$3,100 for a plug.. ha,ha.. snake oil for "audiophiles"

There's a sucker born every minute

Streaming Spotify. No downloading.

Whatever that is.

You can’t plug the kind of headphones I’m talking about into an iPhone, you’ll have to have some sort of intermediate Doohickey. I’m not even sure the latest iPhones have a port for headphones.

$3100 is for the outlet. A good plug (with 1 meter of cable and a receptor end) will cost a little more.

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I have a pair of Focal Utopia. You have to really run them off of a headphone amp. Sennhieser 820 would be the other option because they are closed ear. My Focal heaphones are really accurate and amazing, but with the open ear design other people can hear the music. It might be annoying for them. Neither one would be considered portable because they really need an amplifier.

headphone amp that I'm using is an SPL Phonitor mini.

I like Sennheiser's amp/ headphone setups. You can save a bit of $$ and you know that they will sound well together, which is really what you want.

audiofiles, advice needed. I have been jonesing for a mac set up. Tube pre-amp, solid state amp and maybe some B&W 803's. Thoughts on that set up? Running my mid-'70's Yamaha set up right now with time windows.

audiofiles, advice needed. I have been jonesing for a mac set up. Tube pre-amp, solid state amp and maybe some B&W 803's. Thoughts on that set up? How large is the room and are there many windows, and what do you listen to? The room will play a large part in the final sound quality.

Thank You very much for the great advice!!!

I have been watching Mr. Vinyl Obsessive on You Tube and that started me thinking I needed to dig out my old turntable and tune it up. In the midst of Covid I spent a bunch (for me) of money on an Integra Surround sound system, and some Klipsch reference speakers and a powered sub to add to my old Technics. I have had lots of decent car audio over the years, but wanted something that would shake the house.

After doing some research online, I got replacement tone arm belts from Turntableneedlesdotcom. I found all the service manuals at vinyl engine forums, along with a bunch of info to do the work.

First I replaced the slipping belt for the tone arm.


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Then I installed the Ortofon 2M red you suggested.

The service manual gave specifications where the stylus should be from the base of the tone arm mount which was 50.5mm.
I used a protractor template I was able to download from Vinyl Engine to verify alignment at two locations .


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I also picked up a scale from amazon. My turntable has a really accurate adjustment weight... I set it to balance, then turned it to the 1.8 grams of force, and was off by .02... readjusted it using the scale.


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Put on a U2 Album that I really like.... Records have never sounded so good from my system. Only a little popping between songs.

Now to sit back and enjoy the music.



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Thanks again!

I dunno, these sorts of things are all easy, really. There are no wrong answers with good equipment is my experience.

Whatever makes you happy.

I've been a B & W fan forever and am currently on 804 Diamonds driven by a top line Integra receiver. Simple, really.

I bought Roon and just love moving through my 2+ TB library almost every day.

Makes me happy.

I have my music library PC based, top notch audio card sending analogue to receiver, and for "private times" break out my Sennheiser 800HD's.

No high end DACs or thousand dollar interconnects.

All this stuff is around $20 grand I suppose, but my set up would be scoffed at by many audiophiles as being meagre, particularly on the upstream side.

Good friend of mine is all about billions $ in Mac equipment, such as you are jonesing for.

I love his hardware but am just not a fan of his speakers.

For me, that is where the rubber hits the road. Speakers. Pick the speakers that make you happy - the rest is of little consequence i think...

I agree with Purrybonker, good components should sound good. What matters most is how it sounds to you. Speaker placement and room treatments are important too.

You could argue that room treatment combined with placement can make a mid-fi system outshine the very best gear. I would say it’s probably the most important piece of the puzzle. Far more than $3k wall outlets fed by cheap romex!

Hear ya. Speakers are the place where everything comes together. I remember in the day settling on a pair of Onkyo separates (Tuner/Pre and Amp) and then A/B'ing speakers. Could not afford the JBL L100's so settled for the 88's that I converted to 100's with their mid range kit. (my wife sold them at a garage sale for $50, ouch). Been listening to TimeWindows since 1976 and still love them. Placement is critical and you can adjust the sound by turning them or moving closer or further from the wall.

There is a set of 803S near me for a bit over $3k. Tempted.

My Yamaha M4 amp seems to be pumping along, thought one of my channel lights is out. CD player skips. Thinking of a streamer like BlueSound node 2.1. I think the Mac is just an aesthetic and ego thing.

Thanks for the thoughts.

Sending the woofers of my IRS Beta to Watkins for restoration.

and meanwhile, behind the wall, is standard 12/2 romex. Only fools buy into the "magic"

Is anybody else into IEM's and portable HiFi?

I've tried a few over the years but right now my Campfire Audio Honeydew's are getting almost daily use.
The "Oppo HA-2SE" is an older headphone amp but it's a keeper. :)

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The room is 90% of the sound.

I would bet that 90% of “audiophiles” have missed that point entirely.

Any recommendations for a shop to refresh and adjust my old Theta Data Universal transport?

iPhone (like most phones) don't really do a good job on headphones. Especially wired ones; most "better" headphones tend to be higher impedance - and usually more so the better they are. Anything more than 8 ohms, you'll be crushing it (in a bad way).

A small headphone pre-amp will help it out a lot; otherwise it'll start to sound very compressed/muffled, lacking detail & range. But a better source than a phone is a very good idea if you want quality. Even relatively cheap DAPs are typically better than a phone.

For over-the-ear headphones on a budget, hard to beat Grado Labs SR-80s (the official headphone of the Rock'n'Roll Hall Of Fame) or SR-125s. They're open backed (leak noise in both directions) but sound detailed and natural to me. My sound engineer ex really liked mine, and I had to buy another pair, because she was always using them... When the original pads begin to turn to dust, Sennheiser ear pads are more durable, cheaper and comfortable than Grado pads BTW...

For IEMs, I swear by Shure SE846s - having first worked my way through, and been quite impressed by, the SE215s and SE525s. Find the "black olive" size that fits you best, figure out how to insert and get used to wearing them; these give the very best sound isolation - and thus sound, especially bass response.

The SE846s are awesome. Massive sound isolation (37db, which is why musicians often wear them on-stage so they can play to click or hear cues over the monitors or the PA), true sub-woofer (with dedicated sound path) for real bass (you won't believe these are IEMs) and an additional 3 dynamic drivers. Detachable cables (MCX connector). And low enough impedance you can probably get away with driving them from a low-power/quality source, if you insist (phone DACs are really not impressive - and the last decent iPod DAC was the 5 or 5.5 generation iPod Video - the Classic and anything later are cheap junk in comparison).

I use SE846s at about half or two thirds the volume of lesser ear buds - they block all the external sound anyway, plus I hear all the detail I want/need. No need to run them loud - unless you just want to.

I run mine mostly with a Fiio X7 MkII portable hi-res DAP/DAC. Pretty much all of Fiio's range (cough, I have a few of these, too) grok just about any audio format. Switch them to DAC mode and plug them into your laptop with USB and you'll be amazed how much better the audio sounds with a decent DAC... The X7 accepts 2 SDHXC cards; my mobile collection is all 320kbs MP3 for portability and I can have 30,000+ songs in my pocket. I really can't tell the difference between cdparanoia/lame ripped/encoded hi-bitrate MP3s and lossless formats like AAC, OGG or FLAC - or even Orange Book WAV from the CD itself. I've tried, many times...

Used to only use one of many 3.5mm jack cables I owned (which all sound the same to me), bought a cheap 2.5mm balanced cable from Flea Bay "just because" (the AM3A amp module has balanced output) - to my surprise/delight, the difference was very noticeable. Louder, more detailed, more dynamic range and wider sound stage.

I hate tracing sources of hum and ground loops.

Found it!

Rant over