Always happy to have visitors here! Unless that reply was to @Hans_Hidstam who would probably love to have visitors as well!
It was for Hans as I am swedish, but Daniel I would love to visit you as well, closer to my home in Ottawa.
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Did you decide in the meantime?
I follow jvvita as I have a pair of YG Sonja 2.2i since april 2024.
I heard the Estelon speakers and magicos but the YG are the best for me.
But what I had to learn during the last 2 years: cables are of equivalent importance as the speakers or the Dac
@ Daniel: a playlist of your test music would be very nice.
What would be of further interest is: at what SPL do you hear these different music files?
In many articles in HiFi magazines the authors get impressed of what they hear and give the information about their test music. But do not say at which SPL they hear that music.
When I go to live music ( mostly classic ) I always measure ( with the SPLnFFT app of my iPhone ) the SPL for some part of the music. And when I reproduce the music at home at the same level of SPL it also at home sounds really “live”.
I realised that ( for classic music ) at home I normally hear the music about 10 dB lower than live.
Perhaps there could be a “test” track with some sort of white/pink/polka dotted (jk) noise that could be used to equilibrate systems with an SPL app for the iPhone, lacking more precise instruments. Kinda like the test tones of old.
My normal SPL listening range 50-75 depending on music which in my case corresponds nicely to 2 settings on the Cascade 55 or 65
Hi Bones13,
for that purpuse I use the EBU testtone which is a pink noise 500 to 2000 Hz.
You can download the tesfile here:
EBU = European Broadcasting Union.
This file accompanies me for a longer time and helps to adjust loudness in different setups or when choosing new equipment.
Our ears / our brain is not so good in discriminating whether there is more dynamics ( better transients ) or more loudness. But if you adjust the loudness level to what you are used to hear for a certain music file then it is easy to say whether a more “live” aspect of one component is due to better dynamics or not.
For example on my way to my present MSB items I tested several power amps. And I can tell you that with some of them I nearly felt asleep 
not really, but there are great differences.
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@Peter.Bomberg then it seems as if you are listening much quieter than me.
As to explain in more detail:
in a live concert of émile waldteufel espana op 236 I measured the loudness range with the SPLnFFT app on my iPhone ( not calibrated ) with 65 to 103 dB, with a peak of 112,7 dB. Most of the music was in the 80 to 100 dB range.
At home that was position 106 of my Reference DAC feeding into the S500, which was in low gain position ( + 16 dB).
When I hear this same piece of music at a loudness which is “normal” for me, the DAC is set to 94 or 96.
That means I hear this piece of music in a range of about 55 to 93 dB
May I propose an experiment.
Let’s create a playlist if Tidal tracks via Room and record average and max SPL for each
may be we should open a new topic in “Listening”, as this topic is independent of the MSB listening room?
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We will consider this, but our listening materials is so chaotic it wouldn’t feel like anything coherent… Qobuz has been pestering us to release a playlist with them. Perhaps we can.
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