Big Ego & Little Ego

[Gary Cook]

Jan 22, 2017 16:11:13 GMT -5 imjustdave said:

I'm fairly new to quality music and I'm seriously thinking about a DAC for work, you know I spend 8+ hrs there ... might as well enjoy it.
So lets say I get Big ego. The next question that comes to mind is music source, I never obtained a large collection of CD but I have a few, so ripping them to a quality format is next on my list to do. Any advice here?
Also what about online sources, say Amazon music, or spotify, or pandora... there are literally a few dozen options out there, but I assume if I get junk source it wont really matter if I have a Big Ego.

My CD collection is all on iTunes, ripped lossless (ALAC), it's convenient, easy to use, not quite bullet proof but very close, I can play anything on any iDevice, iPhone, Ipad. Mac etc. I have an Apple TV4 which is connected via HDMI to my UMC-200, so via wifi and a pair of Airport Extremes I can access the library (MacMini) anywhere in the house. For example pull up a track from the library using an iPhone and play it in the garage (Zone 3 on the UMC-200). I also have a BTM-1 plugged into the UMC-200 so guests can play music via blu tooth.

I'm sure that you will have lots of people saying "but it's only 44/48 kHz", well, if you are ripping from CD's then that's what you got. My experience is that the mastering of the recoding is far more important than the sampling frequency. There's good sound at 44 kHz just as there is crappy sound at 384 kHz.

Whenever I want to really listen to music, rather than just have it on in the background while I do something else, then I play CD's in the ERC-3 or vinyl on the TT with both via the XSP-1 for 2.1 stereo.


Cheers
Gary

[autiger]

if you are looking for a simple encoding program, "trader's Little Helper" is easy and free

[Gary Cook]

Just received Ego #4, a BigEgo this one is going to my future son in law. He travels a lot and after listening to my Ego he can't stand the onboard DAC's in any of his computers.

Cheers
Gary

[flaviowolff]

Guys, sorry to bump an old thread, but I’m seeking a bit of more detailed info about the HB filter (crossfeed) implemented on the Big Ego. Is it similar to the Bauer implementation used on roon’s dsp engine? I really loved that filter. It reinvented headphone listening for me. Having it on hardware would be awesome.

Thanks.

[ronf]

I recently purchased a Little Ego DAC from Emotiva in a clearance sale for this item. I am using it with my laptop and Senn HD 650 headphones, and I am enjoying this tremendously.

I have a question regarding left/right balance control. I am running Ubuntu OS on my laptop. This means under normal use the audio driver is ALSA, and the layer above that which the user uses to control things like volume and channel balance is Pulse Audio. If streaming audio to the Ego this way, balance control works, because it is being done by Pulse, not by the DAC. However, I want to stream audio to my laptop using the squeezelite client and asking it to connect directly to the Ego DAC, bypassing the normal Ubuntu OS audio mixing and control functions. This works beautifully, giving me bit-perfect streaming to the DAC. Using the alsamixer app, I can control the volume function in the DAC. All is good.

Unfortunately, balance control does not seem to work. ALSA tells me, (using "amixer -c 1 controls") that the DAC is reporting it contains a balance control function, and in fact I can set the balance in the DAC, and the DAC tells the ALSA driver the new balance setting! However - nothing happens; the channel balance remains unchanged.

Question: are the attenuators for the two channels in the DAC tied together, disabling the balance control? Or - am I doing something wrong?