I used to like his articles and video about using cheap RPi as Hi-Fi audio players because it appealed to my tinkerer side. He lost me when he started to promote USB and S/PDIF "purifiers" because I already have to deal with enough pseudo science and other nonsense at work and have no intention whatsoever to continue doing so in my free time at home.
I have mixed feelings about Darko.He did much to promote the use of a lot of quite poor sounding DACs .The whole DAC of the month thing was ridiculous.I have friends who bought one DAC after another trying to get decent sound from computer audio only to realise their one box CD players sounded a lot better.
That really is a pity. All the more so, because buying one really good one, instead, might have made all the difference. Quite a few of us have gotten excellent sound from computers-based systems, but not by rotating in and out a series of mediocre DACs.
I like the way he does the reviews, in writing and video. However I don't always agree with his conclusions .
Darko doesn’t just listen to electronic music. He also listens to indie rock, classic rock, folk, and singer-songwriter music. I’ve heard him talk about evaluating gear while listening to Dylan, Tom Waits, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and other music featuring voice and acoustic instruments.
He actually listens to or at least references several different types of music though he openly admits he’s not a Classical or Jazz guy and mentions his distaste for several audiophile standards, which I share. The funny thing is Darko agrees with you. He’s said several times something to the effect that if all you do is sit in the dark and listen to Diana Krall and Telarc records “I’m not your guy”. I never take any review vary seriously so maybe that is why I enjoy his show. That and his varied musical taste and the fact that along with the entertaining back and forth with his guests and slick production values you get someone talking about music I listen to more regularly than Brahms and demo disks.
Yes. He recently used some Julian Cope records too. Most of the chill music you hear on his videos are simply available licensed music to further the visuals. Not music he auditioned the equipment with.
Well it is very hard to get really good sound out of a standard computer regardless of the DAC you use.Which is why so many people kept trying different ones .Especially when reviewers kept singing the praises of the latest and greatest.Any of us with a decent CD player and a willingness to compare were not convinced at all.
This line from Darko's website is why I place no trust in his reviews regardless of how entertaining they are: "Electronic music also gets its fair share of airtime during the product review cycle." How on earth can electronic music play any part whatsoever in telling us whether a hi-fi product has "fi"? Reviewing a speaker or cartridge, we can report enjoying or not enjoying "Scary Monsters" or "Kill Everybody" but we can't report whether the product reproduces Skrillex with fidelity. Fidelity to what? Some knuckle draggers immediately see this as a criticism of electronic music. I said "see" because I just couldn't bring myself to type the word "think." The motivation or aesthetic orientation or taste (or whatever you want to call it) that leads a hi-fi reviewer to dismiss a thousand years of musical riches in favor of a tiny, congested slice of recent stuff is worth noting too, but it plays no part in making the case for using acoustic sounds in real spaces for evaluating hi-fi.
Exactly! I mean there's no way that, after going to a concert hall and hearing a theremin soloist perform, I'd ever be able to tell if my system at home had the fidelity necessary to faithfully reproduce what I had heard in that concert hall. There's just no way that my ears and brain would ever be capable of making that comparison, and contrasting the two experiences, simply because... I got nothing. Jeff
Ha Ha! I guess this issue is more important to me than to some because I'm not talking about a momentary exposure to an unfamiliar acoustic instrument. My career put me in real spaces making music with real acoustic instruments--a curse I suppose when I try to listen to what many call "hi-fi" or trust reviewers who use that word but don't seem to know what it means.
I Another thought, Jeff, and it's totally unrelated to this thread. Theremin soloists generally don't get to perform for real audiences with real orchestras unless they look real' good in a long dress!
hes not saying it’s all electronic music plays during a review cycle but you certainly get a wide range of sounds from that genre. folks who don’t listen to the genre think it’s all the same monotonous tones to a beat track. There is much more to good electronica. And there can be a wide dynamic range as with other styles of music.
One of those USB purifiers (the Schiit Wyrd) actually fixed noise over my USB port at higher volumes, so I wouldn't say they're totally terrible.
He doesn't use electronic music to the exclusion of acoustic music though. His music selections are much more inclusive of all genres. I prefer this approach to the Krall/Barber/Warnes/Organ-in-Church demo material other reviewers. Darko also comes across as being thoughtful and thorough with his words. He's not all, "Great all-around performer, hard to beat at this price, highly recommended"! I like to see him struggling with how to best describe the differences between equipment. It shows me that he is not phoning-in his reviews.
i do like that a recent review compared 3 amp / speaker pairings including mixing and matching. not only did this highlight the critical importance of proper matching between amplifier and speaker, he went into specific detail about the brands and which pairs worked and which did not. we need more reviews like that imho. all too often reviews mention "supporting hardware" without additional options or mentioning combos that we should avoid.
Are you purposely mentioning garbage like Skrillex and Deadmau5 as test material? Stop name-dropping if you don't know what he's even using. That's like me saying they always use jazz like Kenny G and Candy Dulfer.
Yeah, he has got to be one of my favourites - I like the way he simplifies things but not in a patronising way.
I picked Skrillex and Deadmau5 at random as examples of electronica that are bad for judging the "fi" in hi-fi. It had nothing to do with what I think of the music as music. Would my argument that electronic music is a bad way to judge audio fidelity be unsound if I used Daft Punk? Kraftwerk? Someone else not in your dumpster?
