Beyerdynamic A2 Chinese clone. FAO Dice.

AlienALX said:
Because I used to live down in that area and that's how it was.

I left that area in 2000 to better my life and I've done that but I guess it's a case of "you can take the boy out of Brixton but you can't take Brixton out of the boy"
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Yeah but there's so many better MCs from those ends. Stormzy's a pop star at this point
 
MadShadow said:
Yeah but there's so many better MCs from those ends. Stormzy's a pop star at this point
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I guess it comes down to "define better" really. Better as in more hard core etc?

Thing is I grew up on a really rough council estate and there was no escape. I've seen some pretty horrific things during my time there (27 years) and tbh? I really have no desire to hear about it in a song. Stormzy is edgy, but not too much so.

I remember listening to a few songs back in the mid 2000s by a Grime group called "Terror Zone". Then I found out that they weren't a Grime group at all, they were actually real life gangsters. They robbed, and pistol whipped, my friend's mother because they had been told incorrect information about her being a dealer. Few months later it all kicked off with another gang from the same area and before you know it every one in Terror Zone has been arrested for murder, stabbings, shootings etc. What they were rapping about in their songs wasn't fantasy, it was things that they were actually doing and involved with at the time. All of their stuff has been deleted from Youtube and was used as evidence to bring them down.

So yeah, whilst a part of me is still 16 and invincible and gets an adrenaline rush from that sort of music the rest of me is 44 years old and has no desire to hear it.

My fave song of his so far is with Linkin Park. Probably a bit ghey for some, but I like LP a lot too and can connect with the song :)
 
Mate of mine in work ended up selling his Asus STXII for 50 notes to me, He's getting stupendously expensive AMP/DAC so wasn't bothered about charging much, Will do nicely until this Beyer clone arrives sometime this week all being well :)
 
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Dicehunter said:
Mate of mine in work ended up selling his Asus STXII for 50 notes to me, He's getting stupendously expensive AMP/DAC so wasn't bothered about charging much, Will do nicely until this Beyer clone arrives sometime this week all being well :)
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Sound cards are pretty important when you are talking pure head fi. I've got three that are hifi grade, and again like the amps they all sound totally different. The D2X is far warmer than the XFI Tit, but the Tit has the best mid/highs I have heard. So it's usually a trade off. I have yet to find a sound card that is a jack of all trades, but tbh? I think such a thing does not exist.

Going from thumping reggae to classical is pretty much impossible for any audio product. You either have all of the detail, sound stage, stereo separation and so on or you have guts, low end and power. That was why back in my speaker days I had a Cerwin Vega Stroker sub (18" 3200 W RMS) with a whole load of audiophile stuff for the mids and highs.

I'm hoping the Dragonfly also has a decent sound card to it.
 
AlienALX said:
I guess it comes down to "define better" really. Better as in more hard core etc?
Click to expand...

I mean he's got some good tracks but I can't take him seriously. First he's the "wicked skengman" and then all of a sudden he's doing collabs with little mix. He's a sellout as far as I'm concerned. Same goes for Skepta for working with Drake.

Also his bars tend to be quite basic and not really have a lot of meaning behind them, which is why he's become so popular with the mainstream. I prefer to stick to the old school guys like Wiley, dizzee, etc and some new guys who are actually putting meaningful tracks out like Dave.

That's just me though
 
MadShadow said:
I mean he's got some good tracks but I can't take him seriously. First he's the "wicked skengman" and then all of a sudden he's doing collabs with little mix. He's a sellout as far as I'm concerned. Same goes for Skepta for working with Drake.

Also his bars tend to be quite basic and not really have a lot of meaning behind them, which is why he's become so popular with the mainstream. I prefer to stick to the old school guys like Wiley, dizzee, etc and some new guys who are actually putting meaningful tracks out like Dave.

That's just me though
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No I understand what you are getting at. Thing is, when you live somewhere like he does (Thornton Heath just outside of Croydon) and you have any ambition whatsoever you will do whatever you can to get out of there. TBH? I would guess a lot of my old friends would call me a sellout. I've lost my venomous street mouth and according to my old boss "You sound like a posh tit!". My brother has moved out of the area too, he now lives in Caterham (posh).

Thing is, if fate hadn't screwed me I would not have been there either. I come from a very, very tight knit family. My dad was a bricklayer and doing very well, two of my other uncles were brick layers, then another uncle was a painter and decorator etc.

In 1979 my dad decided, with all of my other uncles, that he wanted better for us. Business was booming and we were becoming quite comfortable, so between him and my other uncles they bought a large piece of land about 10 miles outside of Hastings. The idea was to basically sell all of their houses in London ('cause even houses in the craphole part of London could buy you five elsewhere) and then basically build a private development with iron gates etc so we would be safe and grow up as decent human beings.

It was all set, planning permission was granted and then my dad died suddenly playing football in 1981. He was 35, no warnings fit as a fiddle etc.

So yeah, our house was paid for (he bought it off the council cheap) and we were moving forward. Then all of a sudden it comes to a crashing end. The land was sold, and we were stuck there.

And as a kid? I loved it. By ten years old I had seen people being stabbed, shot etc. You quickly become accustomed to violence and that was your way of life. And that's exciting as a kid. Growing up in an area where the police were constantly hovering around and you had to dodge them etc was fun. As you grow older though it starts to weigh you down. And the more life goes on the more you realise it's not right. Then I started on the drugs when I was about 12. Smoking cocaine and cannabis. Then I got hooked, took too much LSD and had a nervous breakdown when I was 18. That is when we knew something was seriously wrong with me.

I could not make any friends. Like, you know? good people who were kind etc. I would bring them to my house and my "mates" would cuss them and rip them apart verbally. They had no wish to return after that.

And that's BS. I did not want my life dictated to me and I didn't want my only friends to be pretty much gangsters who stole from me (they burgled my house three times) and decided who and who not I would be friends with.

I wouldn't have called it an outright gang, but I was a part of the S.V.P (Streatham Vale Posse) which was more of a joke thing but we were known. And as I say, that stuff is exciting when you are a kid. We didn't do anything bad, we just dealt with whatever came to us. I, for example, have never committed a burglary or mugging etc. I just can't, I wasn't raised that way.

Then when I got into my mid 20s and wanted to start slowing down a little bit the *real* gangs moved in. 12-18 year olds, would stab you no sooner look at you.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...teen-gang-1m-crime-spree-jailed-40-years.html

As I said, I've seen people being stabbed and shot etc. But not like this new wave. They will stab and shoot each other over nothing. When some one got stabbed or shot when I was growing up it was for one of three reasons. Drugs, money, some one else's woman. Learn to live by not breaking them three rules and you had nothing major to fear.

And I could sit down and watch movies with rape, violence, etc and laugh at them. And my first wife used to say "How can you watch that?" (Rise Of The Footsoldier, Bonded by Blood, Rolling With The Nines" and I used to say "I guess because I am used to it".

But when I started nearing 40 that changed again. Stuff like that now makes me feel physically sick. And I guess that automatically means that stuff like Grime, when it's about stabbing and robbing etc? yeah, it's just too much for me.

I was recorded at high school when I was 13 years old as having a IQ of 152. People like that do not belong in places like that. And it's kinda like Shawshank Redemption "Some birds just weren't meant to be caged".

I've closed Facebook, kept my addy and phone number private etc. My mother brings me "news" from down that end ('cause she still has friends down there) and that is enough for me.

Apols for the life story, but I felt it just needed explaining properly :)

Edit. I am just listening to Goodbye (Stormzy and Linkin Park) and he specifically says -

Let me say goodbye to my demons, let me say goodbye to my past life

I can't die for my postcode.

That says it all tbh.
 
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Yeah I totally get where you're coming from. I just feel like he betrayed his fans that were there from early, the guys you see in his older vids. I was a fan of him until recently as well. It's just sad to see what money does to these guys. It happens to a lot of them, even Wiley, like when he released that atrocity 'wearing my rolex' (but obvs it's wiley so he can do what he wants). They start off genuinely, talking about real stuff, but some of them sell out to the labels and just make what they know is going to sell.

Obviously music is about personal choice, but I wouldn't want to support guys like stormzy and skep. They're killing the scene imo.

~also sorry to admins for the off topic :)
 
I have this amp but the one with the DAC built in. The first one I recieved had a terrible buzzing noise once you connected the USB so I sent it back for a replacement. The second unit I got is working perfectly and paired with the Spiritlabs MMXVI headphones it sounds absolutely fantastic. It produce a nice deep bass and very detailed sound both in mids and treble. With that being said the treble is not at all fatiguing. Very nice amp and DAC highly recommended purchase. However if your headphones are hard to drive this is not a great purchase because the amp has a hum at high volume.
 
Mine has no hum at all, even at 100%. In fact it's so clean I often end up turning it up full lol. It may be a DAC thing causing the hum, or a ground issue with the PC. Both of my Asus sound cards hum so badly playing Fallout 4 that I have to use my Aune DAC with its built in USB to stop it.
 
TBH no. Do you have it connected to a multi strip? because I am sure that is the cause of the buzzing I get. Thankfully at desktop I have very little hiss or hum.
 
So you do get some noise. Anyway it's definitely a ground issue as if I disconnect usb turn volume up and touch the volume knob it makes it worse and yes I do have it plugged into a multi power strip will try without sometime and let you know the results anyway at the volume levels I listen at it ain't there would it still be effecting the sound quality though.
 
PCs are not made with ground in mind tbh. They are a veritable nightmare when it comes to noise. I've read a hundred things that can cause it. One of them is using a sound card, how ironic is that?

I get noise out of most of the components in my PC. However, if I isolate an amp for example and plug it straight into the wall and then use my phone as a source? nothing. Nothing at all.

On no signal most of them are silent. I do have a cheap one that whines, but I read that is the PSU and because it's a funny voltage (16v IIRC) it's hard to replace. A lot of amp manufacturers do that. Use funny PSUs so you have to go to them to replace etc. Sucks. Graham Slee does do an uprated PSU for one of my amps but he wants £150 for it. Think I will pass. What makes me laugh is if the stock PSU is so s**t then why does he not sell it with the £150 PSU included?

You need to be careful with the snake oil man, some of 'em pour that crap on thick.

I am not buying another built amp for RRP. I paid £87 for my Beyer clone and built my own Musical Fidelity valve based pre amp for less than £20 instead of £250. Yeah, prices are insane. Give me a Chinese clone any day.

Hey man had an idea.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/AudioQuest...&qid=1507065630&sr=8-1&keywords=jitterbug+usb

You could try that. If it's snake oil then I guess you could send it back but it may work for you?
 
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