[MarkG509]

I'd love to A-B these to my trusty old FiiO X5 with Sennheiser HD-650's (at home) or IE8i's (when exercising). Hearing the sound-stage and subtle do-dads buried by lesser set-ups is a pet-peeve of mine.

A very important, perhaps dominant, factor in all of this is how the music was ripped/encoded. Except in my car, for which I did separate rips, I don't bother with MP3-320. For the X5, having 200 CDs ripped via WMA9 locks me in, until I can find a week or two to re-rip to a more modern lossless format.

I grew up on vinyl via my (crazy/rich) older brother's Class A/B stereo. I'm spoiled, and feel sorry for the people today that think MP3-120 is "good enough".

[mellavora]

You might be interested in building your own Class A amps. The sound is amazing.

See https://diyaudiostore.com/

https://www.diyaudio.com/community/

for details. Hobby-ist driven, fantastic stuff.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

You've no doubt double blind tested these claims?

[csdvrx]

> Sennheiser HD-650's (at home) or IE8i's (when exercising).

I prefer the 900N outside, and the 1000XM inside.

To exercise with some music, I'm waiting for good neckband headphones with active audio cancellation: ideally something like the Anker Soundcore Life U2 - same form factor and USB-C plug, but with LDAC, AptX HD and a quality at least on par with the Shure AONIC.

Yes I'm super picky :)

> Hearing the sound-stage and subtle do-dads buried by lesser set-ups is a pet-peeve of mine.

Oh so much this!! I'm hearing instruments that I hadn't noticed before! The first week, I thought it was in my head, because some of the tracks I've been listening to for years started sounding different!!

But no, the Sony is that good. Again, it's worth every dollar.

> I'm spoiled

Now I'm spoiled too :) I just can't forget how much better it made my favorite tracks!

TBH, the Sony has been my best purchase of these last few years: it has even rekindled my interest in music.

Right now I'm exploring "pop urbaine", a very interesting genre that I didn't even know existed.

My favorite tracks are inbetween EDM and Raeggeton, the best example being "On fleek" by Eva - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_eEW2Ioe-o (starts at 0:30)

I would never have expected I'd take a liking to french music, but here I'm! Thank you Sony!!

> A very important, perhaps dominant, factor in all of this is how the music was ripped/encoded.

This too!

I only use FLAC ripped from known-good sources like DDD audio CDs, but after reading a few things like https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/51326/spotting-a-f... and https://musicfans.stackexchange.com/questions/12545/original... I've been thinking about developing a "scoring" app that would basically do a spectrogram and look for suspicious banding to rate my CDs on a 0-10 scale.

> For the X5, having 200 CDs ripped via WMA9 locks me in, until I can find a week or two to re-rip to a more modern lossless format.

I recently re-ripped using a slot-in Apple Superdrive with Windows Media Player Classic running on Windows 11 set to auto-rip into FLAC.

I just worked as usual and every now and then swapped the CDs from 2 huge piles on the side of my desk.

> I'm spoiled, and feel sorry for the people today that think MP3-120 is "good enough".

Same lol