Lately I’ve been extremely busy. Its a tough life. Who said life is fair? But who said life can’t have fun?
It has been decades since I got myself into the world audios. Hardly spent much money on it as I’ve been busy with a lot of other expensive hobbies (like photography). In fact audios is a lot more expensive hobby compared to photography. There’s only that much one can spend on Leica vs one who can spend on amplifiers.. pre-amplifiers.. cables? (seriously).
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve got myself back into this bandwagon. More on a low cost, personalised “model”. In Ear Monitor(IEM). The IEM that I’ve gotten is pretty damn good I must say. Plugging in Spotify is more than enough to have a good quality music…Although it’d be unfair of me if I said I had no problem around the heights while fixing it. And then I started to use FLAC, wow.. amazing (those two comparisons we can do on another time..). But that wasn’t enough..
Yesterday – after I finished meeting in KL (yes – I did have a meeting on Saturday). I decided to go to Jaben to get myself a cable so that i can run conference call on my IEM. Then I bumped into the devil! What a coincidence!!! I’ve not seen him for many months, and today I bumped into him. My gosh…. This is not gonna be good.
The funny part, we came to buy the same thing which is the amplifier – JDSLabs C5D. Well – same thought in our mind, the online store for Jaben showed it’s in stock, but in actual fact its not. Oops. And the waiting list for this is 3 months. Gulp gulp.
OK – so its’ 3 months waiting period. What do I do? We tried all sort of amplifier, some more expensive, some cheaper – nothing beats JDS Labs…
Freaking hell, the C5D is really a damn good portable amplifier. And for the price, it really kills off even the much more expensive amp.
After a bit of negotiating, managed to get Jaben to give me a loaner, at the same time I paid the full amount and will wait for 3 months (maybe 4). But heck, I got what I wanted! In addition to that, I also got the mic cable (which is probably my worst investment ever!!!).
After Jaben – me and Ed went our separate ways. I left home and did all sort of test, like connecting the amplifier to my PC 🙂
Man, quality of the music using FLAC with bitrate of 4k is just super amazing. The clarity of it. Soon after, Ed buzz me. He said, not enough, he needed to buy something – which is the Grado. So we headed over to Amplified. Met Joseph, nice chap. Ed got his SR80 Grados (cheap I must say), while I took the opportunity to test JDS versus the rest of the portable amplifiers.
What really surprised me is that the Sony PHA-3, which is hell a lot more expensive than my “cheapo” JDS Labs – sounds extremely flat! Out of the 3 amplifiers we tested at Amphead…. C5D won! Great bass, great depth, good high notes 🙂 Happy camper. Now now… no more splurging on other toys.