How did you do that? Pins are a bit different and you can't insert them wrong way.

Always tell what you mean by 320kbps. Because old MP3 encoded by Bladeenc or l3enc (for example) is pretty much easy to differentiate from FLAC. On the other side you have absolutely no chance to find difference between Opus 320kbps and FLAC. MP3 320 encoded by LAME (the most relatable variant) is somewhere in between - close to being transparent though.

AKG K612 Pro.

But why, they're epic.

Finally words of truth. There's another side of truth though: music is good for stereo system they were mixed for. Hard panned recordings will never sound good in headphones - on the other side, binaural recordings won't sound as good as they do in headphones.

D means Bluetooth?

If you get the same sound out of your monitor and motherboard, maybe your headphones are boomy by design? Wouldn't be surprised if that's how you perceive DT177x.

Yes. AKG K612 with slightly modified oratory1990 EQ + Oppo Enco X2. It's not like I'm closed to something new, it's like I'm afraid that the chance of getting a lower quality sound is a lot higher than the opposite situation.

>All will be in FLAC 24/96 for consistency across the board.

Why the hell? Lossless rips must be bitperfect, so you could throw away your CDs and still have the perfect copies of them. Resampling on a player side is perfectly fine.

You know it's a good device when a user wants to use it even if it's a lot easier to connect headphones directly to a source.

I mean, you're very likely to hear the difference, because it rarely happens that DSD and PCM releases have the same mastering, but to me it's a mixed experience - I often find PCM releases done more professionaly and having more thoughtful mastering.

Because "better mastering" doesn't equal "sound that you like better".

Do they?

I can surely say that despite controversial sound signatures all Beyers rarely have any problems with mid accuracy, unlike, let's say, Audio-Technica.

AKG K371, AKG K612 (though I guess I'm too late for that)

Android chooses the best codec available by default. LDAC is nothing special if you have an Apple device because AAC there sounds very good.

Galaxy Buds Pro with Galaxy S22 - it's likely that Samsung Scalable Codec is used, not AAC. So I think it's system DSP that makes any difference.

I like that pads replicate Beyerdynamics.

Yeah, take any recent DAC chip schematics and get sad because most modern delta-sigma DACs are not 1 bit and they do not support DSD direct (ESS Sabre chips all play DSD pre-processed for example). And the circuit is not much shorter. And you didn't even consider looking at how ADCs work, which is another potentially very interesting story...

>DSD take far more samples per second during recording.

1 bit samples, might you. Which do not replicate sound wave in any way, unlike PCM.

>Of course, if the music is digitally produced to begin with, there is no benefit in using DSD

Yes, "to begin with". >95% of music in the world is digitally produced, even if it doesn't contain any digital instruments. It's a matter of fact, because digital mixing is a lot easier to perform than analog one. Some DSD releases are converted from PCM masters - it's a matter of fact as well.

DSD is an archiving format for analog sources, it does not have any other use cases. It does not do anything better than PCM in terms of sound. "Better approximation", "more information" and "less digital processing and filtering" - all of this is complete nonsense.

>Direct recording to DSD or analog to DSD conversion

..is a strange approach in modern world where digital mixing/mastering is de facto standard, has endless possibilities and it's simply easier. Which leads to a fact that almost everything today is recorded/mixed/mastered digitally. In PCM of course, because there're almost no tools for processing DSD signal the same way you can do with PCM.

>are both vastly superior sonically to PCM.

Very bold statement.

>There is literally no point to own an audiophile grade DAC if you never use it to listen to DSD.

I use hardware to listen to music I like, not to listen to music in DSD, MQA, whatever. I do not need to justify my purchase by using supported formats, I'm here for enjoyment.

So this guy just named all the formats he knows? Then he knows little.

Opus all the way.

DSD is dead. Unusable format for an end user. PCM all the way.

I may have won a lottery. That's possible.

They do that with side signals, not with mid. If you get bad center, it's different frequency response between two drivers, aka driver imbalance.

That's the beauty of my K612 - they sound spacious and they have great imaging because of epic center - all at the same time. I can name my Shure SRH840 as being the opposite - less spacious and very bad center (bad batch - channel imbalance is too high).