Headphone Amp/DAC

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  adamren on 14/09/2014 - 23:00

  Can't answer, but am curious about these things. Can I ask you a q?

  Mind telling me about this combo thing? Do you have to get a certain amp to go with certain headphones.

  Can some amps not handle 250 Ohm or is it just an audiophile quirk, or just a personal preference?

  Just saw a store window in Perth today selling those German made phones. I can only imagine they're $500 to $2000!

  I should just go do my own research but you need huge file storage as it's best to get the highest bitrate on your songs? Like the max rip rate on a CD, isn't it 396kb? I think that's audiophile level ;-p

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  pharcyde on 15/09/2014 - 01:21

  The E09K combo is the E09K desktop amplifier, with the E17 DAC.

  I'm nowhere near an expert on this, so take it with a grain of salt. But some amps are more powerful than others, and usually the higher end the headphones, the more power they will need from an amp to drive them adequately.

  If you're talking about the beyers, the pair I bought was $240 del a little while ago on amazon. They have regular sales, and you can often pick something up for relatively cheap off of massdrop (if shipping times don't bother you). Noisy motel and Jaben are other good sites that come to mind.

  I believe CD quality is 320 kbp/s, but again, i'm not an expert. I think certain codecs (FLAC comes to mind) can go higher than that, >500 kbp/s and apple's AAC format might do the same. But I'm with ya there mate, I need to do some research as well. Most of this headphone stuff doesn't make a great deal of sense to me, I just enjoy the quality haha.

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    elusive on 15/09/2014 - 01:50

    CD is uncompressed PCM. It's two-channel 16-bit with 44,100 Hz (samples per second), making it 1,411.2 kbit/s.

    However, it is uncompressed. You can't compare audio quality by bitrate, especially across different formats, and it's certainly possible to tune compression to sound different even with the same format and bitrate. Lossless compression like FLAC can have half the bitrate with literally zero difference when you play it (assuming no bugs, your CPU/player can handle it, obviously).

    MP3s are lossy compression. However, 240 (192?) kbit/s are generally considered the bitrates beyond which humans can't really tell a difference (assuming the compression was tuned correctly and from a clean source). Sometimes it even sounds better, since MP3 compression's lossiness tries to discard excess noise.

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  adamren on 15/09/2014 - 02:15

  Maybe I was getting 394 mixed up with something else. 320 is probably right. I used to rip with Exact Audio Copy but it's silly to do full/best quality if you are just listening to it with sub-audiophile phones.

  I use mp3 as it's fairly portable across devices etc.

  Yeah, people swear they can tell the difference with DAC/Amps and good headphones but apparently it's not really discernible unless you have a really good ear and musically trained, which most of us aren't. It's probably a placebo type thing, you just want there to be something better because you paid $500. Or $2000. Like those Technics or AKG (maybe it's actually AKG Technics, I'm not really actively pursuing it now).

  Thanks for the info, I think Jaben was the name of the store here in Perth, or it had lots of Jaben stickers and posters in the window.

  I'm not sure I'd get a desktop amp, I like the freedom of portable or mini amps, but they're limited by their battery capacity like everything. But a few hours is sufficient, especially if you can swap the batteries out. Last week on MassDrop I saw that some use the Samsung Galaxy S3 battery, so that was interesting.

  A portable one that can run on mains power and can plug in speakers would be good. Not sure if they exist.