If anything, make an Opus library :)

ANC has technical limitations, what magic did you expect? Chu's are like a 2 in a 1000 iem that should've cost at least 80€. I'd argue DSP makes them superio, fit is unfortunate, they work just fine in my ear. Genetically more fitting for me.

A good solution is Fiio bt amp dac you can hang around your ear and use on any IEM with 2 pin or MMX.

Good, cheap overear BT are Mpow or AKG's.

Using Plexamp for 192 Opus transcode. Works fine for the limited resolution of my phones DAC.

might consider getting a dongle to give m Tin P1 Max a bit more power to work with. Planar's are hungry

Opus VBR

They also have DSP but that's a different technology

ANC cancels out noise, not add it. Research what phasing does.
I've used Galaxy Buds Pro (1st Gen) to get some peace and quiet in the Bus every morning, in-between screaming children, the loud engine noise, etc. Works really well.

there's well and there's excellence.

No I meant, why are you benchmarking with the computationally most easily decoded platform to test system performance when codecs like Opus, transcoding in real-time, into multiple streams does in fact require <some> processing power. I run a Plex server and all my Music is being transcoded to Opus C-VBR 150 to multiple end-users on the same PC I use as Daily Driver for gaming and rendering tasks.

That has, in fact been done which demonstrates windows direct has noise in the audible range. While WASAPI does not. In fact, with WASAPI and ASIO, there's no need for sample rate conversion at all.

The difference between ASIO/WASAPI and DS is that DS always use the Win mixer.

All audio is dithered by the mixer.

If the sample rate of the audio differs from the one set in the sound panel, it will be resampled.

ASIO/WASAPI (exclusive) will bypass the mixer.

No dither and no resampling if the hardware is able to play the sample rate of the audio. This is about the protocol. The media player might do all kind of DSP like volume control + dither.

You called using asio over windows direct drivers "placebo" even tho noise from sample rate conversion has been demonstrated as audible.

Asio and Wasapi are superior to Windows Direct Audio.

in wav. for sure. Tried a compressed codec?

Wondering why you benchmarked flac encoding and not something computationally advanced such as opus or e-aac3

iirc linux has crappy audio implementation (that's why you'd need some of these for instance.) And yes Windows Direct Audio sucks too. Not too sure about all of them but for Dolby stuff for example you specifically need some licensed software also. I wouldn't call it min-maxing obsession to use software designed to perform audio better than perhaps a general use driver that isn't well optimized for example to play DSD, SAC, Dolby Atmos 7.1, etc..

Phone games are becoming bigger. Thus we need more 1TB phones (there's only a handful rn) and perhaps more later on, same because of Video and image files increasing in size (Iphone will be using 8K video at some point)

AV1 is video a video codec that takes special hardware that phones don't have.
Opus (the audio equivalent) doesn't.

All the time when I'm outside (going to and from places)

Using PlexAmp + Galaxy Buds Pro (1st Gen)

Uhm, yes the kind of claim you made actually does.

I use SA-6 ULTRA's and NTH-100's but ok

Can you show me this kind of metric population data for these claims you're so confident to make?

notice how I said "most people who have heard them". I'm pretty sure Beats by Dr. Dre users don't know or care about audiophile brands or try their headphones

NTH-100's from Rode I'd say.

Flac is an open source project with no licensing fees or royalties so either you mean it just costs more to get Tracks in flac from Production Companies or they're having trouble acquiring the Storage Facilities needed to store the significant increase in size of their 90+ million track library. Not all of which even exist in flac.

Both storage, Game performance and Av1 which is basically going to become industry standard and therefor a necessity are all very noticable. Even to casual users.

Bragging about having permanent hearing damage lmao

or something with detachable cable (even balanced?)

Can you go into detail on "unnatural" ? To most people who've ever heard them they sound astonishingly good from all the reviews and listening tests on the internet (except for people who dislike harman I guess)