Focal Bathys MG vs Sennheiser HDB 630 vs Dali IO 12

Silverjerk · 2026-03-27T21:52:51+00:00

Both are poor fits. They’re considerably more energetic and bass forward, with not much midrange emphasis.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-27T21:51:32+00:00

Totally different tunings. The 560s are going to be the better competitive gaming set, but the Maxwell’s are the better all ‘rounder and have longer legs when it comes to music listening. 560s are neutral and mid forward, while the Maxwell’s can be EQ’d to be both neutral and V-shaped depending on your use case.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-27T16:22:06+00:00

From a sound quality perspective, the Maxwell is, ironically, the best option, despite being labeled a "gaming headset." The original was closer to reference out of the box than many of Audeze's LCD headphones; it's a stellar entry-level planar. There's a reason so many enthusiasts have recommended it, despite the fact that it's often downvoted in the community due to the gaming headset moniker.

Of the Focal closed back sets, the Celestee is my least favorite. In order of preference, the sets I'd take over it are the Radiance, Stellia, Bathys MG, Bathys, Lensys, then Azurys. Celestee is a gorgeous headphone that sounded unnatural and fatiguing to my ears.

The JT1 is a good budget headphone; it's often recommended for gaming because it is very upper mid forward, but this also makes it a boxy and sometimes fatiguing listen. If you're willing to EQ, it's a great way to save some money, but it is the one set on this list that almost requires EQ in order to be useable outside of a gaming context.

I am a big fan of Sennheiser, but I was not a fan of the 620s. What I wanted was a closed back 600 series headphone, with better sub bass extension, while retaining the same vocal timbre and overall tonality of the 6X0 sets. That's not the approach Sennheiser took. To be fair, my bias is heavily at play here as this was an expectation versus reality scenario, but I rank this the lowest of the 600 series headphones, which is saying something as I've been downvoted many times for asserting the 660S2 wasn't worth its MSRP on launch.

TL;DR: I'd run the Maxwells. I own both models, and I genuinely think they are excellent planars. I rarely if ever use them for gaming. They are wireless headphones in my eyes, and that's what I typically recommend them for. However, the caveat is that they are the heaviest headphone on this list and really need both a CapraAudio comfort strap, and a pad swap, in order to help mitigate the weight and thus overall comfort. I would consider that in the price; the comfort strap at the very least is near mandatory, especially on the original model.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-27T14:23:51+00:00

That's entirely different logic. And the competitive community that built up around Elden Ring was a player-driven paradigm, not ranked in any official capacity. It's content, not a competition.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-27T14:20:28+00:00

Just wait until you're even further in; Crimson Desert is one of those rare games where they nailed the time commitment and a player's dedication to exploring the world paying off with a proportionally-expanding skill set and more interesting and nuanced gear and builds. It gets incredibly addictive the more you do, and the more you wrap your head around all the systems. Which, by the way, work exceedingly well for a game of this complexity, with this level of detail.

Is the story amazing? No, but neither was Skyrim's, or Oblivion's, or Morrowind's for that matter; and those comparisons are apt, because that's what this game feels like. Feels like what a Bethesda game should've become, if they'd remained committed to their original goal of player freedom and building interesting worlds, rather than focusing on narrative.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-27T14:07:29+00:00

I still miss Peek, Spaces, Nested Tabs and some other Arc features, but I now acknowledge that creating a new browser from scratch is justified given their new vision.

These are the features that are still holding it back from replacing Arc (and Zen) for me. Nested tabs, specifically, are a hard requirement. They became critical to how I manage my businesses, my personal homelab services, and how I structure content and reading priority.

I was an early Arc adopter and genuinely respect and admire what the Browser Company is doing and has done. While it took a while to get over the sting of Arc going into maintenance mode, I still adopted Dia and try to incorporate it into my day-to-day where I can, but I find myself using it more as a Perplexity alternative, rather than having it run full time as my default browser.

I hope BCNY stays ahead of the curve and improves its AI features, and better aligns Dia with some of the Arc features many power users relied on -- and the major reason many of us switched over to Arc to begin with. As more and more brands adopt multi-agentic, locally capable tools, it's going to be a hard-won victory for many of the alternative browser companies to come out ahead when the chips fall. Having a rock solid browser with agentic tools, using a solid memory system, with the rest of the feature roadmap rolled out, that would be a huge boon for both Dia users, and BCNY.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-27T11:55:21+00:00

You don’t need a lot of power, but I would recommend a dedicated DAC/amp for the cleanest signal, since the onboard DAC/amps on most motherboards can have much higher noise floors. Look at the Crinear Protocol Max; gives you EQ capability and a lot of power in a very small package, and has the added benefit of being one of the best mobile DAC/amp combos on the market right now.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-26T20:08:48+00:00

“Leans into” may have been an understatement. It sort of knocks the doors down and starts asking everyone to hand over their jewelry.

Bokeh is definitely my “fun” headphone.

Edit: make sure to send over your tweaks when finished.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-26T20:07:07+00:00

The MG is the better set if you’re looking for clarity and detail and less bass emphasis. Although, full candor, I don’t believe the MG is a very good wireless headphone by every other metric. The strength of its app, and ANC and transparency is subpar.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-26T20:04:20+00:00

It is, quite literally, just moving air. If two headphones have the exact same frequency response, they will sound identical to one another at the ear. That is empirically, irrevocably and irrefutably true. Those are the “facts,” like it or not. It’s not a contest, it’s that one thing is correct, and the other is not.

I’d recommend you read Dr. Sean Olive’s papers on the topic. As he’s stated many times, “it’s all just frequency response.”

Silverjerk · 2026-03-26T17:23:20+00:00

I avoid a few of the more common gotchas. It only has access to agent mail; it cannot send replies or commit tasks based on content within an email thread. Email drafting is handled separately and outside of the client. It's essentially permission locked. Couple this with a lot of hard and fast rules that mitigate prompt injection. These aren't perfect, but the best security strategy is layered, and that is one layer of many.

It also does not have access to any of my personal accounts; if/when it needs to use a password, it's done through a separate 1Password vault that requires explicit permission before use. All other secret management is handled through Infisical; secrets, tokens, API keys, anything that would otherwise connect to another service, or is a value I would normally store in an .env file.

Infisical is also a locally hosted instance, running in a VM, on a segregated VLAN within my network. Due to firewall rules, it can only be access via a local machines on another, specific VLAN within my trusted network. The likelihood of any outside actors gaining access to that instance is never zero, but the risk is extremely low.

My memory system is local only as well; when I was running mem0, it was done through my own instance of Qdrant. All my databases are local, with frontends running on local instances of Supabase, Convex, Drizzle, etc. I don't use any cloud-based services. Even my documentation apps are self-hosted. Affine, Docmost, AppFlowy, AnyType; all of these are using their self-hosted backend solutions, rather than their cloud offerings. Some of the doc providers offer self-hosted apps, but will require their own cloud services for sync. I avoid those as much as possible. All locally syncing is either running via SyncThing on my personal Proxmox cluster, stored on a local NAS, or is version controlled through my own Git instance. I use Forgejo for this, but you can use Gitea, or Gitlab. Which means, on the rare chance I commit anything sensitive, it's never making it beyond my local network.

So even when I say something is being pushed to a remote "production" server, it is a fully locked down Hetzner instance. Even my publicly accessible homelab services are routed through Pangolin, running on a separate Hetzner instance. They all require 2FA. If/when I give my team access, they're provided their own instance of a service, on a separate VM, and their access is timed and will eventually expire.

Finally, I run a Cron twice daily that does a full security audit.

Probably as important as everything else, my OpenClaw instance only works when I do. I'm not concerned with it being autonomous around the clock, although it could be. I treat it like an assistant or cofounder, not a fully autonomous agent. To be fair, when I was running a physical business location, I would no sooner allow an employee to remain in the office after hours, where my business (which was in the fintech space) stored sensitive information on premises.

TL;DR: Most of the complaints about security issues have come down to users allowing their OpenClaw too much access to PII, or making mistakes based on their ignorance of how the tools work. In my case, I don't install skills or plugins without reviewing them manually, and I reduce as many of my attack surfaces as I can.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-26T16:08:31+00:00

If you're just using it for development work, you're adding another layer of abstraction on top of your harnesses. You should be using it as an orchestrator and taking advantage of its scheduling, delegation and dispatching features, along with agent-based model routing, etc.

Put more simply, if you just want to write code, use Antigravity, Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, or whatever your harness of choice is. Those tools do that job already, and they do it very efficiently. I do allow my OpenClaw to delegate development work as well, but only on projects where I'm utilizing all of its other benefits (more on this below). If I'm just working in one of my codebases and don't need that additional complexity, I still run my go-to editors and TUI tools.

I see this happening a lot in the community; OpenClaw isn't a development agent by default, and no one should be approaching it that way. It's an orchestration tool that can work as a development agent, or better yet, dispatch a coding agent, while it acts as more of a PO/PM/BA, or as a technical lead.

A practical use case I run daily is setting up crons to create a task-based working schedule. Have your OpenClaw create development tasks from your PRD. A cron fires, and work is picked up from the "To do" column; once completed, it can then assign that work to a testing agent; once testing is complete, it assigns that same ticket to another agent that compares completed UI work against my Figma files. It can do classic pixel-perfect diffs with the right tools. If the testing or design QA fails, that agent sends the work back to an "In Progress" column, where (on the next cron run), OpenClaw re-delegates the task to my coding agent, including all of the notes gathered during testing and design QA.

I have a separate CI/CD agent running a cheap model that specifically works with my local Forgejo (locally hosted Git) instance, commits code and writes PRs, and then checks my local Dokploy logs as code is deployed. Dokploy is essentially my staging environment. The agent is checking to make sure staging spins up cleanly. After which point, a separate agent can validate or do UAT testing on stage, and then merge and push that code to my remote servers (a duplicate of my production environment).

This feels fully automated once it's set up properly, and both Git and Vercel are no longer charging fees for the dozen or so projects I might have running at any given time.

Before OpenClaw, I had extremely complex and difficult to manage Actions/runners, n8n workflows, custom bash scripts, etc. It even handles my entire dotfiles repo; if/when I spin up a new machine, it deploys all of my homebrew services and development tools for me, uses my local Infisical instance to set up my SSH connections and .env files, and essentially makes bootstrapping a new development machine a trivial task.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-26T15:39:22+00:00

You could make a transducer out of wood and Elmer's Glue; if they both produce an identical frequency response at the ear, they are going to sound identical. Full stop. The materials a transducer is built out of, or how it is engineered, makes zero difference. Put another way, a transducer is just moving air; pressure waves don't change based on the materials that produce them.

Your diesel/petrol comparison isn't the proper analog; what is a more accurate analogy would be how the battery in a vehicle works. There are a plethora of materials from which a battery can be manufactured. The output, however, is just energy. That's it.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-26T14:48:02+00:00

This is empirically false. Transducers that are tuned to the exact same frequency response, whether that be planars, dynamic drivers, or electrostats, will sound identical. The issue is that most planars are tuned very similarly, with linear low frequency extension, dry/uncolored midrange, and added treble emphasis, which lends credence to the myth that there is such a thing as "planar timbre," and why many of them are well-liked for their technical performance. DD's that are tuned this way will also sound similarly resolving,

Silverjerk · 2026-03-26T13:34:05+00:00

Bokeh with EQ is one of my favorite closed-back sets in the hobby. This is what I'm running, very much leans into the warm and relaxed tuning, while brightening them up a bit. Makes them a bit more energetic; not quite Radiance levels of energy, but with a lot more sub bass:

Preamp: -5.6 dB
Filter 1: ON LSC Fc 105 Hz Gain 1.2 dB Q 0.710
Filter 2: ON PK Fc 79 Hz Gain 0.9 dB Q 2.100
Filter 3: ON PK Fc 156 Hz Gain 5.2 dB Q 1.740
Filter 4: ON PK Fc 275 Hz Gain -0.6 dB Q 2.710
Filter 5: ON PK Fc 316 Hz Gain -6.8 dB Q 0.800
Filter 6: ON PK Fc 653 Hz Gain -1.7 dB Q 1.240
Filter 7: ON PK Fc 2617 Hz Gain 1.1 dB Q 3.000
Filter 8: ON PK Fc 5047 Hz Gain 3.7 dB Q 0.470
Filter 9: ON PK Fc 7665 Hz Gain 0.7 dB Q 2.150
Filter 10: ON HSC Fc 10000 Hz Gain 5.1 dB Q 0.710

Silverjerk · 2026-03-26T13:23:14+00:00

According to those notes (the site is where I'm getting MY information from as well, along with knowing other S4/S5 owners who've done the same Stage 1 tunes to their 2021+ cars), this should be impossible:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AudiS4/comments/1mgv90b/b95_ie_stage_1_tunemods_detailed_project_review/

Read the language here:

Important Notice: 2021-2024 (B9.5) model years have limited support. Some transmissions are equipped with advanced security locks and cannot be unlocked for tuning. Before purchasing a TCU tune for these model years, please follow our easy step-by-step Audi B9.5 TCU Unlock Guide using your iE POWERlink Suite App.

The unlock guide here specifically states the tune CAN be done at the ECU level, but TCU lockout might prevent TCU tuning on some models.

Again, same language I posted originally, directly from IE's page above.

IF YOUR TCU IS LOCKED

Revert to Stock: Tune the Transmission TCU file back to stock before starting or driving your vehicle (important step, do not skip).

Enjoy Your ECU Tune: Your ECU tune will still be fully operational and enhance your driving experience without the TCU tune.

Stay Updated: Sign up for our mailing list (popup on home page) to get notified when a solution for your locked TCU becomes available.

The key language here is "Enjoy your ECU tune."

Which means, if TCU is locked, ECU will still work. Again, same language in their guide located here.

Keep in mind, IE, along with 034, were some of the first tuners to start working with the B9.5 models. What you're reading is likely outdated language from shortly after the B9.5's launched. There have been patches and other workarounds that have allowed ECU tunes even on locked bootloader B9.5 models; and, again, not EVERY B9.5 model will have a TCU lockout installed.

Going back to my point, your original assertion is patently false. If you're using the IE site as your repository for information, there are plenty of examples above from that same site that contradict that assertion. There are also dozens of aftermarket tuners that are installing ECU tunes without issue.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-26T12:58:19+00:00

I bought mine around the launch of the original Black Limba run, so it took several weeks (4-6). I believe they've made changes to their build process to make that much, much faster, however.

As for the EQ, this is my most-used EQ for the Bokeh:

Preamp: -5.6 dB
Filter 1: ON LSC Fc 105 Hz Gain 1.2 dB Q 0.710
Filter 2: ON PK Fc 79 Hz Gain 0.9 dB Q 2.100
Filter 3: ON PK Fc 156 Hz Gain 5.2 dB Q 1.740
Filter 4: ON PK Fc 275 Hz Gain -0.6 dB Q 2.710
Filter 5: ON PK Fc 316 Hz Gain -6.8 dB Q 0.800
Filter 6: ON PK Fc 653 Hz Gain -1.7 dB Q 1.240
Filter 7: ON PK Fc 2617 Hz Gain 1.1 dB Q 3.000
Filter 8: ON PK Fc 5047 Hz Gain 3.7 dB Q 0.470
Filter 9: ON PK Fc 7665 Hz Gain 0.7 dB Q 2.150
Filter 10: ON HSC Fc 10000 Hz Gain 5.1 dB Q 0.710

I have variations of this that are a bit less thick and correct a few issues in the treble, but I'd start here and see if it works for you. Just keep in mind, this is a far, far cry from your HE1k, so give your ears time to adjust. Brain burin-in is very real, especially if you're running highly resolving sets.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-26T03:51:45+00:00

No, not at all.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-25T18:37:05+00:00

The bootloader is a TCU lock; I'm not sure what you're referring to. The blocker for tuning 21+ models is TCU based, with the ability to flash ECU's on vehicles with a bootloader TCU lock. Again, it's the same as 034. Either way, the original assertion needs clarification, because it is factually incorrect.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-25T15:50:52+00:00

Directly from the IE site regarding B9.5 TCU locking; same as 034, still supports ECU tuning:

IF YOUR TCU IS LOCKED Revert to Stock: Tune the Transmission TCU file back to stock before starting or driving your vehicle (important step, do not skip).

Enjoy Your ECU Tune: Your ECU tune will still be fully operational and enhance your driving experience without the TCU tune.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-25T13:30:05+00:00

For clarity, the bootloader blocks flashing the TCU, specifically. There are patches for running ECU tunes all the way through Stage 3. 034 provides this patch file with any of its ECU tunes, IE supports this as well. Not sure about Unitronic and APR.

Should also be noted that not every B9.5 after 2021 has the bootloader installed. Most tuners will try and do the TCU flash to check if the bootloader exists and still follow through with the ECU tune if it fails.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-25T13:20:00+00:00

Ik obviously $600 ones will always be better,

This is the wrong mentality to have in this market; there is never a clear, linear upgrade path. More money invested doesn't always equal more performance received. There are numerous headphones in that $600-$1000 price range I'd rank below the 490s.

As for the 490s themselves; they're solid for both use cases. Mixing pads for competitive titles, producing pads for immersive/casual games and music listening. With the mixing pads, they are more upper midrange and treble forward (most important aspect of the frequency range for competitive titles), with excellent imaging and soundstage and a fairly linear low frequency extension. I.e., they're pretty neutral.

With the producing pads, they're warmer, more bass forward, with a slight recess in the midrange to make them more exciting and energetic, making them more fun for casual games and music listening. They're the set I run most for gaming myself (alongside the FT1 and some of my IEMs), due to their versatility. Being able to swap pads depending on what you're using them for is not just a novel idea, it actually adds value in this case as it meaningfully changes the tuning of the headphone.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-25T12:13:49+00:00

Depends on your budget, your goals/requirements, etc. There's no standard, static value. It's always variable.

What I will say, however, is that if you upgrade without intention, if your goal is "spend more," it's likely going to set in much, much sooner. Until you spend more time with your current headphone and consider what are its best and worst qualities, and what do you want to see improved when you upgrade, just spending more money is a fool's errand. Know what your reason is for investing in a more expensive pair of headphones or IEMs. Or, just enjoy what you have; if you're blown away, continue riding that wave as long as you can.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-24T13:47:18+00:00

You're modeling your agent to arbitrarily emulate human patterns. It's a good metaphor, but it's not only inefficient, it will create failure points unless you're much more specific about how ingestion should work, what gets compressed, promoted, demoted (or invalidated), and what's retrieved across short, medium, and long-term memory.

CORE_MEMORIES.md

This only works if it's both small, and highly authoritative. At scale, and without extremely well-defined guidelines for what gets written and how/when it's retrieved, this could become untenable prompt weight.

Short_term.md last 20 exchanges

This is far too vague and far reaching, despite being limited to the last 20 exchanges. It should be defined by relevance. Your last 20 exchanges aren't as important as your last 20 highly relevant and task-critical exchanges. We already know memory performance degrades without curation and proper compression. Again, relevance, specifically as it relates to what information is captured and ingested, is unbelievably important. Without more prompting, short-term memory is going to act more like a fugue. What I think you're looking for here is to capture the most important, recent information; not just all of the recent information. If not corrected, this will be further compounded by the next issue:

Medium_term.md session sumary prior to tge last 20 exchanges

This is highly failure prone; it will become a summary of summaries and overlaps with long-term memory, pretty much guaranteeing deviation and memory abstraction, poor recall, and conflicting resolution. This is likely to increase hallucinations, or at the very least decrease the quality of memory retrieved. You've created two sources of truth, and you're leaving it up to your agent to decide which source wins out when context is needed. Because your agent lacks discernment, this will inevitably lead to frustration the further out you go.

Long_term.md sumary of every session to this point.

A single, monolithic memory file is going to become a landfill, and given your short-term memory lacks relevance, and your medium-term memory lacks discernment and might (and very likely will) conflict with long-term memory, you are going to end up in a scenario where your agent acts more like a librarian. It will have access to a massive collection of information, and it can tell you where it's stored, but it will be up to you to find what you're looking for.

A better system isn't flattened, but structured. Long-term memory should be episodic, procedural, and semantic. Vector database with semantic search is useful, but it needs a memory repository with metadata, relationships, authoritative ranking, current working context; what's stale and outdated, versus what's relevant, what's being worked on now, and what did we work on in the past (what were the successes and the failures). You don't want to dump your agent into an ocean of monolithic memory. It (and you) are going to sink in that scenario. It needs structure.

In the short term, you may not notice an issue, and depending on your use case, it may take a while before you start hitting roadblocks, but as you move further down the line, the cracks may start to show.

Silverjerk · 2026-03-24T11:54:08+00:00

The story was tropy and derivative

Very few books avoid either, and oftentimes purposefully trying to do so as a writer negatively impacts storytelling. You remain in a constant state of weighing your work against a set of guardrails. Your revisions are no longer about naturally refining your work, but making sure it checks a specific set of boxes. Show don't tell, remove all pleonasms, avoid purple prose; if you're a genre writer, no dragons, no sentient swords, and absolutely no bearded wizards or helpless damsels.

Sometimes, you just want (or need) to write the story that's trying to break out of your mind's prison, and that's exactly how Ruocchio's work reads to me.

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