Mp3tag. I’ve tried a couple of others, but kept coming back to it.

I wouldn’t say that I classify my collection solely by genre, although I do use Genre tags. For albums or DJ mixes that envelope multiple genres I use multiple tags with a delimiter. Ex. Hip Hop; Shoegaze; Alternative; Rock

As for the directory or folder structure, it’s Artist - Album.

The music server application that I primarily use, Logitech Media Server, offers full text indexed search. That is, every tag, including embedded lyrics and custom ones, are available for query in its client applications.

I own a Jcally JM6 Pro and no complaints.

All we need to concern ourselves with is frequency response, distortion levels, and load characteristics when it comes to examining drivers.

If the frequency response adheres to a well defined target, the distortion inaudible, and the load inoffensive to the majority of amplifiers, the technology used to get there is irrelevant.

The companies that focus on the science and engineering are the ones that make the highest quality products. The ones that don’t are just selling a dream and an aesthetic.

My endgame is high fidelity reproduction. It’s well defined, based upon solid engineering principles, and surprisingly inexpensive to obtain.

Others people’s endgame appears to be defined by the audiophile media outlets. That’s unfortunate really as it’s misleading.

There are a few music player applications that offer Compressors and Limiters in their DSP engines. Ex. Poweramp, and Symfonium.

As for pure EQ applications that offer the same, we’ve got Poweramp EQ, and Wavelet.

Yeah, drop some acid… 💊🤯

Yes, for well engineered amps with no load dependency and low distortion, they’re all going to sound the same driving the same speaker until they clip.

Which phone I use for personal audio doesn’t really matter to me. As long as it’s got a reasonable amount of storage for local playback, good wifi and cellular reception for remote streaming, and a USB-C port, I’m good.

I use external DAC-AMP dongles the vast majority of the time now. My current favorite is a Fosi DS2, but I’ve got three others to fallback on: a Jcally JM6 Pro, an Apple, and an ancient LeEco.

As a digital transport, no network audio player is worth thousands of dollars, especially since performance like the following could be had for $35USD:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?attachments/google-chromecast-audio-toslink-jitter-and-noise-using-roon-and-topping-d50-dac-measurement-png.15620/

That’s a Chromecast Audio’s digital output feeding a well engineered DAC. However, even it’s analog output is transparent:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?attachments/google-chromecast-audio-analog-output-dashboard-measurement-png.15645/

Beyond a CCA, RPi or WiiM Mini, one is paying for additional features, support and aesthetics, because high fidelity is inexpensive to obtain with digital audio. So high fidelity in fact, that many people totally satisfied with nothing more than one of the three I’ve mentioned in systems costing thousands. Ex. CCA has been my choice since '18 and will continue to be well into the future barring an equipment failure.

Off. However, I live alone. If I didn’t, I’d leave them on.

A lot of us actually don’t.

The higher priced ones compete with marketing, case work, product support and perceived brand prestige, not performance.

Amplifiers have been essentially a solved problem for quite some time now and have become commodified as a result.

Commercially available modules and chips (ex. Hypex, Purifi, TI 325X) have made it relatively simple to produce a highly performant unit.

It comes from confidence artists taking advantage of the cognitive biases that we all possess and lay intuition about how this stuff works.

Science aptitude isn’t a common, and music is evocative. Blend that all together and it makes fertile ground for criminals to run wild.

https://www.daytonaudio.com/product/1117/imm-6-idevice-calibrated-measurement-microphone

https://www.roomeqwizard.com/

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/room-measurement-tutorial-for-dummies-part-1.4/

Yes, I took a set of measurements with a calibrated microphone, created correction filters based upon that, loaded them into DSP section of my music player/server application(s), and quite enjoy the results.

Even a well constructed listening room can benefit from it; not all speakers are going to interact with it in an identical way due to their different dispersion patterns.

Here’s an analysis performed by a very experienced electrical engineer. You know, someone actually qualified to answer such questions:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/jps-labs-ultraconductor-2-xlr-cable-review.42728/

There’s plenty more on the site.

Someone did a performance analysis of it a few year ago, and here are his conclusions:

“3. From a sound quality perspective, I don’t think you could go wrong with any of the “sinc” resamplers and DSD modulators I tested out. While I remain agnostic around which DSD/sigma-delta modulator is “best”, I accept that people can have subjective opinions on this since there are real differences in distortion and noise levels between the different settings. Perhaps certain settings could lead to more “euphonic” output depending on one’s gear. But I believe sonic differences would be at best subtle though based on my own listening and what the results tell me.”

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2019/02/measurements-look-at-hqplayer-325.html

Is there some specific reason that you require upsampling? It’s of no benefit in terms of fidelity.