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those speakers are horrible ... more monstrosities designed by chimpanzees

Hi Paul. Thanks for these great videos. I agree on using AQ cables. These guys knows how to make cables. I upgraded from thr Forest HDMI cables to the Cinnamon HDMI cables. The improvement in sound and picture quality was HUGE. Which model after Cinnamon (Chocolate, Vodka etc) would you recommend for a good AV system, for a future picture and sound quality upgrade? Thanks Johannes. Cape Town South Africa.

Great video!

Man, there is some serious money to be made in this market...

just bull s... digital is digital only 1 & 0

Hi Paul. I discovered your channel about 2 weeks ago. I just wanted to thank you for sharing your vast knowledge with us. And doing it in such a humble and entertaining way. You are the best. All the way from Cape Town South Africa

Question for Paul. Will an I-squared-S out work into a normal HDMI in? I don’t know much of anything about I-squared-S.

Philips dacs are experts in creating a more immersive 3D holographic soundstage, a lot of songs has sounds that go to the listening position but average and crappy dacs only sounds like a 2D representation, so is more than hearing just behind the speakers and make them disapear, there is recordings like sound like Atmos but in a natural way

I feed my Tidal into a small Triangle AIO streamer controlled by wifi from an old Sony tablet. The Triangle AIO outputs digital via Toslink to Chord Mojo 2, which in turn outputs via RCA to an Atoll AM100 power amplifier. Speakers are B&W CM8. Since Atoll power amp has no volume control, I use a volume feature in the Triangle AIO streamer along with volume control inside Mojo2. The magic that this setup delivers makes me fulfilled completely.

What ever you use and are happy with is the best. For me that is I2S on short (3" to 4") coax connections inside a streamer/DAC as they originally were intended. I use UFL connectors but SMA would be better. Using a single board computer to eliminate USB was a step in the right direction. It acts as the player while the user interface is elsewhere on the network. Typically my phone or a laptop. To be clear, all these items are very low impact that you struggle to hear. More engaging and toe tapping realism than hearing a problem or a solution.

I have most of the voices in front of the speakers and rest is spread out. On all sides

Tube dac are best with coaxial

We Can Wire a Entire House without Running Any Cable Anymore From Signal to Power Source To All The Switches No Cable for All Your Entertainment Needs No Cable is Necessary The Technology is Here We Have Got To Move Forward Not Backwards

We Can Wire a Entire House without Running Any Cable Anymore From Signal to Power Source To All The Switches No Cable for All Your Entertainment Needs No Cable is Necessary The Technology is Here We Have Got To Move Forward Not Backwards

And The Guy who Buys Gold Plated Speaker 🔈 Wire Has Got To Have His Head Examined

Let’s See I Need a Low Impedance XLR To a Female RCA To a BNC To a Male Y-Splitter To a Pin Flipper To a C/USB To a 1/4” Mono To A High Definition Video Cable With Phantom Power….This Is All Nonsense We Don’t Need Cable Anymore That Sounds Funny Yet We Don’t Even Need Cable To Get The Ultimate NFL Sports Package The Technology Is Here Yet As Long As We Continue To Buy All This Cabling It Gives The Answer Man a Job

Not Intentionally Trolling It Just Seemed That Way I Just See How Cabling Anything Is So Obsolete With The Technology We Have Now Cabling Is Just Not Necessary For Anything Anymore We Can Wire a Entire House Without Any Wire All The Switches To All The Appliances No Longer Have To Be Hard Wired To a Power Source or Signal Running Between Walls I Know It’s Silly Yet The Technology Is Here And I Was Just Saying No Am Not Trolling There Will Be No Conduit For Wire No More Worrying About Low Impedance Cable or Balanced Cable or Any of That…Not Now Yet Soon Our Homes Will Be Running on a Hydrogen Fuel Cell That Will Be a Module That Will Pull Out and Put In Your Car And Questions Like Unbalanced or Balanced Cabling Blows My Mind I Guess Some Of You Guys in The Mysterious World of CZcams Still Hammer 🔨 Nails With a Rock 🪨

🖤the miniscule percentage of alpha echelon purists, eschew "streaming" 😆 ♣..it's a thing ✌& ♥

Yes have audioquest cables all dragon. Dragon is all silver. The difference is shielding internally and how they cables are made with the strands. Lower lines are copper, then go up to copper/silver, then all silver. For DAC streamer I use WEL signature cables. You are talking 100k in wiring just about even at a discount. The Dragons took awhile to break in. They start a little bright being all silver but then rolled off nicely. For most the all copper to copper/silver will give a noticeable improvement. When people ask a question they need to first look at their budget for their system as there are different remedies available at various levels. Some audiophiles upgrade over 30 to 40 years of time to build their ultimate system.

Bluetooth Audio Streaming is Better Than any Balanced or Unbalanced Cable It’s Very Simple Bluetooth Puts Out Over One Million Base-2 Binary Numbers Per.Second….With That Information Who Needs a Cable Balanced or Unbalanced

Neglecting to mention USB seems a big oversight, as it's a cable type a great many of us use to connect our streamer to our DAC?

I looked for USB DAC's and see there are cheaper alternatives from Fiio. K1 and KA1. Would you notice any difference on these devices comparing to Audioquest Dragonfly?

This is a complex task to answer... If we strictly talk about digital signal from streamer to DAC there are a lot to discuss and Paul was just touching the subject. You may want to pay attention where the clock is located, because that changes depending of format. USB and I2S = clock in DAC. Opt, Coax and AES = clock in streamer? Does this matter and will a higher class DAC handle incoming clock data better even if you have a lower class streamer sending a all-in-all digital data stream, let say by a coax cable?? What about power supply and its potential to lower the noise floor? This can go on and on. Make your own tests and trust your ears?! No, that is to hard - just read compromised "reviews". Cheers!

What about a toslink with multiple glass fiber optic strands?

Data is data and the cable needs to be standard compliant, thus you won’t have data errors, but I prefer a single clock master in the DAC managing the D/A conversion precisely and use asynchronous data transfer from source to DAC. USB C can do that job of the final link between streamer and DAC. I don’t like having multiple oscillators trying to act as clock master for the data flow and PLLs trying to make it sync (e.g. yielding jitter issues). If my music is originating from some Amazon data center stored on some hard disk drive the hard disk containing my music track is read asynchronously and ideally the music data is transferred to the DAC itself all asynchronously where the samples can be buffered. This asynchronous pulling method is the superior way of the future. So one additional concern is that you don’t want to introduce any sample rate conversion and your DAC needs to run in the native format of the track. Methods of pushing the data from the source via TOSLink, SPDIF or I2S aren’t true to the idea of a single clock master (DAC) and running the stream asynchronously. USB C is in itself not galvanic isolating but there are ways to avoid that being a problem.

What does an I2S output plug into? The connector is an HDMI-style connector. I see that. But what's at the other end? I just looked at PS Audio preamps on the website, and I don't see where they have an HDMI-style input. Am I just not seeing it?

Lol it called hight speakers lol I'm referring to atmos sound

This video is useful to me as I'm trying to get the best sound out of my computer and do have a USB to ext dac that has the rca and tossing or fiber optic

What is the format that PCM/DSD data is sent over a normal HDMI link? -I know that HDMI will carry an encrypted Dolby True-HD or DTS Master Audio signal in up to 8-channels at 24-bit 192KKHz for a DAC to decode. -As well as the same bitrate in uncompressed PCM -Also 6-Channel SACD DSD-128 Pretty sure it doesn't use the SPDIF back end, but can't confirm... Not that it 'really' matters (other than to know.) No-one is complaining about the audio quality from SACD or BluRay Pure audio over HDMI. If you're concerned about ground loops use a $30 AUD optical fibre HDMI 2.1 cable.

The difference I hear going from my streamer box through my amp is HUGE/UGE depending on whether or not I'm using my rca interconnect (audioquest incidentally!) or a toslink cable, BUT using the toslink also switches the dac to use the amplifier's internal one rather than the streamer's dac. So it's difficult to tell whether or not the dac or the cable is having most influence on my preference of sound, but the toslink route is massively better than the rca route. The sound is so much more transparent and airier, to the extent that when I switch to rca (I can have both cables connected at the same time so its really easy to switch them mid track) it sounds like the speakers are being muffled, the difference is that apparent. I had been listening via the rca for many years, and purely out of curiosity tried the toslink connection as I got a cable with a new TV, and I was truly staggered at the improvement in sound (to my ears). If your amp/dac/streamer can all connect via toslink, try it out, but be aware of which dac is being used in the chain if you have multiples... I'm not sure what dac would be used if for example you have a CD player connected to an amp which has an internal dac.

Is there a specific audioquest XLR cable with best price to performance ratio?

USB ??! How come is RCA and AES mentioned but not USB ?

I love my Soundlink mini, it’s an awesome speaker, battery could be better but for its size the quality and bass are great. Not been so impressed with the bigger stuff.

Cool, knowledge sharing as usual is great.

FIRST! Paul, this is a great video!

I have a souped up Schumann Resonance Generator that allows sound to encapsulate around me with the glory of clear holographics. I still need a couple more weeks of break in to really know what this will really do. But, music sounds clean and I can capture incredible amounts of depth, texture and layering. My components are all tubes and all cables are silver. I’m checking that song, Radioactivity, one minute in from the second track. The pshhhh sound seems to be in front of that beat on the right hand side.

He admits buying spkrs, that others rave about💩, he needs to audition & assess every component, for his own tastes. I spent $50K last year, assembling my “end game” system. Not only does it excite me, it sometimes scares me, with its frightening realism🔊😱😂😎.

LOL... it is adorable how many people dispute what the maker of a product suggests about it 😅 Anyway... To the dismay of some, 100 hrs of burn in for the R2R Denafrips DACs is recommended by the maker. And in my experience it did change at maybe 80 hr and now at more than 200 sounds magical with the Sprout 100 😊

🙋‍♂️PAUL,JUST NOW LISTENING 👂…AND I LOVE 💕 YOUR CHAIR 🪑 AND THE 🌎 GLOBE …I HOPE TERRY WILL LET YOU KEEP THEM 😅💚💚💚

Julian sounds like actors when TV first went 4K. Viewers could see actual skin defects. In the end, it just made characters more relatable.

I was hoping to give us a technical review or advice, it turns out to be a human rights lesson, thanks anyway.

Listen to some of the recordings that the phenomenal guitar player Marcin has put out ! Soundstage and acoustics are mind blowing in my opinion.

Short Reverb times on your Reverb Plugin /or Hardware will put Performers forward . Set Larger Reverb times/Larger rooms on that effect unit will put the performer back.

I have experienced this sort of effect with my modest setup and I'd attribute these mostly to wall reflections, especially when dipole speakers play into the room, with aggressive toe-in, while the rear beam bounces of the side wall. But not only with dipoles, speakers that cross fire in front of the listener may cause reflections from the opposite walls, in places where you'd not expect reflections, so they're likely not acoustically treated. Finally, by mixing some signals out of phase across channels, sound engineers achieve unusual spacial effects.

Just wondering what anybody’s take on 3D sound is. Apparently Queen did a few songs this way

Thank You.

Sound can basicly sound like it comes from anywhere in the room. Even beside and behind you. It can sometimes sound like you have surround sound from 2 channels

Or just build a solid internal cabinet for it... Many do that. But I don't think it's really any huge benefit or more would do it since it would not be a big effort or cost at all.

best video ever, talk more , more often paul !!

Where’s the server Paul? 2024 and still waiting