My Listening Room & Audio Setup

I haven't published any post in this new year yet because I think there are nothing worth enough to share. My last post about building a DAC that based on the Nakamichi Dragon DAC schematic is now become my currently best DAC. It is sound so good, yet the most expensive DAC I've ever built. I think this is my full stop to make any DAC again.

So in this post is just about myself, lying on my sofa while listening the music with my DIY stereo system in one fine evening, probably few days before the new year. With the borrowed camera on my hands, I try to take few pictures about all of my audio system.

I think the picture are worth to share.

I don't have special room for my stereo system. The room that I use for my listening session is actually our family living room that we are often spend our time together watching TV, playing games, take some snacks, coffee time, studying, working and of course, listening to the music.

The room is not designed for a proper listening room. The floors are using ceramic tiles, the ceiling are using gypsum material, and the wall are all concrete. The room is large enough, about 6 meter by 5 meter by 4 meter with the front side is filled with large wooden cupboard along with TV, display cabinet and drawers that many our stuff are put inside them. I also put my speakers on the same cupboard which are definitely not an ideal place, but better than using speaker standing at the quarter of the room while the risk of my kids accidentally hit them are probably just like count down the time.

On the right side is the large window covered with thick curtain. It really helps to absorb the room vibration very well, but on the left side is just a plain concrete wall. Maybe someday I will put some large and thick canvas painting on it so the sound reflection can be minimized.

My sofa is placed at the middle of the room. It is a three-seater sofa that I bought from IKEA named VIMLE. Between the sofa and the front large cupboard, there is a coffee table made by thick tempered glass. Again, this is unacceptable for getting a good sounding room. I used to have a thick rug on the floor, right below the coffee table. The rugs size is about 2 meter by 1,5 meter, it helps a lot to bring down the room noise but my wife having some allergic to it, so I remove it.

I also put some tall IKEA drawers at the back of the room to put shoes and books. They are actually helping the room to become quieter. The others chair is IKEA POANG which is one seater chair that become our favorite chair because it is easy to move around the room and put anywhere we want.

My speaker system is a pair of 2-way configuration with compact ported enclosure. The speaker drivers are using all SB Acoustic drivers, a well-known Indonesian drivers manufacture for their quality.

The woofer is SB16PFC, the tweeter is SB19ST, the cross-over are second order Butter-worth cutting at 2,6 kHz.

The digital audio player using in my setup is iBasso DX-90 portable audio player. The reason I still using this old audio player is simply because it has SPDIF output.

I'm not using hi-res on-line music streaming although my DAC is capable to process the audio data up to 24-bit 96 kHz. In my opinion, all above 16-bit CD quality are useless.

All music files are ripped using Exact Audio Copy, a PC based programs that convert CD to WAV files. The files are stored on Sandisk SD card and put inside the iBasso DX-90.

DAC in this setup is Nakamichi Dragon DAC clone. It uses 4 piece of PCM1704 in balanced-parallel configuration. The output stages are using 4 pieces OPA627 as IV conversion and an OPA2604 as balanced to single-ended converter. The cut-off LPF is at -3 dB, 22 kHz, low enough to remove any residual digital noise.

The power amplifier is dual mono Myref_C LM3886 designed by Mauro Penasa. It has decent power output and sound just like class-A amplifier with the cost of class-AB amplifier.

This whole audio setup is become my personal goals when working on these electronic hobbies for years.

I guess I had it all now.

Disclaimer: Any statement and photos in this article are not allowed to copy or publish without written permission from the writer. Any injury or loss from following tips in this article is not under writer responsibility.