I see, what do you use for day do day IEM use then?

Whew, never seen that Q7 thing before, it sure does look like a beast. Do you strap it to your phone too? I was thinking about a similar setup, but I'm concerned with the cables, being usb on one side and headphones on the other, like, how can such a setup be pocketable with cables on either side?

Damn, that's quite a setup you got there! Can you tell more about it please?

Well, sort of (and I feel your irony), but on the other hand, my dad always listened to things like Depeche Mode, Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk, Laibach etc. at home and in a car. So, when I grew older, it started resonating with me and I used his music taste as a starting point. Still love these to this day!

My mom wanted me to become acquainted with music as early as possible. Thanks to her, I developed a trained ear, but I wasn't sure yet what to do with it. But then, thanks to my dad, I figured out what I like, and listening to music, performing and composing has been a hobby of mine ever since.

Nice to see people having questions! We should all try to up our knowledge

Yep, that's about how this sub looks this week

Yeah, I mean if you're a kid and they make you listen to it all the time... I wasn't even interested in music back then. My mom is a pianist, and even that didn't bring me to enjoy it much.

Oh yeah, you are totally right! Yeah, it's somehow not my cup of tea, maybe I had too much of it in the music school, lol. Will add it next time!

dudes be flexing hard

I also really like its interface, it's just beautiful

Sure, the transducer makes up 95% of listening experience, guess I'm just curious how to get that last drop!

For me the question was, would there be any difference or not, and I was sure there would be no difference at all. Yeah, it was small, but if we are not mistaken, it was there, and for me that justifies some extra cash and effort. That is, of course, if the results are reliable, and fellow redditors pointed to some caveats In my setting. Guess I will have to do that again? Think I'll go with test sounds only, to only listen to sine sweeps like a true audiophile affectionado

Thank you! I pretty much did only use tracks I know very well, although I haven't checked them all out since I upgraded to the S8. Sometimes I just didn't want to go to the next track since it just sounded so freaking good!

Great! Thank you very much! I wil definitely check those out! With these gizmos, I can satisfy my OCD urges alone and any time :)

I totally agree. How would I evaluate the third category though?

Indeed. The thing with marketing claims is that people need a deep technical understanding of the subject to be able to discern false marketing from real marketing, and it is just not feasible, since said marketing is addressed to the masses. And even with that level of understanding there is still a chance that something could be dodgy under the hood where we can't see. With enough critical thinking/paranoia it gets impossible to consume and be happy about it, so maybe it's the case that "the less I know, the better". Simulacra and simulation, all that..

Could you explain what do you mean by multiple trials? Like, the same track is played to me 5 times and each time I don't know where it comes from and I have to guess? That seems like a strange approach, since I can't go back to the previous playback state and compare, and I kinda just roll with whatever I'm hearing at the moment

Or, do I just ABABAB the same track, but each time I make a decision the person in charge flips a coin that decides which source is A and which is B and I start again (repeat 5 times)?

Thank you very much! I generally agree with all your points. That experiment design choice was mainly dictated by my streaming strategy (continue to use deezer or switch to qobuz), also I wanted to give qobuz the chance to sound the best it could. First try is kinda janky, as always, isn't it? I didn't think I would be able to tell them apart and got excited, maybe a little too soon.

Also, looks like I shouldn't bother my girlfriend too much with these tests and maybe wait till I have a friend over or something, lol

There's a video by Golden Sound, proving that MQA is actually lossy, so an MQA dac sould probably just sound worse. Although it seems like more and more dacs are supporting it now... which in itself is a worrying observation that hardware manufacturers may be prioritizing marketing claims and fancy labels over performance. Ideally everything should be checked in a blind test, but these are cumbersome to carry out correctly. I'm just dipping toes into it..

That's kinda odd. I mean, being an artist, why would you put out several masters of your new album? Why is Tidal the only one to carry several masters? Is there a way to check that there are several different masters of a particular recording if I don't have Tidal?

Yeah, it never crossed my mind that having a non-MQA DAC eliminates the MQA issue, lol :)

Thank you for your thoughtful response! I will try to address your valid points:

• There is really a two-fold problem here, being Deezer not HiRes and Deezer not bit perfect. But HiRes only makes sense with bit perfect playback, so I decided that these problems kinda entail one another. Primarily I was just choosing between two services while my free month on Qobuz is still going. That's concerning A and B, and C just sounds too vague to me without any technical explanation as to why would that be the case

• On the same master recording I commented under another comment (shortly, I just used modern recordings that probably don't have many masters)

• I haven't set the DAC to 44.1 because I forgot (hehe) and also I mostly use this dongle with my android phone with no way to fiddle with its sample rate (that I know of) and it should also be 48kHz by default. I used a laptop instead because Qobuz on the laptop has exclusive bit perfect mode, while on my phone it doesn't, as I haven't bought the USB Audio Player

• I should have definitely used the meter to get the volumes right, I will next time

• That's a cool idea on trying the same track multiple times, thanks! Yeah, I did have my statistics courses back in the university and I do remember some things (vaguely), and yeah, the goal was to get as far away from 7/14 as possible. Also, the results do sort of align and make sense in hindsight... While the result is not overwhelming, still it's there and at least I didn't skew to Deezer. Further investigations will be carried out, since it was much fun:)

Thank you very much for your insightful comments again!

Pretty much all the tracks I used come from modern albums that likely don't have many different masters. There was a track from Depeche Mode's Black Celebration in my playlist that had a different intro and was louder on one of the services, so I didn't use it. The usage of different masters cannot be accounted for, so it the tracks don't obviously sound different, I would assume same masters and just roll with it

And I also didn't want to try Tidal because of its crazy pricing and the MQA controversy

Recently I became concerned with bit-perfect playback: does it make an audible difference?

TL;DR: it does, seems like, but difference is not huge and depends on the genre. Also, statistics are not very reliable and require further tests

For those not in the know: bit perfect playback bypasses OS's system mixer and delivers music to the DAC "as is", without resampling it to a system wide bit depth and sample rate. This should, in theory, sound better(?). Dedicated digital players (DAPs) usually have their system mixers disabled, but on computers and phones this presents a problem, even when using an external DAC: bit perfect playback requires the player software to connect to DAC directly, and not all players can do that. I was very skeptical that upgrading from lossless CD quality playback, albeit not bit perfect, would make a difference.

So, i conducted a blind test. I was comparing a Hi-Res bit perfect streaming service Qobuz and a CD quality non bit perfect service Deezer. Both services were running using their apps on a Xiaomi laptop (RedMi book pro 15 2022), which runs Windows 11. I used dongle iBasso DC05 DAC and Moondrop S8 IEMs. Qobuz was connected to the DAC using WasApi Exclusive mode, which should provide bit perfect playback. Deezer doesn't have that feature and was using system mixer. Windows was using iBasso in default mode, 32bit 48kHz. I matched volumes by ear. I hear frequncies up to 16.5kHz and have mild tinnitus when in a quiet room. I'm 26.

I created two similar playlists of 14 tracks and my GF played me each track on both services. Random number generator was used to determine which service is used to play the track first and which second. My goal was to guess, which service was used for each playback. I could ask to go back and forth between the services and to go to the next track. Most of the tracks on Qobuz were marked Hi-Res (24bit, from 44.1kHz to 196kHz), CD quality on the others (16bit 44.1kHz); and Deezer offers them all in CD quality. I mostly used tracks from my library, as well as some test signals and some jazz I haven't heard (cuz audiophiles love jazz for some reason?).

On busy math rock stuff (Delta Sleep, The Yacht Club) I couldn't grasp the difference and was frantically going back and forth, just to make a guess in the dark. On modern electronic tracks (i.e. Chivalry Is Not Dead by Hiatus Kayote) one playback sounded a bit sharper then the other, sometimes it had more bass. Every time I liked a playback a little more, I attributed that playback to Qobuz (well, it should sound better, right?). The difference was never obvious. Radiohead tracks sounded virtually the same. The American Beauty soundtrack, Arose, has these heavenly little bell plucks, which sounded more clouded during one of the playbacks. The test sounds seemed to be more revealing, as it seemed to me that one playback had somewhat more aliasing, especially on 14kHz tone. The test lasted about 40 minutes.

So, the results? I guessed the service correctly 10 times out of 14. I missed on both of my favorite math rock bands, but was correct on all the others, except for two jazz tracks that I haven't heard before. I guessed both test tones correcly. I think, I proved to myself that it is worth it to pursue bit perfect playback and maximum file resolution, although not for all genres. It seems like rock music doesn't benefit from it as much as, say, acoustic or electronic music.

I will conduct further blind tests to investigate more granular use cases (i.e. test tones only, and different tests for different genres) and to make the results more reliable.

Yup, I used the word "albeit" haha

UPD: Also, next time I will use an EV meter to set the volumes instead of by ear and make more test cases to rule out the probability of a random guess (as proposed by u/ultra_prescriptivist)

Will you please let me know about your impressions when your hiby arrives? I liked the fc5 model, it only has 4.4 balanced output and is a bit smaller than the fc4, though a bit more expensive, probably cause of glass

Oh sure, as a musician myself I understand that very well! There are many horrible sounding albums out there... Guess that was my compulsive perfectionism kicking in :) I'm better now, haha