To me, it sounds like the perfect tube amp. It’s old, expensive, and confusing but I haven’t found anything else quite like it. One plugin I didn’t see mentioned that I really love is PSP’s Vintage Warmer 2. I generally avoid any kind of DSP on playback besides a 1 or 2 dB boost here and there using either the SoundSource’s built in graphic EQ or Fabfilter’s Pro-Q3 because I want to be able to judge what I’m hearing as objectively as possible and maintain perspective for my own work. Just read through this thread and it’s super interesting to see how people are implementing mixing plugins into playback! I am all for anything that makes music sound better to you. Hi I’ll have to steer clear of the deals thread because I’ve spent more than enough on DSP already haha.
Signal chain used: Google Play Music → Windows Mixer → FiiO K3 S/PDIF out → Focusrite S/PDIF in → REAPER DAW (VSTs) → Focusrite Line out → Headphone amp → Headphone But if one has 2 soundcards (DACs), there you go. Kind of physical cumbersome setup I would say.
But come on, one will be only playing with pretty much 2-3 knobs anyway. Reload the project, and another 30 minutes are granted – while settings are lost.
Software demo is worth of 30 minutes – under the caveat of preferences cannot be saved. From small to moderate boosts/cuts, sound was still very natural in my (still) limited tryouts. I suspect this VST also changes the spacious presentation too.Īlgorithm was well designed. V-shape your world without changing the characteristics of a headphone. Then I stumbled with this EQ I had forgotten in my downloads folder. While having an EQ discussion with some doors were open. (I cannot share the processed files due to IP laws, so this will be an in-person deal only). Results and details to be published in the event that I am able to conduct enough experiments post lockdown before I don’t care anymore (i.e. This is of academic interest to me, mostly due to being curious as to how much of dac, amp, tube or overall system “sound” (distortion, noise, harmonics, non-linearities etc.) is responsible for preference vs. some progressively more heavily processed re-masters. A lot of which is down to wanting to see how many people prefer the raw, unadulterated, originals vs.
The former is mostly for my own benefit/amusement the latter as a potential pre-cursor to a couple of local listening sessions to see “who likes what” and map that back to the kinds of processing involved and how that gets received. Re-mastering (not mixing - I don’t have track-level masters of anything you’d likely recognize) a handful of well known, well regarded, and musically worthwhile pieces with a variety of processes and effects applied. This is the bit that makes it relevant to THIS thread! This has meant bringing a fair amount of interesting hardware, such as limiters, compressors, harmonics and saturation processors (much of which is tube-based or has tube-driven core processing) and so on, home.Ĭomparing the hardware software based versions of these boxes - where both are available (e.g. With pending, extensive, travel and little time to make music anymore, I decided to permanently tear down my studio. The extra software, cost, need for (much) more powerful hardware, and the fact that “different” doesn’t necessarily mean “better” or “preferable” means that it has become something I use when evaluating DACs rather than something that has become part of my listening chain. Though not necessarily more or less so than, say, other OS/filtering solutions, nor necessarily more or less preferable.
And in that context I do find audible changes with some gear and settings, most notably true NOS DACs (the Holo Audio ones being the most obviously affected). In fact, I generally don’t use it for listening, either. native RAAT, unless down to the HQP/DAC interaction). enabling PEQ, but not applying a curve, remains bit-perfect end-to-end).Īs for HQPlayer … I don’t use it with Roon (no audible benefit vs. It’s provably transparent beyond the changes you deliberately apply (e.g. I will selectively use the Roon DSP features (mostly EQ and crossfeed) when I want EQ or an using a chain that has no native crossfeed capability for some material/mood/gear combinations.