Quick Review: Inexpensive Spigen Legato Arc wireless Bluetooth headphone with aptX. And an attempt at "getting through"! (Magazines & blogs nothing more than audio Industry advertising?)

As I head off camping for the week, I thought I'd mention an inexpensive impulse buy the other day... Something to consider if you're thinking of getting into wireless Bluetooth headphones on a minimum budget. For ~$US60 (hmm, I just saw it's currently ~$70), here's the Spigen Legato Arc wireless headphone with aptX:

Comes with a couple sets of extra ear pieces in the bag (large, small), charging microUSB cable and manual. Notice that I extracted the left ear piece in the picture while the right side is compactly retracted.

I was in fact able to grab this for ~$30 on Amazon Prime Day recently (hence impulse buy :-).

Summer Update! Huawei Matebook X Pro, Western Digital Gold HDD, and jitter simulation.

Well guys and gals, hope you're having a great summer (or winter as the case may be!). The weather here is certainly conducive to taking it easy and just enjoying the music instead of thinking much about the audiophile hobby apart from short comment/forum posts.

But tech things are happening in the background :-). Really exciting things as well which I'll discuss more in the days ahead. For today, I just wanted to discuss a couple changes / acquisitions this month...

MUSINGS: Zen and the Art of High Fidelity Audio. On transparency, in response to "Measuring Emotional Connections to Music".

Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities, the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.     --Thomas Jefferson

I ran into this article on Inner Fidelity: "Measuring emotional connections to music" penned by Rafe Arnott & Vinnie Rossi the other week that got me thinking about the hobby and the different "sensibilities" of those who partake and who write.

As you know, recently, I measured and discussed the sound of the Oppo UDP-205 player/DAC. I said that the device is "transparent". I believe that this is an important aspect to focus on because it touches right at the heart of the ideas and philosophies expressed in the article. Today, let's explore the themes brought out in that article a bit. As you can imagine, I come at audio from another perspective compared to Mr. Arnott and Rossi.

MUSINGS: Thoughts on audio device "modding" (eg. a tube modded Oppo BDP-105). [New Oppo UDP-205 firmware out with MQA USB-B...]

Couldn't resist the similarity :-). I'm sure the sonic output of both devices have been affected by the modifications! Notice that this Oppo is also sitting on a "Base" device that IMO is very much of the Dubiousness Class A variety...

Have a seat and let me tell you a tale, my friends. A number of years ago (summer 2013), around the time I started this blog, I had the opportunity to check out an interesting device that a friend had just received... It was a "tube modded" Oppo BDP-105 Blu-Ray player.

One afternoon, I went over to this friend's house to have a listen to this brand new device. He obviously spent quite a bit of money on it. The BDP-105 at that time was new and had an MSRP of US$1200. He is clearly an enthusiast so he "drop shipped" an unopened brand new player to the mod-shop and it came back to him with tube sockets for the analogue stage along with a fancy new external power supply. As you would expect, the modding itself being laborious, hand-assembled, and using premium parts was rather costly - about twice the price of the Oppo.

That afternoon, I had the opportunity to hook up my old test kit (with the Creative E-MU 0404 ADC) to the device to grab a few measurements. Since another friend already had a stock BDP-105 for me to listen to and measure, it allowed me to compare the results...