Because i just don’t trust snake oil company A&K, which is notorious of selling ultra-high-end devices at astronomical prices without proper confirmation the quality of their products. [fishy behavior during repair services] [stupid restrictions of not being able to install Android applications] not the best convenience and speed of interface [sometimes even buggy] ugly shape design [pretending to be cool, but actually such devices are pain in a butt to hold and operate to] and so on and so on … That is why i choose something different.

Previously i was quite satisfied with the [iBasso DX240] / [FiiO FA9] conjunction. But after some evening conversations with [DeepSeek] and [Qwen] , I decided to purchase the [FiiO FA19] . The main problem is that I did not stop there and decided to go completely crazy and dive into the [HiBy R8 II] / [Empire Ears Odin] configuration. Now to the main essence of things. FiiO FA7 has lots of bass and quite lush, mushy mids and trebles.

As you already know i fed up using [modern Ryzen/Radeon hardware] and decided to go a bit retro. Cheap Chinese clone mobos and second-hand high-performance cpu’s of previous generations induced me to rebuild my workstation and also fool around with Opteron-based server.
Here is [very detailed spreadsheet comparision] of almost all available Chinese x79/x89/x99 boards on the market.

UPDATED ON: 2022-08-13 ▒ PREFACE WORDS As you remember, my [previous daily driver was Ryzen 9590x 16c/32t] . After some fun with it I’ve decided to drop it in favor to retro stuff. Intel Xeon CPU based around Broadwell tech: [E5-2696v4 22c/44t] became the chip of the choice. It is OEM version of top of the line [Xeon E5-2699v4] . It is a bit slower, around marginal 3-4%, but costs significantly less than 2699v4.

Do we really need expensive Sennheiser? In youth dates, I was fond of exploiting expensive audio technics.As for earphones, my favorite brand was Bayerdynamic. However, some time ago I have discovered relatively inexpensive headphones from Chinese brand [Fiio] . As a listener of wide gamut of music like ambient, trance, dub, psybient, jazz, metal: I have to say that this headphones provide totally unexpected level of audio quality. Especially if we’ll consider the price.