Some background
Ian has been ‘into’ music since being a young teenager, age 13 he started doing paper rounds. If anyone remembers those, to fund the purchasing of LPs / vinyl. Ian did two paper rounds in the morning before school, then one after school. Part of a typical Saturday was spent in the local record shop, buying new music. He remembers Sunday as the worst day, even though there was no afternoon round to do, as quite a few people had multiple broadsheets such as The Sunday Times, The Observer and the Daily Telegraph, which usually also had colour supplements.
As time passed Ian became an early adopter of CDs, replacing much of his vinyl collection with a CD version, when in car CD players became the thing, he fitted a Pioneer six disc changer into the boot of his car. With the advent of USB sticks and SD cards, Ian initially ‘ripped’ his CDs to a computer as MP3s, which was okay for a while. As energy prices increased and the cost of hard drive storage decreased, Ian moved his entire music onto a NAS (Network Array Storage) which uses very little electricity and is always on and available.
When he ‘ripped’ his and Sandra’s CDs collection the second time, he opted for the FLAC format (Free Lossless Audio Codec), as it doesn’t compromise the audio quality in the same way that the MP3 format does. Ian and Sandra use EAC (Exact Audio Copy) to rip their CDs and then store them safely away, as it would be wrong to keep the music and sell the medium it came on.
Headphone systems
Below is how we have Volumio running on one of our Raspberry Pi 3B, and the settings for the connected Fosi device we use for music playback:
Initially, Ian was unimpressed with the low level of volume, until he changed the volume options shown below to hardware, a vast improvement.
The audio resampling settings Ian is using are shown below
The headphones Ian uses in the office / study with the above system are OPPO PM3’s
Some of the other headphones Ian has:
- Beyerdynamic T90
- HIFIMAN HE-400i
- Audioquest NightHawks
- Sennheiser HD650
Some of the other DACs and headphone amplifiers Ian has:
- Schitt Modi Multibit
- Schitt Vali 2
- Schiit Magni 2 Uber
- Garage1217 Project Ember 2.1
The Fosi device we mention further up on this page is an entry level Digital-to-Analog Audio Converter, which also has a headphone amplifier built in, perfect for listening to music whilst working.
Ian bought his Fosi Q4 from amazon.co.uk ← paid link