Typical chifi experience, they will deny or delay your warranty service as well.

Bought a pair of speaker for 1K, sound like crap. Then spent 20 hours and few more thousandths buck did a room treatment, they sound like heaven. Stereo systems need space and room treatment, both of which costs more money and time than buying speakers themselves

Amplifiers are not rocket science, especially Class A ones, literally ancient technology from 100 years ago. The reason why they are charging hundreds time more solely because of psychoacoustics / snake oil and beautiful designs. Chi-Fis are usually either fake tubes or legit tubes with poor QA. Nobsound literally selling tube amp self-assembly kits if u are into EE. Low end tubes sounds like crap because tubes are there only for lighting and they use inferior op-amps. High end tubes sounds like solid state amps because solid state amps are literally the next and better evolution of tube amps. There is no magic, it just ppl like distortions (even order harmonics) and psychological audio quality boost from hefty price tags and glowing tubes. Every aspect of that can be archive by a cheap SS amp and EQ.

Class D is the future, NAD will be the leading company when people realize they have been brainwashed by all the class A marketing. people resenting them cuz they don’t charge much and don’t have snake oil marketing. Time will tell. It is amassing how those ancient technologies that has been proven inefficient and highly noisy and discarded by almost all other fields are treated like a crown jewel in audio market.

Very brave of u for speaking the truth lol, I buy tube amps just for the look, as a person with an EE background and talked multiple amp engineers, I full agree with u, and according to some OEM engineers those tube amp profit margin often times over 100 to its production costs. Any people can read circuitry diagram and have soldering techniques can easily produce those class A tube amps, slap a fancy casing, charging few thousands, brag about tUbe mAgIc, you’re sold, you’re in, and u will be in part of the cult

Four of $100 IEM, you could get a much better $400 low-mid tier one, like Variation. I remember I used to like Aria, then after I bought IE600 and one day went back to Aria, I was like “OMG, this IEM (Aria) sounds so muddy and bad”

I don’t understand why people buying multiple kinds of entry level stuff, u could just save the money get a mid tier IEM and it is far more enjoyable.

Hotel California Live, I use it to demo and tune my speakers

Vali is a toy level fake tube amp with tube there just for the show. Op amp inside is doing 99.9999% of the work, thus the solid state sound. Don’t waste your money buying tube for Vali.

Most of the cheap tube amps are just op amps with tube for show. It cringes me so much when ppl praise those $100 tUbE amp for having “tube sound”. And tube sound are just distortions created by introducing tubes into the circuitry.

Foams seal better, thus better isolation more clear acoustics. But you can’t wash them with soap or alcohol, you need to buy new ones every month (at least for me). It costs much more than silicon

With Sennheiser you can only use its proprietary tips, other brands, I use Comfort memory foams tips.

Cuz them both are bare minimum set up….. Try it on dedicated discrete systems you will find huge differences

This op is baiting, MOD pls ban him

The amount of stupidity in OP’s replies is mind-blowing. No wonder snake oils are flourishing lmao. Paying more for a brand to fix their own problem. Huh? Balanced output has way better sound quality than SE. WTF? Lists goes on…….

But you said “tube setup”. Downvote all you want, but it won’t change the fact that Lyr and any other cheap hybrids have zero tube sound. Save your money for cleaner better and way cheaper solid state amps (like your A90, excellent purchase), or save enough to buy a real tube amp, don’t waste your money just for the fake look.

Had Lyr3 and Valhalla from eBay, I’d say Valhalla has way more tube sound than the Lyr. Op amp in the Lyr is doing almost everything, tube in there mostly I think is for the look.

Yeah, of course it’s a joke, probably his sponsors pay him at least 10 times that price to move tiers. If u think his opinions/recommendations are completely unbiased by money then u are naive, his value is his graphs not the ranks, for they are easily manipulated.

And his ranking can be bought, I think if u pay him $1k u can put any headphone to S tier. It’s on his sponsor link I think

Wake the Fk up samurai, Senheisser just released new model for 600 series