teren41

Jesus, how much do you guys spend a month on LPs? Ruddy amazing collections you guys have there.

I find GYBE's music really difficult... I guess I don't have the patience? I've only got 'Lift Your Skinny Fists' and every song is about 20 minutes. I enjoy the music as it passes but I lose grasp of the entirety of the song and what it means/expresses as a whole because the music is so complex and long. With GYBE I feel like I'm reading a lot of chapters but I don't understand the book as a whole :/ This is why I can't really get into symphonic classical music either. That's why I prefer Mogwai / Explosions, their musical styles are similar but Explosions especially has more pop sense, the songs are shorter, more straightforward. Really love that stuff. It's easier to connect the titles of the songs to the music, to the theme of the album in general. On topic, now listening to 'It's Five O'Clock Somewhere' by Slash's Snakepit

!!!! GYBE is a post-rock band, in the same vein as Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky, they tend to be more epic though, their tracks are pretty long. Instrumental, ambient pieces, sometimes symphonic. Not a girl's band, man.

With both WAV, Apple Lossless (for that matter, FLAC & every other lossless format out there), the original analog audio signal is perfectly reproduced, via the Nyquiest-Shannon Sampling Theorem. Therefore there is completely no difference between WAV and lossless formats (and for that matter, CD). If you are hearing differences, it's probably due to the player settings, I assume your WAV files are being played by winamp / WMP and apple lossless by iTunes, please check your iTunes settings and make sure al the enhancements like Sound Enhancer are turned off. At this juncture, I won't say that the differences you are hearing between apple lossless and WAV are in your mind, so you should weed out the problem that's causing you to hear differences. As for MP3s, WAV and lossless formats are technically superior in terms of quality to this format, however the amount to which this quality improvement can be discerned is debatable. I for one find 320kbps indistinguishable from lossless, in fact, -v0 VBR encryption is also pretty much transparent for me. 192kbps and 128kbps is where quality starts to take a noticeable hit, although stuff really only becomes completely unlistenable at 96kbps. Also, if you're gonna try out others' customs to audition the sound, make sure there's a proper seal, otherwise the sound you hear will be bass-shy, sibilant and thoroughly unsatisfying. The universals, while not 100% of the sound signature you get upon receiving your full custom, will be a much better demo unit than a badly fitting custom.

There's a demo set of up to JH13 at Jaben, with nozzles and biflange tips. Basically it's a universal version of the JH customs. I'm not sure if they have 16s though. When I went a week or so ago, the 13s were on loan to Jaben Malaysia so if you want to make sure you're not stuck at the JH11s, give them a call ahead of time.