That’s kinda the Hifiman house sound. Try listening to it until you get used to it I guess.
blargh4
joined 1 year ago
They are reasonably sensitive headphones don’t need anything special amp wise.
Can you try them with a different source?
Do headphones that are easy to drive – such as the Hifiman HE1000se – benefit much from better amps?
Half this industry is built on people overestimating the objectivity of their hearing and underestimating their imagination. I’ve done enough blind testing to put infinitely more trust in extremely sensitive lab instruments than casual, uncontrolled listening tests.
Do headphones that are easy to drive – such as the Hifiman HE1000se – benefit much from better amps?
If your view of amps is that they should transparently reproduce the input, the state-of-the-art here starts at less than $200. There’s no obvious way from an electrical engineering point of view for an amp to be meaningfully better at this than the last few generations of the Schiit Magni, for example. The huge wrinkle here is that human hearing is really bad at hearing that two things sound the same if there’s any volume difference or bias.
Not all amps are designed to be transparent of course. There’s evidence people like small amounts of certain kinds of distortion.
The “amplifier requirement for a regular consumer” is dramatically overblown in general, but yes it’s a very solid headphone jack.
Assuming you’re hearing something real, I’m guessing the mobo and included dongle have higher output impedance, which will tend to give you a bit of a bass boost with dynamic driver headphones. Most dedicated headphone gear will be closer to the Apple dongle in that respect.
Examples of what I mean. Amplification types that have an associated sound: OPAMP's, NFCA's, Tube amp's, discrete topology amp's, Forward Feedback amp's, THX, non-negative feedback amp's, Class A amp's, Class A/B amp's, Class D amps, current mode amps (Questyle), etc. Amp differences are easiest to spot based on the shape of the soundstage and how well sounds/effect/instruments are separated and layered. Amp performance is reasonably easy to gauge on an audition.
Just because a low-level implementation detail differs doesn't mean it has a "sound". Your AAC audio doesn't sound different depending on whether it was encoded by an ARM or x86 processor.
...not this shit again
Is there an Amp out there that’ll run both headphones to their maximum potential
The Magni 3 :)
Lowest gain is usually good for IEMs. DAC filters… try and see if you even notice a difference? The default is fine.
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Most of my collection is CD quality FLAC. I don’t believe there is a meaningful benefit to going beyond that. But at this point audio just doesn’t make a big dent in my storage requirements so I usually just download the highest quality.