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Vital hi Fi accessories that don't cost all that much?

Is there any chance we could instead talk about "Vital hi Fi accessories that don't cost all that much"? I found it an interesting and useful topic...

Sure:

* A bottle of your favourite tipple
* Spotify (my favourite for music discovery, allows me to have offline playlists on my phone, £10 a month)
* Some sort of damping, like panels, in between the speakers; not having your gear in between the speakers
* A nice big rug if on a hard floor
* Having your sofa & chairs positioned so your speakers are firing across the room into them
 
Is there any chance we could instead talk about "Vital hi Fi accessories that don't cost all that much"? I found it an interesting and useful topic...

Please do so - if I get time later I'll split out or maybe lose the off-subject content. My only reason for leaving it is if I have a soapbox at all it is mastering, and it eventually, after some of the most idiotic and tedious stuff I've read in my life, came up! If the thread title had been 'Vital hi-fi upgrades that don't cost too much' I'd have been stating the case for selecting the best vinyl and CD cuts from the outset - far more important that the system that follows IME, source first and all that!
 
Is there any chance we could instead talk about "Vital hi Fi accessories that don't cost all that much"? I found it an interesting and useful topic...

Some of us have tried but I suspect the diversification that is acceptable thread (mis)use will put new contributors off.

Cotton ear buds are too bulky to clean inside RCA sockets but Mark Grant does a wee pack of suitably narrow ones for a very modest sum.

How do you clean your RCA sockets?
 
Some of us have tried but I suspect the diversification that is acceptable thread (mis)use will put new contributors off.

Cotton ear buds are too bulky to clean inside RCA sockets but Mark Grant does a wee pack of suitably narrow ones for a very modest sum.

How do you clean your RCA sockets?

Usually by plugging and unplugging sockets a few times. Could also swab some deoxit on the male plug & then do the same...
 
Yes, this annoys me too; it can be quite hard to work-out which is the 'real' track. On top of which, stuff like the Beatles LPs are not there.
On the other hand, you can find some quite rare stuff, and the range will improve.
My 'bugbear' is quality...I pay for premium, 320kps, and it's audibly inferior, with a kind of slightly 'muffled' quality, which robs good records of vitality and life. I'm baffled by people who say Spotify sounds good; to my ears it just doesn't. Maybe I'l try Tidal, when it has more tracks.

It sounds "OK", definitely nowhere near my lossless setup, but am willing to accept sonic trade-offs for the huge library available, and I do still end up buying physical versions of the stuff I enjoy / discover on Spotify.
 
I use Tidal at the moment, and it sounds very good.

My ideal would be to listen to all the new music I can on Tidal, and then to be able to buy 24/196 flac or wav etc from the artist for the stuff I thought was a keeper.

The Nils Frahm (free hi res album here - http://www.pianoday.org/ - in case you missed my thread in music) is a perfect example of this. I heard it on Tidal, and then went to find out more about Nils as it was beautiful music, then ended up with a keeper file in higher resolution.
 
My tip on the not expensive accessory (to get back on topic!) would currently be either Tidal, or my DIY CMoy amp that has opened up my world to headphones.

Tidal is amazing for sitting down and just hearing new things. I'm spending hours and hours listening to things that otherwise would have passed me by.

Headphones (Beyer T1's with the aforementioned CMoy) have allowed me to listen for hours and hours whenever I want, at volumes that I choose. They also show up how much information I've been missing as the level of detail is vastly beyond anything I've ever heard from speakers, and that is having worked in the hifi trade too, so I've played with a vast array of systems.

I'm hoping my Bottlehead Crack (http://bottlehead.com/product/crack-otl-headphone-amplifier-kit/) will be a contender for this thread too, particularly with the $20 offer price on the Speedball upgrade.

Finally, I recently moved house, and now have my own room exclusively for hifi related activities :)
 
Nagaoka anti-static cd sleeves for when the cd packaging requires you to pull the cd from out of a slip case. Despite the robustness of the format I still prefer not to touch the silver side. The anti-static properties are irrelevant, but these sleeves are very thin and only as big as they need to be so they fit into the provided packaging. Around £7 for 20.

Zerostat gun for vinyl.
 
Nagaoka anti-static cd sleeves for when the cd packaging requires you to pull the cd from out of a slip case. Despite the robustness of the format I still prefer not to touch the silver side. The anti-static properties are irrelevant, but these sleeves are very thin and only as big as they need to be so they fit into the provided packaging. Around £7 for 20.

That's an interesting tip, and presumably you fold the Nag. type sleeve (twice?) as you don't say. This does bugger them up for future vinyl use, but the idea is sound.

I have a few CDs in those 'orrible cardboard covers (jewel boxes are bad enough !!!!!:mad:) and something like this would be useful, if only to extract the CD !:)
 
Completely agree about Tidal, so much that had passed me by, and of course the quality is superb.
Keith.

One of the things I've found really liberating is that I can listen to stuff that on the face of it I'm not in to, see how much I can get from the music in terms of appreciation of the message/musicianship/production/whatever, but not have to 'buy in' to the music.

A good example might be Say Lou Lou - not really my 'thing', but then again I can listen to the album without it costing me anything, so might as well see what it is all about.

It is liberating really. No longer just scanning through the same files on the NAS, or deliberating over whether or not I should buy a CD of something to see what it is like.
 


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