Gadgetory

every day millions of people walk down the street listening for ordinary streaming services on ordinary headphones well recently with the launch of title the dream of high quality streaming audio is here and got me wondering what else can you do to improve your personal audio experience turns out quite a lot the challenge with high quality personal audio so you have an entire pipeline that you have to deal with and you have to fix every part along that pipeline to make sure that the highest quality sound is getting from the source material to your ears and that's where a service like title comes into play title offers uncompressed audio they give you a giant file that's many times larger than a file that Spotify audio would give you but the trade-off is that you get maximum clarity it's an uncompressed lossless file it is more expensive and then her face isn't as good as something like Spotify or RDO in fact it's downright bad in places but if you want a high quality streaming library with something the size of Spotify title is a no-brainer the next step in the pipeline is you need to find a way to turn that digital file into an analogue signal that the headphone can understand and that's where a digital to analog converter or DAC DAC is is sometimes known and an amplifier come into play now your laptop your desktop PC even your phone have these built in but as you can imagine they're not the highest quality components that's where external units come into play you can spend literally thousands upon thousands of dollars on these the sky is truly the limit this particular set that I have here only costs a couple hundred dollars but truly you can spend ten twenty thirty thousand dollars or more on these most of the money will go into the amp now I'm sure you've seen units with these glowing vacuum tubes on the outside some are enormous and yes these are all things you can buy this one isn't very big does have a tube in it believe it or not but you can buy very very large ones and it's very subjective this is probably one of the most influential parts in the entire pipeline in how your music will actually sound now the final part of the pipeline before the sound actually enters your ears is of course the headphones now the phones that I'm wearing here are Odyssey LCD X's that retail for about $1,700 now I I know your heart is stopping right now you don't need to spend this much to get a really good set of headphones and of course just like the amplifier it's a very subjective thing but you can spend just as much money as you want to and that's pretty much it as long as you address those individual pieces of the pipeline I guarantee you you're gonna get better quality sound I've done some blind tests here in the office everyone can tell the difference it's a real thing and we're seeing this up take an interest in high quality audio right now we have devices like Neil Young's pono coming out in the first quarter of 2015 and this year Sony player that just recently came out they're both focused on high quality audio you're on a fit spend a few thousand dollars to make any of this happen of course you can if you want to that's what audio files do there's an entire universe of ridiculously expensive hardware to buy if you have that kind of money but for instance instead of spending seventeen hundred dollars on these headphones you can spend $300 on these sony so you can buy $100 of Phyo headphone amp either way trust me your ears are going to thank you you