I’ve been enjoying my foray into budget-fi desk gear so much this year and I’ve been so impressed with the schiit magni unity and vestri, that I decided to go ahead and pull the trigger on a modi 5 to pair with the unity.
I’m really interested to compare this dac to the mesh card in the magni and see how much better the newest iteration of the modi stacks up.
Gonna listen for a bit tonight before bed, I will follow up in the appropriate thread in a few days 
Part of me wanted to get these, but DCA headphones don’t really sound too different to me.
Let us know how you feel about them.
They’re pretty great so far but I’m noticing some of the staging wonkiness that the Susvara OG has if you don’t fix the inverted phase. I’m now 99% sure they have inverted polarity out of the box. Annoying but not the end of the world. Tuning is very very good. I still haven’t gotten a chance to hear the E3 or Stealth, but the tuning on these is some of the best stock tuning I’ve ever heard. A little light on the bass for my personal tastes, sounds like about a 5-6db shelf but it’s like an actual true neutral to me. What neutral should be, because flat or rolled off bass is just a sad thing. Timbre is fantastic. Comfort is excellent. Staging is decently big and imaging is really good. I just flipped the phase and all the staging issues went away so I’m convinced that’s the only issue they have. Clarity is exceptionally good, they found that line and walked it really well so they don’t come off as brittle or thin. None of that boxy sound that most closed backs have. They sound like perfect mixing headphones and I think that was the goal? but also they just do sound good in general for listening and it’s pretty nice to have another good closed back in the stable. Might tear them apart and fix the phase and just settle that once and for all lol.
that’s a good looking HP
Why on earth would DCA do that? Do you think it’s intentional, or a manufacturing defect?
Man if I encountered that I’d return them, seems inexcusable in a “high end” headphone. But what do I know? 
I’ve always wanted to try a DCA but have heard mixed feedback about their sound signature, comfort is universally praised though. These look interesting, and more competent closed backs is always a good thing.
A good price too, fitting in that under $1k market is nice. I’ll add them to the short list 
I talked to Dan pretty extensively over the last couple days about this. He produced my exact sets frequency response graphs and phase plots from their internal testing before shipping them out and on his measurements, they’re correct phase. But the weird thing is that if I test the cable, the cable is correctly wired and shouldn’t be flipping the phase and apart from popping the pads off and applying 1.5v to the driver to see which way it flexes, I can’t figure out if the drivers themselves are out of phase but Dan said that it shouldn’t really be possible because of how they’re assembled. But then I go and I measure a dozen headphones and IEMs during all this fiasco and all but a single set is correct phase and that one set I already knew about and again measured inverted. So either every single set I have is the opposite of what I have, or something in his measurement system or the cable he uses for testing is flipped and all the headphones are shipping with inverted phase. He was trying everything he could to deny that it was even possible that my set had inverted phase to the point where he has me questioning my own sanity and measurements.
They’re not even remotely similar to the older Aeon models tuning-wise. They’re some of the most agreeable sounding headphones I’ve ever heard for stock tuning. The older models used to have some pretty extreme treble peaks I couldn’t handle and some super wonky mids that just made everything sound thin and brittle and the Aeon Core doesn’t have any of that at all to my ear. Really smooth overall and I do feel that it slightly cuts into the detail and dynamics possibly because of some slight overdamping, but it’s really not a big issue and they still are really detailed and spacious for a closed back with none of that mud you typically get from a bass shelf in a closed back. I’m definitely impressed, but the phase thing has been bothering me. I can fix it with EQ on my home setup easy but it would have been nice to not have to do it at all. Probably not an issue for most people but idk, I guess I’m just a sensitive bitch when it comes to phase lol.
This is a single measurement I took of them the other day, no averaging between multiple measurements or seating, quick and dirty just to check phase.
out of curiosity are you using a usb conditioner between your PC and the DAC? I’ve seen in the past weird behavior with them in place. If you’re using one, take it out and see.
I actually did try it unintentionally both ways with and without USB isolators both on my measurement rig and on some dongle DACs that have no polarity flip option to kinda try to isolate the issue.
When you say mixed takes for DCA in general I think those are justified, the older models all had some hard to justify keeping issues to me, but this new generation with the E3 and noire X they fixed all of those to my ear, so these are promising
Even the previous noire was still lacking in ways similar to aeon closed 2 again to my ears, specially in the dynamics department, very weak compared to other planars in the price
At least with the noire X for use with the magni or even something like a midgard id stay clear of them, its definitely not enough and it will show in a lack of body and physicality
Its a shame for me since their build and comfort screams portable but they do need quite a bit of juice, so I end up prefering options like denon and focal
Jumped into the NAS thing as a way to unify some of the disparate dongles and drives I’ve got all over the place and will ultimately place the Roon library here. Maybe get my wife to dump her Apple cloud backup account as an extra incentive. :)
AI has sucked the life out of the DIY PC industry but I’ve got a couple of 2 TB M.2 drives that I can put to use, and eventually I’ll buy a couple of 2.5" SSD SATA drives when prices come back to earth to add capacity.
There is mostly love out there for this thing but some horror stories, that said I’m a savvy user and given the complaints, I wasn’t scared off.
Curious if there are any experiences in the community. Also out of curiosity, I’ve never used a dual Ethernet connection before, any real value in doing that? I only have one spare port in the switch I’ll be plugging this into. I can move things about if I need to and swap the five port and 8 port switches I have around, but curious to hear about tangible benefits.
I realized I needed an upgrade cable for the Bokeh C, the stock cable is definitely not it imo… I wanted something that would compliment it well in sound but also make sense for the price.
I’ve been using a corpse cable gravedigger with my pair of Senn HD6xx for like 6 years now and I’ve always been satisfied with it in both sound and build, it has held up and still looks and feels just like the day I got it. So it was a no brainer to go with corpse again in this price segment
I think their lifetime warranty guarantee is a rare thing that you don’t really see a lot these days much less when it comes to audiophile cables.
I also picked up a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter (wired with cardas as well), to use with the Vestri and my LPGT for those times I want to be portable.
I opted for the 3m length so I can use the Bokeh with my speaker system comfortably from my normal seating position. I’m going to be checking out the combination for the first time later tonight, so far I’ve only been using it with my schiit stack and some light use with the vestri.
edit; LOL I just noticed how dusty my speaker setup is in this photo… whoops let me do some light dusting real quick 
I got some more goodies in the mail today that I had on order.
I have been hearing some good things about this little usb isolator and decided to check it out over a jds synapse.
My main goal was to use it with my schiit vestri to try to get rid of the noise, static, clicks and pops I hear when using my really sensitive iems with it. The size factor was definitely a concern since this would still be used in a portable/transportable use case. Thankfully this thing is way smaller than I thought, it is so cute and tiny lol
…and unfortunately it didn’t totally fix the issue. It definitely cleaned up some of the noise I was hearing but it never totally got rid of it all, just made it fainter. I’m pretty sure that this rules out it solely being a usb power / data issue.
So I’m thinking probably a rf interference issue and something specific to my pixel 10 pro xl.
It’s kind of a bummer, but I bought the neutron v1 with a backup plan in mind just in case it didn’t work. Instead I will use it with my schiit modi/magni stack to clean and isolate the signal coming from my desktop usb. I will have to test it soon to see if it is a noticeable difference.
Do report on your impressions for the isolator, im really really enjoying my altor, ill add a small green backpack lps later down the line since this isolator gets great results even from random smps
Also the new usb ipurifier pro isolator from ifi looks very sick but the $350 seems a bit rough, there was a good offer on ebay but I decided on the altor, also the previous versions of this (tho great) colored a bit too much
Haven’t made any audio-related purchases since the Crinear Reference & Technics AZ100, but I did get my Porter-Yoshida bags in last week and another CD box.
What did you think of Reference? I liked it and appreciated what is was but I bought Divine at the same time and ended up preferring that; sold Reference.
It’s been hard to put down the Reference, especially after experimenting with different eartips. I initially went with the “shortwides”, but I found that smaller-bore tips with a more traditional shape improved both ends of the frequency response to better suit my preferences. It has even-keel mids that make it one of the best vocal sets I own.
My only gripe, which really comes down to my own ear anatomy, is that I’d prefer just a touch more treble in certain regions for certain music. The Aful Magic One, which is tuned very similarly, has a slight elevation somewhere that adds a bit more clarity, but I prefer the Reference across the rest of the frequency response.
It’s a shame I didn’t make any notes regarding what exactly didn’t do it for me as I can’t remember. I think it was that the mids didn’t wow me as much as Mystic 8. Mystic 8 mids was what I was hunting for. Guess I just need to buy Mystic 8.
