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New Toys & Gadgets 新玩具

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chin:
The following is a picture taken with the heavy Sony A900 + 24-70/2.8. Compare the quality to the pictures taken with the Casio FC100.

2nd picture is part of the 1st picture blow up to 100%.

chin:
I just spent a few hours reorganizing the work space at home. And decided to take some pictures for record.

Up until about 1 month ago I had 2 PCs hooked up to 3 x 19" screens. The first picture shows the main components of the current setup:

1. the new bigger desk, from Ikea.

2. big screen is 30" cinema display from Apple, hooked up to an 8-core (2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon) Mac Pro /w 16GB DDR3 RAM.

3. smaller 24" screen hooked up to a 2 yr old Core 2 Dual PC.

4. the Mac is optical out (digital signal) to a Ibasso D10 DAC, then to Altec Lansing FX3022 speakers. The PC is line-out (analog signal) to the aux port of the Altec speakers. One major feature of this pair of speakers is the ability to hear BOTH input at the same time. So there is no need to have a set of speakers for Mac and another set for PC.

chin:
The Ibasso D10 DAC/AMP is the new toy in this setup. It's the small shiny box sitting to the right of the speaker in the following picture.

This is sort of my first adventure into the head-fi & computer hi-fi world. The little box decodes the digital signals into analog signals (DAC= Digital to Analog Converter) to feed into an amplifier. The regular PC has DAC on board but the quality is not as good. And a regular computer does not provide enough power to power a good headphone.

I have tried connecting the headphone to the PC via D10 vs connect directly to the PC. The sound quality difference is very apparent to my ears. When I tried to do the same on the Mac Pro, the difference is smaller.

I chose the Ibasso D10 because it allows diversified input (coaxial digital, optical digital, USB digital, line-in analog) & output (line-out or headphone). It has received very good reviews in the head-fi communities. And it's a quality Made in China product. I ordered from the ibasso.com web site and it was delivered within 24-hour!

The D10 can be used as a portable headphone amplifier for iPod & other portable music device. I tried it on the iPod Touch but to my ears the difference is not too big. It's main purpose is still a good DAC.

My headphone is Philips SHP9000. A nice comfortable headphone I have for about 1 year already. Supposedly it's not as good as some head-fi grade headphones, but those headphones are easily HK$2000+.

The powered Altec speakers are not quite hi-fi grade, especially with the way I put the left speaker behind the 24" screen, but very practical for my current 2-computer setup. Perhaps in the future I will change to a setup with separate amplifer & monitor type speakers.

chin:
One of the major reasons to go with the Ikea desk is the hanging rack for computers. In my setup the Mac is on the right, and the PC on the left.

chin:
After hearing the much higher resolution music at home with the new gadgets, the music output quality at office became simply unacceptable.

So today I bought this tube amp with USB input and headphone output for use in the office. Right now I would use only the headphone output in the office. I hope in the next few months, when we move to the new office, I will be setting up a nice pair of monitor speakers hookup to this amp.

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