2025 was sort of the year of slowly getting back into things for audio in general, I started the year with a leftover prism lyra 2, mass kobo 248, and a falling apart mysphere & esp950 with 0 desire to listen anymore. Outside of audio I didn’t really have many other hobbies that actually interested me, so I ended up somehow spending 2024 and early 25 getting back into keyboards and maybe got a bit too carried away again with it, but it was and still is fun, but it was also a realization that nothing will ever have the same level of depth and meaning as audio for me as well. Lot of other things going on in my life at the time made it hard to get into any hobby too deeply anyways since it was just a general shakeup of most all aspects of my life. I think my interested in audio is coming back now though, and throughout 2025 it’s sort of come in 3 different phases, and they were all sort of “best buys” for different reasons. Sorry for not really following topic exactly but this is just how it went for me lol
Phase 1: Listening again
I feel somewhat elitist saying that I felt wholly unsatisfied with just the mysphere and koss, but that’s just how it was to me. My mysphere are so heavily used that they’re starting to rust on the top, have some wear that might impact sound on the earpads, and the headbands are falling apart, but the biggest killer for me is that they just sounded so underwhelming on the mass kobo and lyra that I couldn’t stand it. Don’t get me wrong they were fine and probably impressive enough to most, but just having heard what they can do before and listening to them in such a reduced state just gave me 0 enjoyment in comparison. I know some people are happy and satisfied with downsizing but man it just fucking sucks and I didn’t take it well at all lol (it wasn’t exactly my choice anyways so idk). Because of that, I ended up using the koss more, and they are great for just a general throw on and forget sort of headphone for my pc, nothing I had to think or worry about, and sounded good enough for me to not care. That in itself is a problem though, because almost all of my listening when I did decide to put on something was just background and just noise for whatever I was doing. Sometimes I’d stop and listen to the music but it felt distant to me and just detached from any sort of emotion. Not a knock on the koss, just a side effect of being jaded and other things going on. I also had no more servers or streamers or anything like that, and was limited with storage space on my local computer at the time along with constantly fighting linux for stable high quality playback and being unhappy with most player options, but I eventually got it usable and ended up with JRiver (being the best option I’ve tried, still have freezing issues though). It wasn’t a situation I wanted to continue, but at the same time I had 0 desire to do anything about after feeling so worn out and dejected.
That changed when I was able to get a HEKSE and HPA-1 from 2 very very good friends, hook it up, and finally start to get the sense of actually listening again. Sort of the perfect things to start back with, safe, familiar, and comfortable. No fuss, good sound without hassle, something I didn’t need to worry about. I had to force myself to do it at first, but I started to find myself actively skipping through tracks again to find things that interested me, checking a few artists for new releases, and spending the time to pull more music from disconnected drives back onto the computer. I also ended up further getting the desire to tune my computer for audio performance even more to try and get more out of this setup, but this also became a major distraction from the music itself so I eventually settled on the best I could do for the time being lol. Regardless though, I started to see the value of just sitting back and listening again, although it still felt more shallow than I was really hoping for with time. Not discontent, but also not really positive either. I was able to get an upgraded Norne cable (after many months of waiting lol) and that was a nice reminder that small tweaks were still noticeable and made a difference, but I also had myself stuck that it wasn’t worthwhile to mess with it further. I think a lot of my experience here was just marred by my mentality and the discomfort of drastic change, but this helped me overall get back into the mindset of caring and paying attention more, even if it didn’t feel necessarily satisfying at first. Talking with more forum friends really helped here too, in terms of getting past some bullshit and not letting myself get too discouraged or dragged down at first, and this was equally important if not more than the gear itself.
Phase 2: Recording diversion
When I ended up having to axe all my stuff, my recording gear was also lost in that too. I had collected a lot of rare mics, preamps, compressors, etc, and that was also extremely upsetting to see that wiped away. I had already sort of conceded that I wasn’t going to do any production work anymore after things really tailed off for my mastering on the side beginning with covid (as budgets got tight and people got paranoid, professional mastering is the first thing that gets cut), along with a realization that attempting to transition more from commercial/non music mastering into music would have significantly impacted my enjoyment of music as a hobby (the more I had done production work, the more I started to think of critical listening as a task rather than entertainment). Despite that, I still really enjoyed recording things around the house, for other people, or just having this stuff for some reason even if I wasn’t using it. I have a bunch of random field recordings, recordings of local venues groups, work from the past, and just me fucking around and experimenting with technique and equipment for the hell of it. It’s nice to have things that were actually used to make the music you listen to, even if you’re not using them at the moment. I am not creative nor artistic enough to make music myself, but I did really enjoy recording or putting the final touches on it, and considering I had no more gear and no more clients to do that with, I had given up hope of doing this as a hobby too. The thing is, I had plenty of things to record staring me right in the face, and it too me some time to realize. When I did, I quickly got addicted to recording my keyboards for fun, and eventually for publishing later on.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how I was really going to get back into recording, there’s so many routes and options, and I forced myself to make sure that what I would end up with would be the edge of reason for my situation, that I wouldn’t let myself go full overkill, and I would go into this with the goal of having something truly balanced and versatile, but also staying in line with the sentiment of sticking with known good quantities and low fuss options. That meant anything real vintage or tube was out, anything ultra high end or rare was out, anything super finicky or specialist was out as well. I will spare the rest of the thought process, I landed on going with Crane Song preamps and compressors, and having a modern recreation of a U87i made for me as well with a reskinned vintage capsule. I hadn’t realize Dave had passed, and this made tracking down CS gear more challenging, but after some waiting and putting feelers out, I was able to get ahold of them. Part of the decision was also getting something that I felt I had a more emotional connection with as well, rather than just something to do the task. I had met Dave a few times at various audio shows, and he was a really interesting guy (and the only person I’ve ever seen attend a trade show as a vendor with a Hawaiian button up and short shorts). We weren’t friends and didn’t interact much after those, but I had used his equipment enough to produce good results with clients, and talked enough to him to really feel his passion that it just felt like a fitting choice for myself, who was lacking passion. Working with a microphone designer on the 87 side was also cool, was able to have him spec it to basically almost original 87i sound with a few modern touches, and the result is 95% the way there of a vintage 87i at half the cost and much less hassle, was happy with that and it was something a bit unique to me. The Lyra was already one of the best desktop AIO interfaces you can get, so I didn’t have any qualms with that being used, and the result was very satisfying for the price. From there started months of playing around recording boards and experimenting, prepping my environment and honing a useless skill that seemingly 99% recording keyboards online don’t care about either, sort of going into unknown territory per se. A lot of previous recording knowledge was useful during this process, but I still learned new things about the challenges of properly recording things in the space that you’d actually use a keyboard, and also actually getting it to sound accurate to ear. During that process, I did find that maybe going with a vintage 87i wasn’t the best idea for a keyboard considering coloration and characteristics, so that gave me an excuse to get another known good quantity, a Josephson mic, and that drastically improved the quality and accuracy of my recording, but only when I was able to learn how to deal with the same problems I had before that were now just exaggerated by the new mic (it’s a real fussy sob for being a solid state LDC). I had also tried a few more audio tweaks like an Altor HISO isolator and some nicer mogami cabling and such, small but appreciable differences, but they were also mostly an attempt to solve noise issues that I wasn’t able to fix at the time, still progress, but not there yet.
Eventually when I got happy enough with the results, I had started uploading them to youtube just for fun, my builds aren’t really all that great, but my goal just ended up being to provide the most accurate and detailed sounding keyboard recordings out there. I haven’t really gotten there yet, there’s still more work to be done, but I already think I’ve gotten up there. In the same way almost all the large articles/pieces I’ve ever written about audio have started from the dissatisfaction in the lack of real information around a topic (along with a hint of spite toward those presenting disingenuous results as accurate and general dissatisfaction with the community at large), I ended up starting a mini article about how I record keyboards and what I’ve learned through the process, just a brain dump of what I thought needed to be said and touched on, things most people miss. It’s not really a guide (in the same way the shit list isn’t a tier list), but just rather my thoughts and ramblings on the concept as a whole, and my journey though it. It’s not something the mass mass majority of people in the hobby will care about, or even find, but it felt nice putting something out like that. I’m still working on it and refining it, along with looking to further improve my recording space and try out proper stereo recording in a way that most haven’t ever tried, but just waiting for the right chances to arise before jumping into that. Putting things out publicly like that with any sort of images or video was a big step for me, I’m now in a position where I’m able to do so, so I figured I should start small and take advantage of that. I will never shake the true paranoia I get from sharing anything like that online, but this is the most allowable degree I can do it with for now. No expectations (or desire) for that channel to take off, it’s just snapshots of my progression in the hobby, nearing completion to document where I am before most of it leaves, and to maybe provide some information on things that most people never see extensive thoughts on (the modern keyboard community is bad at providing actual information on things lately). At least this was written/created on a more positive note than the shit list or the final dac article was, as one of the underlying motivations for writing that was the desire to put a condensed version of most of what I knew about audio, as at the time of writing, I wasn’t confident I would be around much longer after that (which is also one of the reasons I have no desire to finish it, it feels depressing). This time was closure that was more on my own terms
Phase 3: Problem solving & listening rejuvenation
The later end of this year was an interesting one, I went into it with the goal of fixing some long running issues in my setup, but have come out with a renewed interest and appreciation for music, and the desire to work to restore my setup to my past standards (within my current means). I started by doing some cheap tweaks, taking an old server rack cart and moving all my audio gear away from sources of noise, experimenting with placement and cable routing, improving the ease of use and reliability of what I had, and so on. The most pivotal point was addressing power issues with my setup, I have had long term issues (documented in the power thread on here so I won’t waste time typing them here), but they were real problems that were slowly driving me nuts as each attempted fix either didn’t work, or didn’t do enough to resolve the problem to an acceptable degree. I had made up my mind and decided to bite the bullet and just spend the money to resolve it in the form of a power conditioner. I had gone though all the debating and landed on a Shuntata Hydra Triton v3, which at the time of purchase resulted in a wave of regret as I felt I had just suckered myself into overspending on an unknown variable when something like a PS P5 or similar would have likely “fixed” my issue for much less (and I would have known how it would react).
I got the Triton in, bought a rack shelf to put it with the rest of my gear (which annoyingly came damaged), and plugged it in (in a way that would bring a Shunyata engineer to tears, to a 20ft extension cable), expecting to no longer have any hum and for it to be marginally better. My first impressions were not positive, as while it reduced some of the physical hum of my CS gear, it didn’t fully reduce some of the hum from the Pass, and things sounded thin and compressed. After an hour or so, annoyed with myself, I went and did something else for the rest of the day and came back. When I did, it sounded like a whole new setup, and it made me seriously doubt what I was hearing. I had already had a pretty low sense of self trust lately with my senses, from being so fed up with the hobby and constant issues getting things to sound the way I wanted, from the feeling like I had become too detached from reality with my old setup (starting to wonder if it was all just falling for biases ASR style), and back and forth issues with mental stuff flaring up throughout the year, I just didn’t really think what I was hearing was real. I apologize for not commenting on anything on the forum, but I genuinely didn’t feel confident in anything I would say in terms of content or accuracy as continually bounced between states, but it’s not like I had much to comment on anyways. But things just kept sounding so much better, it’s been a few weeks I think and it’s still sounding as impressive as when I came back to it after the poor initial impressions. It feels like the missing piece to restoring true listening enjoyment, without realizing it I have had all my time sucked away just listening to any album I can, getting trapped in music and not getting anything else done, all I want to do is listen to music. I could go on about the sonic changes it made, things in the stage feeling more delineated and defined with greater accuracy (although a bit less width), sounds having more texture and tactility to them, more immediacy and tangibility, more definition and detail, more ability to expose the sound of the music itself and sound less homogeneous. It doesn’t really matter though how it really changed my setup to me, it’s now brought all my attention toward listening to the music and that’s what matters most to me right now, that’s the biggest change I could have hoped for in this system that I didn’t expect whatsoever. It makes me appreciate both music and what existing equipment I already have more, to the degree that it’s mostly reignited the passion in truly enjoying listening as a hobby again.
It also has a dedicated grounding block, which I’ve never experimented with in my own setup, so I gave that a try with some random server/electrical grounding cables and measured the resistance of the chassis for grounding points and selected them and tied them in. I was still skeptical at the time that any improvement would happen, but yet again small changes lead to big differences for me. I now got a better sense of rawness and further lack of defined character in the system, music that was more organic felt more organic, things more synthetic sounded more raw and artificial, a further increase in the ability to differentiate what I was listening to. I think I can credit this into increased desire in tweaks again now, I had initially been planning to improve my ADC/DAC or headphones, but now I feel compelled to focus on tweaking the small things again to really extract the most out of what I already have. The next thing I buy will likely be some power cables and fuses to be honest. It feels wrong, almost seems stupid, maybe things would be better spent on upgrading a critical component, but I think I’m just at the range of my setup where my time, energy, and resources would be best spent fine tuning what I have as that true next tier up is likely above my means for a bit.
All of this makes me regret not experimenting as heavily with power aside from what I had already done in my past setup, if the differences were this pronounced in my current setup, they would have been massive in my old, but I have to accept that what’s in the past will likely stay in the past. I can’t see myself ever really being able to reach or justify the level of setup in the past, but maybe that’s not really a bad thing. I should listen to my own past advice, I should shoot for a reasonable stopping point this time rather than trying to reach the final frontier and life encompassing journey that comes with it. I failed to really realize the extent of how consuming this hobby was for me, to the point where audio and work were the only things I ever really knew and did. I can’t let myself live like that anymore, so I need to work on properly finding a balance. It’s very hard for me, but I just need to push though and get better. What I’ve written here might seem like a shining endorsement for the Shunyata specifically, but I don’t really know if it was truly just the conditioner being that good, or that my problems were much more of a limiting factor than realized, or if it was just that final piece that pushed performance up by just enough to cross a mental threshold/barrier. Can’t really say without further experimentation, but also don’t really feel like getting in a totally different conditioner to confirm, I should focus on keeping what works, and changing what doesn’t, rather than trying different things for the sake of it.
This is likely beyond the initial purpose of the thread, I apologize for the wall of text, but I just felt like writing today, and I also felt like I maybe owed some sort of update or explanation on why I haven’t been around here much. I do really feel bad not having meaningfully contributed for what a few years now? I hope to improve that in the future and be more active as I continue to get back into things. I do have plans to upgrade listening, but I am also going to take things slower and more focused than last time
)! It is mostly an issue with the Bifrost and the diy Amp Camp Mini. Both get worryingly hot on days where the temp goes over thirty degrees Celcius and last year I turned them off and not using them between May and September. This year I swapped the Emotiva A-100 I have back in for two channel during the summer which is fine as long as I don’t touch the volume pot (it’s degraded) but I really notice the sound quality difference. I still have the Jnog V1 I can use but then I do have shortage of outputs.
