What source do you use from the PC? Flac files are best

For my PC I’ve got my foobar2000 set up basically to be a CD player – I rip my CDs (to FLAC) by the album, split into Disc 1 and Disc 2 (etc.), and use my own tagging/metadata scheme so the display can include performer information and record label/catalogue number. See pics:

https://www.musicbabble.net/posts/15ae1950-7d90-4519-a4bf-a375d47ffd4a

If you’re not already into foobar (or PC audio) it’s probably too late in life to start – you have to change the UI and learn the markup language to do practically anything, let alone replicate my setup, and adults ain’t got time for that shit (plus I doubt you persnicketally retag every album you download to keep the metadata format consistent).

foobar2000 (native 16/44.1, not resampled by the sound card) > Sabre ESS DAC (in my Sound Blaster AE-9) > RCA out (on the back of my sound card) > Emotiva > Toshiba > Klipsch or Audio Nirvana

I really hope motherboard manufacturers don’t keep shrinking the number of PCIe slots or dedicating them to absurd numbers of NVMe slots – my mobo might be the only B850 with three slots, and I need all of them (graphics card, sound card, and a two-port SATA expansion cards for a fifth and sixth storage drive). Even with my storage-heavy setup I have no real use for the fourth NVMe slot on my motherboard – I keep a 128GB emergency boot drive just in case something catastrophic happens to the C drive. I think X870s have either three PCIe slots or six SATA ports so in my next build I might need a high-end board. Oh well: they say only people with fringe use cases need high-end motherboards and apparently I’m on the verge of being one (the overwhelming majority of people don’t even need the four SATA ports on a B850).

Re: Klipsch – my dream speakers for the last 20 years have been the Klipschorn. They’re $10,000 and are triangular-shaped to go in the corners of a room, which means I’d need a good large (they’re like 105dB sensitive, and even the Audio Nirvanas want to play loud, the same way a V8 “wants” to go fast) dedicated listening room and the lack of in-building neighbors to disturb. As anything I might inherit is a condo, I doubt that will ever happen, even if I had ten thousand bucks sitting around.

But holy shit, $80K for headphones? That amplifier better give me a happy ending after the listening session. I haven’t had the pleasure of hearing electrostats, either speakers or headphones. If Stax sets are like $10K, what the hell do the speakers cost?

Amp: Huh, I didn’t even realise Tosh built hifi separates… or at least, used to? Do they still?

Yup. Mine is the middle one (Leistungverstürker, SC-335):

I don’t know if they still do. I don’t know if they still make any stereo equipment, maybe a mass-market AV receiver, but as I said, the TOSLINK standard on the back of your DAC reflects their legacy in this sphere. Even the Toshiba stuff from the ’70s is a step below Marantz or Denon or Onkyo or the like, more along the lines of Pioneer or Sharp. But from the back, I see that “Toshiba” is short for “Tokyo Shibaura Electronics Company”. What Shibaura means, I have no clue.

Re: PC – I went with the Radeon mostly because I used an Nvidia in my first build and I wanted to try the other one, though I still went with an AMD processor instead of Intel because the then-current 14th generation had overvoltage issues, and because the 9800X3D was the top gaming CPU in the world at the time. A post hoc rationalization also was to stick it to Nvidia, the company more than any other that has led to the current price structure. It blows my mind that 10 years or so ago, graphics cards were priced like any other PC component – now they’re up to half the cost of the build. Also, the $50 savings over the RTX 4070 (current at the time) didn’t hurt.

Even though I have the power to run Cyberpunk 2077 at 60fps at the second-highest preset in 1440p with ray tracing on and FSR activated (though the top preset is still unplayable), I’m currently playing this game:

Though TBH, since I got out of gaming in 2002/‘03, anything released after PS3, and even many PS3 games, looks incredible. I can’t perceive the difference with RT on vs. off in Cyberpunk, at least not in the little video it plays to test your frame rate. The last decade-plus have seen only incremental gains in graphics, as the hardware grows exponentially more powerful – compare Metroid (1986) with Super Mario 64 (1996), then compare Skyrim (2011) with any game fifteen years later. Sooner or later graphics cards will reach a limit of how much improvement they can make, like solid-state amplifiers, and anything more will be a matter of fussiness as we see $5000 videophile GPUs.