp. This time I used 4" legs for air flow ( 2/7 x 4 inch Sign Standoff Screws ), since the Schiit is passively cooled and the vents are on the top (the mac mini has a fan and vents out the back, so I wasn’t as worried about leaving space above it). Drill bits to poke holes in the aluminum. It’s a little wobb...

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 ...

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...

(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...