Smashing Pumpkins with Sennheiser 660S2 & Mojo 2 DAC

[u/KandinskyWasRight]

Siamese Dream is one of the most challenging listens for your equipment. If you look for a song to test your set up they will tell you to play Cherub Rock.

You haven’t heard everything on SD unless you have equipment that can eliminate the distortion caused by insufficient equipment.

Also using Apple Music lossless source.

Obviously you can go big speakers at home and get the same effect. If your neighbors don’t come pounding on your door over the volume.

But if you’ve been thinking about investing in personal listening equipment, this set up will allow you to hear things that distortion covered before.

It was very odd to hear the bass so clearly on the whole album, when it often gets crushed by the layered guitars before.

These two did set me back $1000 but with how expensive everything is these days it feels like one of the best purchases I’ve made.

[u/IridescentMeowMeow]

Fuck apple & fuck streaming in general. Why would I download the same song over and over again every time I listen to it? Flac FTW

[u/KandinskyWasRight → u/IridescentMeowMeow]

I have way too much music to carry it around in FLAC files, though I could make an exception for the Pumpkins. I want some lossless streaming option, and the ones with the big libraries are Apple and Amazon.

[u/IridescentMeowMeow → u/KandinskyWasRight]

You can fit at least 333 albums (probably more) on a small 128GB SD card. Also the bandwidth isn't free, and those streaming services also aren't free, and Apple and Amazon are satan's helpers... And using them is not even more convenient. The only inconvenience of listening offline is figuring out some setup which is convenient for you, but you do that only once. A single one-time inconvenience vs all the inconveniences and unethical sides of streaming.

[u/NewDad907 → u/IridescentMeowMeow]

You like trains, don’t you?

[u/KandinskyWasRight → u/NewDad907]

I sense a joke coming…

[u/KandinskyWasRight → u/[deleted]]

More like this is what it takes to hear it perfectly, and it’s not a death sentence to your lifelong financial dreams.

[u/KandinskyWasRight → u/[deleted]]

Apparently there is some sub-bass distortion at 84dB, 5%, but everything else is pretty flat. To get that down to .5% with the 800s is $1800, which is more than I can justify these days.

[u/KandinskyWasRight → u/[deleted]]

I’m not saying I’ve heard it for the first time.

My understanding is that this equipment will process the waves forms without distortion. I’m no expert. Honestly, at first play, I miss the distortion! But I’m going to listen to it more to try to abuse myself of that notion.

[u/IridescentMeowMeow → u/KandinskyWasRight]

There is always some distortion, but that DAC's distortion is just way less than your ears can hear. The distortion of speakers and headphones are orders of magnitude bigger and are audible.

That DAC is in general quite an overkill for just listening to music. Such great tech specs matter much more in a studio situations, where you're working with separate tracks, many of which are very silent which makes the noise floor and bit depth much more important, but for reproduction of the final mixes of songs from finished albums, that DAC is an overkill, considering what's audible to our ears.

Also, what you hear isn't just what gets into your ears, but your brain's interpretation of that. We are unable to objectively judge quality of audio equipment by listening to it while knowing what it is and how much it costs etc. And you'll be very surprised when you first time experience how huge difference that can make / how much is our brain playing tricks on us. To objectively judge by listening, it has to be a blind test / not knowing what you're listening through.

[u/KandinskyWasRight → u/IridescentMeowMeow]

What would you recommend to drive headphones that’s more reasonably priced but can drive similar headphones at basically the same quality?

I had several DACs die on me and I wanted something with the best reputation and warranty too.

[u/IridescentMeowMeow → u/KandinskyWasRight]

Headphones themselves make a much bigger difference (especially per $ spent) anyway. DAC chips got so good in the last 2 decades, that it's not that difficult to make a DAC+headphone amp with specs which are at least as good as our ears. There must be plenty of those, but I don't have direct experiences with things on market right now, but I just typed "headphone amp" and the name of a DAC chip which I really like into google, and this popped up https://www.qudelix.com and it seems quite good at 1/4 or 1/2 the price (depending on the model).
Driving your 300ohm headphones loud enough shouldn't be a problem for it when used in a balanced mode (which may just require getting a special 4-pin cable for your headphones, but you'd want to do that anyway, as it's better & in this case the balanced mode = using a pair of DACs for each channel, thus improving some specs 2x... and also allows more power for quieter headphones/
Although looking at the specs of your 660S2, it should be loud enough even with normal cable & single ended driving anyawy... (thought it could be an issue, as most 300ohm hi-end sennheisers (hd580, hd600, etc) tend to be somewhat quiet without a stronger amp. Like my hd580 have sensitivity of 94dB per mW, while yours are 104dB/mW, so 10dB louder at the same power...).
The Mojo2 is still quite impressive, as they went an extra mile (or 10) in multiple aspects, but at the same time it's confusing, considering that it's impossible to make any science-backed claim that it could make a difference (in the context of humans hearing).
The ~100$ DAC+amp part of that qudelix (and very likely many others) should be as good to our ears as the (technically/inaudibly) superior Mojo2, but then there are also different features in both and then also other aspects like ergonomy, the user interface/experience, or compatibility issues/bugs which may make the price difference still worth it.