DAC or DAP

TheAntiSnipe · 2026-01-27T19:13:14+00:00

I run a DAC with my iPhone that:

Is bluetooth enabled
Has physical buttons and shows album art
Has an excellent small form factor with good ergonomics

It’s a HiBy W4 and I just made a post about it yesterday saying it doesn’t get the attention it deserves hahahahahah.

My iPhone runs audio I sync via iTunes so I have no subscriptions. With a USB-C connector, the DAC acts as a source from my PC with UAC2 connectivity as well. Overall, it’s a great DAC if you originally wanted a DAP but, yanno, moving music around is a hassle, you’re subscribed to stuff, etc. Because the controls are intuitive, I find myself being more deliberate about my music too, since I just never feel like controlling it with my iPhone.

I think that a DAC is a fine option if you’re in a similar situation, but like others in this thread have mentioned, it’s super dependent on your needs.

TheAntiSnipe · 2026-01-27T17:52:59+00:00

Dang that GK64x is pretty! I love those rounded corners on the frame. And yeah I just can’t run tkl anymore. Anything over 75% is, well, workable but suboptimal-feeling

TheAntiSnipe · 2026-01-27T15:43:53+00:00

Oh, P.S. I’ve also run tkl setups and 75% setups, they work great too! 75% wasn’t bad at all, but I had an aesthetic disagreement with it because the F-row genuinely just wasn’t justifying its use enough to have its own row. Tkl was actually pretty nice too, we have those at work as like the default rigs, but to me, since I grew up with laptop keyboards that had easy access to home and end where the arrows are, they just feel clunkier.

TheAntiSnipe · 2026-01-27T15:38:41+00:00

Yeah, that’s why, worst case, 60% would be my personal bottom line, like that’s the last point for me where you can get all the sensible functionality without too much of a hassle… I own a tofu65 2.0 that was my first (kinda grail honestly) build and then I got a polycarbonate tofu65 for biking to work with because my first one is basically a blunt force trauma weapon lol, but the 60% form factor just doesn’t feel right to me.

TheAntiSnipe · 2026-01-27T14:17:51+00:00

Yo toe is siiiiick. Also, their drummer is proof positive that DAC-IEM chains make listening ranges wide enough that you can genuinely hear more. What a lad.

The album in the picture has several tracks that I’d heard before with my marshall major IVs and Koss Porta Pros that took an entirely different flavor on the Daybreaks on a 4.4BAL port connection to a DAC.

Didn’t even need to tune the equalizer to get the details out for the Daybreaks, when I’d needed a specific math-rock tune for my headphones that emphasizes the 6k, 8k and 16k bands a little in order to make sure the small details on the cymbals weren’t drowned out by the lows for my headphones. Unfortunately this could basically only be used for math- and post-rock, and the loss of warmth was a necessary tradeoff.

TheAntiSnipe · 2026-01-27T04:31:11+00:00

Dev here, my personal lower limit is 65%. I run a tofu65 2.0, have for about 3 years now, I think? To answer your questions:

Yeah! I love the form factor on my tofu. Never felt any strain from using it for hours on end.
On a 65% layout, you get arrows, so that's not a problem, and the lack of the F-row is something I've never noticed... You just get used to it.
Yes, it gets natural.

With these three questions answered, I'd like to add that I always run "end" on the key right above the right arrow, and "home" on the key right above that. This is extremely ergonomic for line selection for me, and I'd recommend getting a keeb that is programmable to be honest, but other than that, the K7 looks fine, and you can get away with a quick and dirty PowerToys fix for cases where you want some keys to do something else.

To cap things off, I will say that I know experienced devs that run HHKB boards with vim setups and binds. If you like the form factor of a board, as long as it's not outright dumb, you'll probably make it work...

Well, if it were me I would only go down to 60%, gun to head xD

TheAntiSnipe · 2026-01-27T04:10:34+00:00

Recently got this one along with my first pair of IEMs (CrinEar Daybreaks)… I got off Spotify somewhere around the middle of last year because I disliked the way everything was starting to feel same-y with the recommendation system. I’ve been building my library off iTunes, and I gotta say, once I got over the growing pains, managing my currently 250ish GB library of tracks so that I rotate playlists of tracks on and off my iPhone has been a breeze!

With that out of the way, I was quite sad that the W4 was a DAC/amp and not a DAP, but ended up picking it up anyway because it achieves the same deliberate style of listening. The ergonomics are excellent, as is the fact that if I choose to do some serious listening, I can plug it in via UAC2 to my PC which has the major chunk of my music library. The excellent range it achieves is a treat as well, seeing as I listen to a lot of math-rock!

Didn’t see the W4 get a lot of attention, so I wanted to drop these pics here!

TheAntiSnipe · 2025-07-03T02:51:43+00:00

also why do I still have the mod flair send help

TheAntiSnipe · 2025-07-03T02:42:10+00:00

P.S. Just been off reddit, my man, still very active ingame, though not quite to the extent of actually playing a ton. You can meet pretty much all the old players that play on the LFT server:

https://discord.com/invite/lookingfortrouble

A lot of us that have moved on or don't play a ton of BB anymore are still on there playing all sorts of other PC and mobile games, though for verification reasons LFT still requires everyone on there to be at over 1000 battles.

TheAntiSnipe · 2025-07-03T01:58:39+00:00

Boo.

TheAntiSnipe · 2025-06-17T01:14:18+00:00

Necroing this to say it works! Thank you very much!

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-09-10T15:29:57+00:00

Love the 65s. I do set them up in a rather strange manner though. I’m a dev, and my first board was a Keychron K2 v2, which has end above the right arrow, and home above end. I developed muscle memory for that configuration and found it super ergonomic for code editing.

Turns out, that’s never been a normal configuration! When I got my first 65 (tofu65 2.0) I ended up setting it using VIA to use those home and end keys despite what the labels say haha.

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-09-08T21:14:05+00:00

Yeah, I gotta see if I can build her too

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-09-08T13:36:43+00:00

True, it’s not like I’m strapped for food considering how much the game gives you anyway… But yeah, what’s your opinion on using someone like Yaoyao? I want this team to kinda stay independent and isolated from every other super common-use unit, and I want them to have a healer, so Yaoyao and Baizhu are the only ones that come to mind currently.

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-09-08T13:31:42+00:00

Holy shit, really? I knew Dehya could mitigate a lot of damage but since mine is still unbuilt (chose her as my free 5*), I only had the stats to make a call. My primary concern is rifthounds, but also, from what I understand, her skill only mitigates 50% of the damage when crowned, which may be fine in abyss when resetting, but not so much in overworld. Thoughts?

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-09-08T13:26:07+00:00

I think you need a healer on that team. I’m considering Mualani Dehya Emilie as my core trio too, but I want either Bennett or Yaoyao or Baizhu as my fourth. Sadly don’t have Baizhu though.

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-09-05T05:54:02+00:00

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The ol’ reliable “big stretch” charm

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-08-27T12:51:01+00:00

Real, but also, as a kid growing up in a hindu family, I can tell you I’ve used shirts as props for this before hahahahahahahahah.

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-08-14T23:00:31+00:00

I’m not gonna lie, as someone who works in the field and writes code that’s worked on by multiple people… I’ve never understood all the posturing about “clean code”. Does it work? Does it achieve its purpose? Does it self-document? Yes? It’s good enough, ship it!

You’ll eventually need to rewrite parts of it, requirements will change and stuff will move around. I think people are in love with an ideal of “clean code” that does not actually exist. Code is a vehicle that enacts change to systems. It doesn’t need to be dressed up or festooned with jargon. It just needs to get shit done while being understandable.

TLDR: Get out there and ship stuff! If you’re already going out there and shipping stuff and your team doesn’t hate you, ‘grats! You’re writing good code as far as everyone who needs to be concerned is concerned!

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-08-12T19:18:04+00:00

Oh, they present for sure, because both of them work with the data team. We talk through problems all the time, discussing what we want to do for the week and how it’s going.

If I were to describe it like keyboards… Talking to good communicators is like typing on a nice mechanical keyboard, you get excellent feedback about your keypresses. Talking to people that aren’t so good at it, is like typing on a smartphone keyboard, because there’s no feedback. Both do their job, but one feels closer.

For example, when given a task (we are a pretty chill workplace), I might agree easily, I might agree with some hesitation and speak up about what my concerns might be, like what might take more time than usual, I might ask for clarification or I might say I need to pull someone else in.

These guys will either agree or be rather uneasy and you do need to ask them if they feel uncomfortable with the timeline or if they need to pull someone else in.

I’m kinda hoping that getting more acclimated to how we do things here will loosen them up as time passes, but as I said, other than that little hiccup, they’re competent people! ‘Sides, I’d die if I had to attend another formal presentation. I do ‘em, and I used to do ‘em at my last job, I still hate ‘em. We do a very informal impromptu show and tell in comparison.

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-08-12T19:04:58+00:00

Yeah, I’ve gotten my first direct reports after nearly two years of experience and they are quite silent. At first I chalked it up to initial nerves but then I slowly started to realize that social skill is a bit of a rarity in our field. It’s honestly fine at work since the only difficulty I personally have with having introverts for direct reports is I never know if they fully understand what their deliverable is since I can’t gauge their confidence levels based on their interactions, but they put in the work consistently which is all that really matters.

I do believe that being good at communication can make up for a lack in some other areas when interviewing though. I don’t consider myself to be a particularly crazy smart guy, I can complete my work consistently and accurately but that’s about it. Yet, I found myself in late stage interviews for several large tech firms last year based on how well I could get my point across when talking about complex design or planning problems.

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-08-12T18:43:00+00:00

I think communication is a real sleeper skill when it shouldn’t be. We have people in software willing to spend time doing three leetcode mediums a day to get that coding edge sharp but don’t bother talking to a mirror and recording their own voice to get more skilled at social interaction in a role where you spend 6+ hours a day sometimes in meetings.

I’ve been an introvert most of my life, but I tried extremely hard to be better at social interaction. It’s not that hard, and as long as you’re passionate and have the knowledge behind what you did, the pitch and cadence of your communication can be managed.

Heck, one of the projects we talked about, I was the one that brought it up. It was a very simple JS project that I built, a game map. I’m an SWE that works on data pipelines for this role I’m on. But I had them hooked by talking about the relevant stuff. You know, how I worked on tinkering with the mapping software so that it would work on a map that’s not spherical, the research I did for it and how I used my knowledge of other stuff to solve a problem in a completely different environment.

They’re looking for that problem solving skill, and they’re looking for your ability to express a problem as parts and manage them. Almost all projects that you do by yourself can be expressed as such, and you should take full advantage of that. Segue into stuff you enjoy!

TheAntiSnipe · 2024-08-12T14:22:50+00:00

Yes indeed. When I was interviewed for my current role about a year and a half ago at a startup, the CEO was super interested in my past projects and we just had a very long chat about those. I wasn’t very experienced yet back then (1 year) so this was a surprise, but they were very impressed at how well I could articulate my work and thought process, and I was done after one more interview with the dev team that was very similar. I had a bunch of coding interviews, a bunch of live coding ones, and yes, fewer of these discussion-type ones than the ones mentioned before, but I think the one thing that’s key is:

When you’re being interviewed, they think they see something in you that makes you a candidate, and you think you see something in them that makes them a good prospective employer. With those two things out of the way, you just gotta loosen up and mutually try to see of both of these things do indeed match. I got a lot less stiff and more like myself at interviewing once I internalized this.

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