u/dskerman

you'll want to buy a calibrated mic like the umik and run some sweeps at your listening position in order to determine what issues are present.

sloped ceilings are often good because you don't just have a single reflection distance so there are less consistent standing waves across the room

Welcome to the big leagues

generally you don't want the sub right near the main speakers for stereo listening either because you want it at the best spot for making even bass in your room and that usually isn't where your mains are positioned.

The wavelengths produced by the sub are so large that it can be pretty far away from your mains before you run into any negative effects because of the distance.

it works best if you use something like a frequency sweep from 20-200hz or a walking bass line which covers at least down to 40hz. Ideally you will find a spot where the volume of the sweep or walking bass line stays constant and there aren't certain frequencies or notes where you hear it noticeably louder or quieter.

Usually a corner or about 1/3 of the way off the corner on your front or sidewall or at the midpoint of your front or sidewall are close to the best spot in a lot of rooms because those positions tend to excite a lot of room modes at once so you don't just have one large hump or dip in your response but instead get a bunch of smaller dips/humps. The other location which can work well is a sub right near the listening position but that can be challenging in a lot of rooms because of furniture or cable routing

have you tried replacing the tubes? It's possible that the cathodes are wearing out and they are taking longer to get warm and emit enough electrons.

those tubes are pretty cheap to replace with a good set from tube depot.

If not I've really liked both the ifi zen and schiit mani. I think the zen is a touch better personally but both are great.

it shouldn't make much difference. Mono grooves will only have left and right variations with no up and down variations. The stylus tip in the groove isn't necessarily different for a mono vs a stereo cart, the difference is in the way the magnet structure is setup in the cart

There is minor benefit from playing back using a true mono cart because it won't pick up any extraneous up down movement introduced by rumble, pressing defects or debris in the groove, but the benefit is usually pretty minor.

1) yes it's mainly different mastering. The discs also use a different material for the reflective layer so they should have lower errors but in practice it probably doesn't make much difference.

2) yes if you rip to alac it will be the same bits that were present on the disc. However all playback sources are not equal (computers for instance often have very noisy usb outputs with a lot of jitter)

3) They either use slightly different materials for the disc construction or some of them like xrcd pack 24bit data into a 16bit disc but require special hardware in order to take advantage of it (also 24bit vs 16bit is basically meaningless for playback and only really matters during the recording/mastering process so I wouldn't focus on it very much)

4) There is no hard and fast rules. Usually I find that audiophile reissues are preferable but it varies depending on the specific album.

5)Your speakers are probably the weakest link and you will get the by far the most bang for the buck doing an upgrade there. Also adding on a subwoofer (rsl 10e is a great affordable option) can make a large difference when using smaller bookshelf speakers

what do you mean by weird? The axis are different on both charts but they look pretty similar when you account for that. I don't think that spectral cutoff value is correct because you can see content above that frequency

just to elaborate a sub crawl is when you put the subwoofer at your listening position and play either a low frequency sweep or a walking bass line that gets to the lowest registers and then you crawl around and listen for the spot that the bass volume is the most even across the sub frequency range.

then when you have found the spot you like you can put the sub in that spot.

Generally good starting points to try are in a corner, on the front wall about 1/3 of the way off the side wall or at the midpoint of the front or sidewall.

because of how different every room is it's very hard to predict the best spot even with room modeling software.

also you generally don't need to worry about furniture or other things in the way of the sub as sub frequencies are so large they pass right through most objects. Mine for example has the best response with the driver facing directly into the wall 1/3 on my front wall about 1/3 of the way off the side wall.

there is no one answer to questions like this. There are way too many implimntation details one would need to also specify in order to make a determination.

Even your comment about a torodial transformer isn't always the case. People like benchmark audio would argue that their switching power supply results in way better voltage regulation and lower noise than they could accomplish with a linear power supply.

all it's doing is adjusting the PEQ filters. If you really want to use an llm you can just ask any llm to give you a set of filters with frequency, gain and Q and program those filters into your adi-2. The luxsin just makes it a little easier.

However, I would recommend just learning how to use your PEQ and you shouldn't really need an AI to help you tweak things.

I've never tried the valhalla. My favorite headphones are all planars which I just didn't think would be a good match for the valhalla.

Before I had the lyr I had the asgard and a vali 2 and I preferred the vali so that's why I went to the lyr.

After the lyr I would up building the Bottlehead S.E.X. speaker and headphone amp and that thing is the most beautiful sounding amp I've ever listened to. Highly recommend if you aren't too scared off by the soldering (it really isn't too hard with just a little practice)

https://bottlehead.com/collections/headphone-amplifiers/products/sex-4-kit-for-headphones-speakers

with my schiit lyr headphone amp I found the psvane 6sn7 was nicer than the stock or the electro harmonix but I haven't tried out a sylvania

it's a really mixed bag. Normally the actual artists don't have anything to do with the atmos versions. In general there seem to be a lot of issues with recessed vocals on a lot of atmos mixes and a lack of instrument cohesion.

there was just an article on headphonesty earlier today about how terrible a lot of the mixes are and how the quality varies a lot even within a single artists catalog. https://www.headphonesty.com/2026/05/producers-warn-apple-music-dulling-setting/

I have the 1229q so it might not be the same but that does look a little funky to me. Thankfully it looks like it doesn't have any horizontal motion by the time it hits the platter but if it did that would cause a lot of extra wear on the stylus connection.

here's the service manual https://archive.org/details/dual-cs-601-service/page/12/mode/2up

I'm not sure what the adjustment would be but I bet there's something you can tweak which will fix the location of the stylus to get rid of that weird hitch.

I would try lubricating the bearing using some sewing machine oil.

If that doesn't work you can replace the spindle/bearing but it does require some very simple soldering.

https://www.audio-technica.com/en-us/svp-703-f703-253

you can get a cheap iron for around $50 and this is a pretty easy job even for a beginner.

If you change your mind they are on sale on audio advisor right now

https://www.audioadvisor.com/demo-qup

A synonym's just another word for the word you want to use..

That most likely hasn't done much damage. Styluses are usually good for at least a few hundred hours.

Might want to look into getting one of those cue up devices that automatically raise your tonearm if you forget.

They fit on a lot of tables

Please stop spreading nonsense about dems cheating primary winners. Regardless of superdelegates Bernie was behind in the primaries even just with pledged delegates from the actual primaries.

Hillary was closer to Obama in 2008 than bernie was to hillary in 2016 and she didn't claim they stole the election from her. Even Bernie doesn't claim that but random people online are just so certain that it wasn't fair.

You are spreading right wing propaganda which is still helping to divide the left to this day

I would totally agree that filters are audible I'm just not convinced that's actually because of the ultrasonic content.

Most filters introduce some changes to the audible band unless they are way above 20khz and very slow.

Personally I think that's why some people prefer high resolution files because the lpf used is way farther outside the audible band.

It's a super tweeter

Where it's sitting is not really ideal as it's gonna diffract off the top of the box and it's so far from the acoustic center of the other drivers that it probably is introducing comb filtering depending on exactly where you sit

Generally you want to aim them up toward the ceiling or back toward the wall behind the speaker. That way they add to the room ambience and increase the treble energy in the room without directly interacting with the main sound from the speaker.

My current Maggie's are 2.7qrs but I've heard their ribbon models and always thought the highs were too disconnected from the rest of the panel

Check out a spectogram of a high res track above 20khz and get back to me on that

There's one study in Japan in which they claimed an increase in alpha waves.

But everyone who has tried to replicate the results has failed to find any evidence of impact of ultrasonic frequencies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_effect

i would just listen to both and see which you prefer

First pressings can sound better but you're still playing the luck of the draw with how worn the actual stamper was when they pressed your specific copy of the record.

The last record off a stamper from the first press is gonna sound worse than a copy on a repress that was near the start of the stampers life.

Also depending on the pressing plant the represses could be straight up better across the board if the og was pressed in one of the crappy ones