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Software: Macos sonoma, Logic pro, music, vlc
Hardware: U-Phoria UMC1820 -> Adam T8V, ATH-M50, SPC HP140
I only listen to music, sometimes i process music too


Software: OpenBSD + music player daemon (music) or mpv (video)
Hardware: Infinity Alpha 5 + Sony STR-DB790
Sound demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pkv-QqQjMVRs4Pya32fwjSmSRb3DdtiY/view
I use this setup to listen to music or video on a desktop PC.

GRUNDIG CDP 410 and F&D F550X
Sound demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yZlWz5rsFLCFhCKz78mWM5Ky1BnIgF7t/view
I use this setup to play CD collections.

To record audio on PC I use Trust GXT 259 Rudox.

First sound example is not good. low end only. There are no higher frequencies at all.
Same thing about the second example.
Too much of such a timbre would have a bad effect on health.
How can you enjoy it?
 
I keep wanting to try other music playback options but have kept things simple so far. I tend to just use my iPhone where I have 6500 songs saved as ALAC files. Using Apple's Camera Connect I am able to bypass the iPhone DAC and use the DAC in my Anthem STR Preamp. May not be the focus of this thread but I also really enjoy spinning vinyl.

I am doing more video and need to step up my audio recording options. Nikon Z 9 and Inspire 2.

I don't stream but my wife does. She doesn't use the system for steaming much but I keep wanting to try. Using my MacBook Pro or even my PC over the network is another option on my to-do list. Hopefully I'll eventually get around to it.

Anthem Room Correction (ARC), does a great job with both the stereo speakers and duel subwoofers.

STR_DAC_Stereo_Room.jpg
 
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My main listening setup is my 2.2-channel HiFi.
  • Speakers are Lii Song F-15, 15" Full Range Speaker Driver open baffle design built by a woodworking friend of mine based on the Decware design.
  • Amps are 2 Schiit Vidars in monoblock (400 watts in this config)
  • Preamp is a Schiit Freya S
  • Streamer is a Cambridge Audio CXN V2
  • Turntable is a TEAC TN-300
  • Not shown are 2 Klipsch R-120SW Subwoofers
IMG_0085.JPG
IMG_0086.JPG

PXL_20240531_191552910~2.jpg
 
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Logitech Z623 2.1 speakers (great) on my Mac Mini running iTunes or whatever it's called now. Three generations of SanDisk (clip style) mp3 players (great) with various budget headphones. The best being a 30-year old pair of Sony MDR-7506 with replacement pads.
 
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My main listening setup is my 2-channel HiFi.
  • Speakers are Lii Song F-15, 15" Full Range Speaker Driver open baffle design built by a woodworking friend of mine based on the Decware design.
  • Amps are 2 Schiit Vidars in monoblock (400 watts in this config)
  • Preamp is a Schiit Freya S
  • Streamer is a Cambridge Audio CXN V2
  • Turntable is a TEAC TN-300
View attachment 2409793View attachment 2409794
View attachment 2409701
Those speakers are absolutely gorgeous; quite lovely, in fact.

Actually, I love the warmth of the wood - and the fact that it is a natural product with wonderful resonance; what type of wood was used to craft them?
 
Those speakers are absolutely gorgeous; quite lovely, in fact.

Actually, I love the warmth of the wood - and the fact that it is a natural product with wonderful resonance;
Ironically speaker manufacturers will go to huge inreasingly-expensive lengths to prevent the resonances from wooden speaker encosures impacting the sound of the drivers. Just so that the-then acoustically-controlled cabinets can more-accurately reprodce the sound of instruments made from wood (and other materials) that naturally-resonate. I totally get it, but hifi is definitely a funny animal in that respect.
 
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Ironically speaker manufacturers will go to huge inreasingly-expensive lengths to prevent the resonances from wooden speaker encosures impacting the sound of the drivers. Just so that the-then acoustically-controlled cabinets can more-accurately reprodce the sound of instruments made from wood (and other materials) that naturally-resonate. I totally get it, but hifi is definitely a funny animal in that respect.

Speaker Manufactures have some limitations due to weight, cost, profit margin, etc. and while they have the tools to model optimal speaker design and construction relative to budget, a Do-It-Yourself design doesn't have the same size and weight constraints. The exception is the design must be basic enough that a home builder can assemble the pieces with general wood building tools.

I’ve built my DIY speakers based on North Creek Music founder George Short’s Cabinet Philosophy. He used to publish a small NCM Cabinet Handbook. The speakers tend to be extremely heavy and would not be practical for speaker manufactures to build and ship except for the very high end speakers.

Both MDF and Baltic Birch are used. Since they have different density, sound velocity and damping characteristics the resonances in one layer will not match the other. This may not be as important with subwoofer drivers alone. The front and rear panels are laminated by gluing the ¾ inch Baltic Birch and ¾ inch MDF together.

MDF is used for the 4 sides and Baltic Birch for the bracing. Cross braces are glued to the cabinet back and side walls, spacers are glued to the side walls and cross braces creating both a matrixed pattern of I Beams that stiffen the front and back of the enclosure and a series of T-Beams that stiffen the enclosure walls. The Handbook goes in to more detail about panel bracing, panel resonances, panel damping, material, shape, and other design considerations well beyond my level of expertise but they have served me well as a general guide.

I add hardwood to all sides, mostly for cosmetics but it adds rigidity. (1/4 inch to the sides and back, 1 ½ inch to the front. This results in stiffer front and rear baffles that are only slightly wider than the subwoofer frame resulting in a narrow baffle with short, easier to control panel resonance wavelengths. An example of my most recent project, a pair of Scan Speak 32W 4878T 13 inch subwoofers in 1 1/2 cubic foot sealed enclosures that are now used in the family room.

Scan_Speak_32W_4878T_collage1.jpg
 
Something a little different. This is my setup for silent practice, and band rehearsals at home. I play at different churches in my location... and 99% of the churches are ampless/silent stage. So I got rid of all my amps, and play through a digital mixer at churches and at home.

  • Top Rack is Behringer X32 Rack
  • Middle Rack is my IEM (Sennheiser G4) and Instrument (Sennheiser EW-D Cl1) Wireless system... which is the main rack I take with me to play.
  • Bottom Rack is the digital stage box.
  • Controlled and mixed with an iPad and Mac Mini M2. The iPhone is playing the setlist through a multitracks iOS app called Playback. Interfaced with the X32 separates the instruments stems into different faders/channels on the mixer... where I can mix, pan, peq, mute, etc....

homemusicrig.jpg


Since I mostly play ampless, I only use custom molded IEM's:
  • Right - 64 Audio A12t
  • Left - Alclair Tours (my back ups)

64A12t_Alclair.jpg


You would think what's fun about playing with just IEM's... because you can't feel the music. That's one reason why I didn't like about going ampless on stage in the beginning. IEM's on stage is the norm now, so I play with a Bassboard with transducers mounted on it to feel the music.

bbrd.jpg


What's nice about a digital mixer is I can route certain instruments to different mixbus's. I have the drums and bass going to the bassboard, so I can feel my bass playing and the kick drum. It feels like playing on a loud stage, but at lower volume... saving my hearing... and not bothering anyone in the house.
 
I've updated my hardware setup, and I think I will leave it at that, if that can ever be said! Still lusting after some more guitar pedals, but I can have quite a lot of fun with this lot! I mostly make pretty poor electronic music, but I've been getting back into playing my guitar, quite out of practise, and need to learn a lot more...but I'm good at making noise! Recently got a Walrus Audio Fable pedal, only used it once so far with a clean guitar tone for ambient stuff, I'd like to see what it does to a heavily distorted sound.

IMG_0722.jpeg
 
My gear is the same 2 posts above, but I hated my setup. I kept hitting my bass headstock against the wall, hard to use my pedalboard since was on a small table, and rotating the screen for mixer interface wasn't a good idea. Last, cable management wasn't great, so that gave me the excuse to rearrange my setup. I'm very happy with my rearranged setup now...

Pedalboard is where it should be... on the floor. I don't have to rotate my screen, and I have access to all my computer keyboards and monitors. I have a bad case of OCD when it comes to cable management... which is why I went all wireless for instrument and IEM's. Playing and work space is nice and clean now.

cablemgnt_offc.jpg
 
My gear is the same 2 posts above, but I hated my setup. I kept hitting my bass headstock against the wall, hard to use my pedalboard since was on a small table, and rotating the screen for mixer interface wasn't a good idea. Last, cable management wasn't great, so that gave me the excuse to rearrange my setup. I'm very happy with my rearranged setup now...

Pedalboard is where it should be... on the floor. I don't have to rotate my screen, and I have access to all my computer keyboards and monitors. I have a bad case of OCD when it comes to cable management... which is why I went all wireless for instrument and IEM's. Playing and work space is nice and clean now.

cablemgnt_offc.jpg
this is one lovely setup. I don't do any real music production at home. I just write only demos using Jackson guitar, Scarlett USB and Logic Pro, and then the base demo is processed at professional studios.
 
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My gear is the same 2 posts above, but I hated my setup. I kept hitting my bass headstock against the wall, hard to use my pedalboard since was on a small table, and rotating the screen for mixer interface wasn't a good idea. Last, cable management wasn't great, so that gave me the excuse to rearrange my setup. I'm very happy with my rearranged setup now...

Pedalboard is where it should be... on the floor. I don't have to rotate my screen, and I have access to all my computer keyboards and monitors. I have a bad case of OCD when it comes to cable management... which is why I went all wireless for instrument and IEM's. Playing and work space is nice and clean now.
Regarding going wireless on instruments, you don't have problems with latency? I don't even use wireless headphones for guitar playback because of latency. I use only wired for recording, but for editing I use wireless ATH headphones (audio technica)
 
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Regarding going wireless on instruments, you don't have problems with latency? I don't even use wireless headphones for guitar playback because of latency. I use only wired for recording, but for editing I use wireless ATH headphones (audio technica)
I think we both have different applications on how we use our sound gear personally. I use my gear for mainly live, rehearsals, running through songs at home in silence. I'll record just to hear my technique to help me improve, and learn to be more creative. A lot of the songs we do have available tracks that I play through an app... that separates all instruments/vocals in separate stems through my digital mixer, so I enjoy playing alone at home with the musicians that actually played in the recordings... minus the instrument I'm playing... in a stereo mix.

As for your question on wireless gear and latency:

When I was in the market for my digital and wireless gear, latency was always on my mind in my research. Professional sound engineers would like to keep latency below ~7ms when it comes to digital and wireless gear, so that's what I was shooting for. Anything above 7ms can lag when playing... but you don't really hear the effects of latency till around 10-11ish ms.

Most of the places I play at have digital mixers... which is similar to my X32 Rack at home. The digital mixer alone has around ~.8ms of latency added in the equation. I also use an HX Stomp digital modeler pedal that add's another ~1.8ms of latency. That puts me at around 3ms of latency excluding my wireless gear.

As for wireless, the best sounding gear are digital so I was picky when it came to a wireless instrument system. I went with a digital Sennheiser EW-D Cl1 Instrument wireless which had pretty low latency of 1.9ms. In total (including my digital mixer and pedal), that put's me at around ~5ms of total latency... which equates to like standing 5 feet from your amp... which is average on a live stage performance with a back line.

For my IEM's, I went with an "analog" Sennheiser G4 IEM wireless system with 0 latency. The trade off going analog is there can be "noise" floor hiss. I don't notice the hiss unless I'm really listening for it... but it's NOT noticeable when playing music. That is an acceptable trade off for me... at least for now. As digital gets better in features, sound, and latency, I will upgrade because digital does sound better, and the direction to go moving forward.
 
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I think we both have different applications on how we use our sound gear personally. I use my gear for mainly live, rehearsals, running through songs at home in silence. I'll record just to hear my technique to help me improve, and learn to be more creative. A lot of the songs we do have available tracks that I play through an app... that separates all instruments/vocals in separate stems through my digital mixer, so I enjoy playing alone at home with the musicians that actually played in the recordings... minus the instrument I'm playing... in a stereo mix.

As for your question on wireless gear and latency:

When I was in the market for my digital and wireless gear, latency was always on my mind in my research. Professional sound engineers would like to keep latency below ~7ms when it comes to digital and wireless gear, so that's what I was shooting for. Anything above 7ms can lag when playing... but you don't really hear the effects of latency till around 10-11ish ms.

Most of the places I play at have digital mixers... which is similar to my X32 Rack at home. The digital mixer alone has around ~.8ms of latency added in the equation. I also use an HX Stomp digital modeler pedal that add's another ~1.8ms of latency. That puts me at around 3ms of latency excluding my wireless gear.

As for wireless, the best sounding gear are digital so I was picky when it came to a wireless instrument system. I went with a digital Sennheiser EW-D Cl1 Instrument wireless which had pretty low latency of 1.9ms. In total (including my digital mixer and pedal), that put's me at around ~5ms of total latency... which equates to like standing 5 feet from your amp... which is average on a live stage performance with a back line.

For my IEM's, I went with an "analog" Sennheiser G4 IEM wireless system with 0 latency. The trade off going analog is there can be "noise" floor hiss. I don't notice the hiss unless I'm really listening for it... but it's NOT noticeable when playing music. That is an acceptable trade off for me... at least for now. As digital gets better in features, sound, and latency, I will upgrade because digital does sound better, and the direction to go moving forward.
this is a very serious approach! I can only laud :)
 
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  • Speakers: Ino Audio i14 (tops, handling 80–20000 Hz) + infraX-6 (bottoms, handling 80 Hz and below, way way below).
  • Active crossover: Ino Audio cr80s
  • Preamplifier: Marantz NR1510
  • Power amplified: Emotiva XPA-5
  • Disc player: Poineer UDP-LX500
  • NUC with Roon server installed.
 
Updated my music setup again... after my 2 posts above... 3rd times a charm? probably not... haha

I needed more space in my home office for rehearsals, or just having friends over to play music. I wanted a rolling rack... but not a gig rack that I would put in a car, or travel with... which are too bulky for my office. A 12U Network rack with wheels would be perfect for home... but all I could find were racks with square holes.

I finally found a 12U Network rack that had 10-32 round tapped holes for music racked gear during the Amazon Black Friday sale ($50 less)...

It fit nicely under my desk, and easy to roll in the house if we want to rehearse or play music in a larger room if my office is too crowded.

musicoffice13dec24b.jpg

musicoffice13dec24.jpg

musicoffice13dec24c.jpg
 
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