Industry News, Rumors, & New Releases 🤐

I was thinking of Luxury & Precision. My bad.

They’ve come down a fair bit used, now hovering around 2.2k for a p6p ish give or take a few hundred, if you keep your eye out you can find some really nice deals on them now

New pacific, with an upgrade path.
Seems to be just a digital upgrade.

https://www.lampizatorpoland.com/pacific-dac

I just checked with Lampizator North America, and it does involve shipping the DAC back to Poland, though they will facilitate it, providing a shipping label.
Lukasz is claiming it’s a not a subtle upgrade.

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Another brand that seems to be emerging again after the pandemic shortages, Aune released the S9C Pro today or yesterday by the looks of it. Seems to be a replacement for the older S6 models. So far it is only available in a few places but it looks to have some interesting improvements over their older gear.

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At Munich I tried there new balanced class a amp and really liked it, not quite as good as the new ifi, but considering the price difference, that thing was great.
The display basically just showed it’s temperature, which is nice, but I would really like to see a vu

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LTA 120wpc monoblocks.

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That room is going to sound awesome

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I wonder what topology they will use and if it will be zotl. It may get a bit toasty in there with the tubes needed to get 120w.

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Small fries…real CEOs squander in the billions.

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$19.99 per month for CD-quality sound is a joke. Qobuz offers hi-res sound – better than CD quality – for $12 per month.

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I dont have the most extensive music tastes but Quboz has had everything i looked for. I know the early knocks were on it’s catalog.

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It’s rare, but I do occasionally find an album missing on Qobuz that’s on Amazon and probably Tidal, usually smaller Euro labels. My solution if I really want to listen to it is to pick up a used CD assuming it’s not stupid expensive (which has happened, obscure release with no rereleases).

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Qobuz has nearly everything you want unless you’re into some pretty obscure artists or genres.

I’m a classic rock, hard rock, alt-country, Americana, bluegrass and hard bop/bop jazz fan, and I’ve found everything I need. The only musical genre I enjoy that’s a bit lacking on Qobuz is progressive house/deep house EDM, but I grab individual DJ mixes from Mixcloud or YouTube to satisfy that jones, anyways.

To be fair, there is no substitute for Spotify if you’re into social sharing of playlists, user-created playlists and other social functions. Spotify still is the king there. But I have little use for that, as I still prefer to listen to albums, and the playlists created by Qobuz and its users improve all the time.

Plus Qobuz wipes the floor of Spotify in pure information. Artists, recording information, studio musicians, background about the band and the album, etc.

Spotify is a mass-market service for people who listen to music. Qobuz is a niche service for people who LOVE and LIVE for music.

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Tbh, i still always go to bandcamp first for any artist, even the big ones. I try to avoid CDs now at days because i need to do something with them after.

Sure, and I’d do the same, I hate the space physical media takes. But often if it’s missing from Qobuz, and I’m interested it’s unlikely to be purchasable anywhere. The last time I ran into the issue it was some Early 90’s Deep Purple, they had a batch of 3 albums released through a now none existent label, that I wanted to listen to. Some of those releases have at some points been available on Qobuz, they just weren’t at the time I wanted to listen.
None of them were available and even on CD it was a case of tracking down discs.

I only really run into it, on less popular material, occasionally I find a missing recording when I do the listen to everything by a particular artist in order thing, that I tend to do.
I also occasionally buy recordings of specific masters, since Qobuz or any other streaming service isn’t going to carry every version of something that’s been released.

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No knock on anyone who does still grab physical copies. It just takes a lot for me to pursue that now. Some things like singles with bsides, or something i really really like and cant get elsewhere may make me bend. I can also see specific masterings being well worth it.

But i fit everything perfectly in a box and stored it away. Then The Bronx had the nerve to send a rare covers CD when i bought a shirt from them and now my ocd resents this extra silver disc with no home.

I currently subscribe to both Qobuz and Apple Music, and um, this hasn’t been my experience—I feel like there are albums I want to listen to all the time that aren’t available on Qobuz? If I had to put a number on it, I’d guess maybe like 5% of the music I want to listen to isn’t there, and I don’t feel like my tastes are /that/ obscure?

And yeah, I do try to buy albums on Bandcamp when I can.

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LOL about 5% of the shit in my library is stuff that doesn’t exist online, but that’s not the fault of the streaming services. It’s just stuff that was never sold, promo copies and compilations and such. At this point though it’s embarrassing that Spotify doesn’t have lossless and it says more about how much people care about that stuff than than it does about their inability to deliver it.

I’m with you though, if I LOVE a track or an album, I’ll go out of my way to get it on my local library.

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I tried Qobuz. Sound quality was excellent, and jazz/most more popular vocals were there, but I found a number of my classical
favorites aren’t so am with Amazon HD for now. Have Spotify too for some better search options, but tired of waiting for them to go lossless. Have you
tried Apples new classical section, which is basically the Primephonic service
they bought…Loved that for their cataloging, search and suggestions and wondering if Apple has followed through. Noticed it’s only available on ios, so
another strike against it (I would use on Windows laptop.) May not be your genre, but if you have tried it I would welcome any comments. Thanks.

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