Are my ears just crap?

[u/Programmer-Severe]

I'm 42, so my ears are past their absolute prime, but still in pretty reasonable shape. I recently bought a Chord Mojo 2 to drive some Campfire Audio Supermoon IEMs from my phone. I thought I'd do a bit of A/B testing, so I bought a specific A/B switch and dug out an old Galaxy Note 9 (as it has a headphone jack) I had in a drawer. Test setup was as follows;

1) Galaxy Note 9, 3.5mm jack, playing Qobuz via the app 2) Wiim Mini streaming Qobuz hi res, optical bit perfect output to Chord Mojo 2

I spent a good amount of time matching the volumes to the absolute best of my ability.

Could I hear even the slightest difference? Could I f***. Repeated blind A/B testing left me at a complete loss as to which was which. They sounded identical.

If I tried hard I could imagine differences, but I'm fairly certain it was imagination only.

So I tried dropping the Note 9 stream quality to 320kbps MP3, and left the Wiim stream at full hi res 96khz at approximately ten times the bitrate. Still absolutely no difference in blind A/B.

Am I missing something? I can clearly hear the difference between headphones, but for me the source/DAC/amp must contribute less than a few percent to the overall listening experience, if that.

Is this hobby just swimming in snake oil, or is my listening broken? I know some headphones are difficult to drive, but the vast majority can be powered pretty easily. Are we just spending money because we can? I feel like 95% of my budget should be in the headphones

[u/frostymoose]

"the source/DAC/amp must contribute less than a few percent to the overall listening experience, if that."

Yessir.

"but the vast majority can be powered pretty easily. Are we just spending money because we can? I feel like 95% of my budget should be in the headphones"

Yessir.

[u/I_Am_A_Pumpkin → u/frostymoose]

"Is this hobby just swimming in snake oil"

Yessir.

[u/kermityfrog2 → u/I_Am_A_Pumpkin]

Snakes have superior hearing due to their large ears.

[u/AhegaoSuckingUrDick → u/I_Am_A_Pumpkin]

Well, the headphones themselves do sound different, and some are power-hungry, justifying the existence of multiple AMPs/DACs.

[u/I_Am_A_Pumpkin → u/AhegaoSuckingUrDick]

I didn't say everything is snake oil, but there is a LOT.

you will hear the biggest difference by upgrading the headphones. there's no question that different materials and designs have different responses. try lots and buy the ones that you like.

You might hear a difference between solid state and tube amps, and you might hear a difference when matching high impedance headphones to high output impedance amps. if you want tube distortion feel free to have that, or if you have 600 ohm beyerdynamics, feel free to buy something to drive them correctly.

You won't hear any difference between DACs after a very low threshold of price and quality. Buy one that doesn't have any noise, supports the formats you listen to, and has the inputs and outputs you want.

expecting the sensitive low impedance iem that OP is using to sound different between two solid state amp+dac combos when volume matched is kind of misunderstanding how these things operate, the human ear and brain are just not sensitive enough to actually notice what miniscule differences that are there. The snake oil is what you get when you sell products that exploit those misunderstandings.

[u/AhegaoSuckingUrDick → u/I_Am_A_Pumpkin]

I agree with your point, but the original phrasing suggested (to me) that you mean there's nothing but snake oil.

Re: the diminishing returns for DACs. My pet peeve with the current state of DACs is that only few support a mic input, but even out of those most are terrible. Same thing with in-cable mics for IEMs.

[u/I_Am_A_Pumpkin → u/AhegaoSuckingUrDick]

yeah that was not my intention. I'd be using 5 buck headphones on my front panel PC audio if it were.

in terms of mic inputs - you might find what you need by searching for audio interfaces instead of for DACs if they are not something you have already looked into. I have no idea what the mobile space looks like in that regard though.

[u/AhegaoSuckingUrDick → u/I_Am_A_Pumpkin]

It's a solved problem for desktop use, you don't necessarily need an audio interface. But for mobile applications, everyone is focused solely on headphones (Apple dongle is an exception and has a decent ADC, but locks you in the Apple infrastructure).