Thanks 1M for the feedback Page. OOK and I have had an active PM dialog going ever since I made that OP. Since then, I've spent oh about 50% of my awake time poring over
www.head-fi.org. The feedback you gave above is very consistent with what OOK told me AND I'd concluded from sorting through the various head-fi threads, reviews, noob inquiries from others, etc. I especially found useful the advice that working backwards from the phones is how to go about this. So, armed with a bit of knowledge and the time I'd spent with head-fit and OOKs input, I had some small degree of confidence to 'take the plunge'...knowing fully from this taping hobby that I'm probably stepping over into a point of no return abyss in terms of never going back from the 'personally acceptable sound' and 'leave the wallet at the door' themes. Earlier in the week I did some research of the local hi-fi stores in the area. With all of this, I had enough confidence to go in with my credit card in hand.
Turns out this place has a quite well stocked listening station and the guy that helped me was well informed. Before we even started, he first asked what my budget was (around a grand) and what I wanted included in that budget (phones, amp, dac). He also asked what I typically listen to and the goals I had in mind for my ultimate listening experience. Based on how we approach similar scenario's with noobs here on ts.com, I liked those questions and almost immediately felt like I'd walked into the right place.
So, next he suggested I take a seat in a chair they had near one of their two listening stations. I told him before listening to anything that I didn't really want to listen to anything higher end from my budget because I wanted to stick to my budget and didn't want to be disappointed if that meant 'settling' on something that didn't sound as good as something he'd have me try. He put that concern to rest immediately by explaining that's exactly the philosophy he takes and that he was going to use a mid- price amp/dac combo to have me test all of the phones from so that I could get a good feel of the sound differences from one model to the next. That made sense to me.
So basically from that point he had me audition about 6 sets of phones that were roughly in the price range that met my budget…about $250 to $500 range. I think the low end of the price range was Beyer DT880 and the upper end of the range was a pair of Grado (can’t remember the model though). In between, I tried a pair of Senn HD600, Beyer 990 Premium and one or two others I can’t remember. After a very subjective process of elimination, I narrowed my selection down to the Beyer DT880 and DT990. I decided on the 990 based on their low end ballsy character. I might have gone with the 880, but reasoned that I also have a pair of ATH-M50 at home and those have a very neutral presentation as a closed back phone, so felt that the open back 990 might be a good compliment to what I already had. The only question mark I had at that point was that the 990’s that I auditioned were straight out of the box, whereas all of the other phones that I’d listened to were from their station, so they’d been burned in. Still, I reasoned that if the 990s sounded best to me at that point, theoretically they’ll only sound better after burn in, so I was pretty pleased what that decision.
I was especially stoked when, after the guy left me alone to figure out what he wanted to show me as far as dac/amp, I discreetly checked the B&H website for their price on these phones and found out the price these guys wanted was exactly the same price…$375…nice.
Next to the DAC/AMP. For this, he didn’t have nearly as much stock to try out as he did phones. We auditioned a couple of different products that I can’t remember the name of. Wasn’t too impressed though. I asked the guy if the unit I’d listened to in the listening station was available and he said it was. Since my reference listening was done though that, I figured it would be logical to focus on that unit since that’s what I’d used to settle on the 990’s. That also seemed consistent with something I’d read on head-fi is that it’s not insignificant factor to try to match and amp/dac to the headphones and some combo’s sound better than others. I KNOW that’s true in our world of mics/preamps, so it made sense to me to focus on this for my first amp/dac.
Turns out it’s an amp/dac combo…and it fit my budget just fine. So fine, I’d already spent over an hour listening to that unit and I obviously liked how it sounded with the phones I’d chosen, so decision made! I ended up with a Parasound Zdac which I later checked B&H and again their price was spot on the same as B&H at $475. Not sure why, but he knocked it down to $450 for me…New Years Eve special I guess. Nice again…especially since I walked out UNDER my budget by over $100. Might have saved a couple bucks by not paying sales taxes if I’d gone through B&H, but there’s NO WAY I’d have been able to have the personalized service or ability to spend time doing A vs. B testing like I did.
So when I walked out I was a very happy customer.
I haven’t been able to spend too much time with the combo so far, but as of today, I’m having some problems that I haven’t yet been able to figure out. First off, when I walked out, I thought I was leaving with a pair of 600ohm headphones. Didn’t realize it until yesterday that they’re actually 32ohm. More on this in a second. So one the way home from the store I couldn’t resist, so I put the phones on my ipod/fiio head amp combo that I have. The fiio is a low powered amp that I’ve been using with my earbuds. Remember, when I walked out I thought I’d bought the 600ohm model, and to be honest at this point I didn’t think these phones would work with this combo, but to my surprise they worked and sound great. My only issue was that my volume levels were a bit low, so when I turned everything up to max (including the gain and eq switches on the amp) I was able to distort the phones with the most thumping EDM type music I’ve taped. Otherwise, they sounded GREAT, especially through that little el cheap $60 fiio amp. It’s interesting because I don’t hear NEARLY as much fidelity improvement with my IEMs (Shure 215) as I hear when I switch between the ipod and the amp outputs with the DT990s. Wow, with the exception of the distortion I was getting on the peak bass notes at the loudest volumes (I don’t get that with my ATH-M50) I was astounded by the sound.
So, obviously after this experience, I was really excited to test out the dac/amp combo. Since it was late on NYE when I got home, I had to devote the remained of NYE to Mrs. Toney…we had a wonderful evening at home and rather than doing our usual NYE dinner out, we decided to have a fantastic time at home and cooked up a couple of lobsters along with filet mignon and baked a pie. It was awesome.
But obviously, when I got up yesterday morning my mind was on my new sound gear. I’ve never used my computer as my main listening station and had always used my ipod…yeah I know, but remember way back at the beginning of this post, I already said that I’ve been trying for years to avoid this moment of jumping into higher-fi on the playback side since I KNEW it would be another unneeded money pit and also since I’ve been fully vested in higher end on the taping end I knew what to expect once I delved into this end of the spectrum. Anyway, so I was excited to set my computer up to test out the DAC. My main music storage location is one redundant 1tb passport drive, so I grabbed that since it has all my master recordings saved as 24/48 FLAC files. Since I’d never used my computer as my music player, I spent the majority of the morning researching and setting up Foobar2000 with all of its different components/plug-ins…deciding which plug-ins I wanted to install and teaching myself how to use them. This, in itself, was a revelation to me because I’d been told numerous times by people on ts.com how easy it is to tag my FLACs with Foobar, but have never done any FLAC tagging since I never played my FLACs. So I got distracted for a couple of hours playing with Foobar and using it to newly tag some of my most recent shows…and marveling at how easy it is (just like I’ve been told) to tag my FLAC files using the Live Show tagger…or whatever it’s called.
After spending the morning on the computer, decided to leave it alone for awhile and spend some quality time with the wife and dogs…watched a little bit of the Winter Classic together, the Rose Bowl, etc. FINALLY, around 9pm last night, I hooked everything up…made sure drivers were properly installed on the computer after the Zdac was turned out. Verified the computers sound was pointed towards the USB and the ZDac and fired this sucker up!!!
Oh no! Nothing. Hmmm. First thing I noticed is, I wasn’t hearing with the amp volume at around 9pm. So I start increasing the volume knob and I start to get sound. Hmmm. Volume level really isn’t decent until the vol knob is all the way to 3pm and the levels I’d prefer to listen at don’t occur until I crank it all the way full…which is just a tad short of 6pm. Then I immediately noticed that the sound, even at 3pm was very distorted. Not noisy like diginoise, but the music distorted. Hmmm.
So my first focus was on the computer. Checked settings, fiddled around with various gains, balance, etc settings in both my control panel type locations and the specific drivers. Yes, they offered some control, but don’t resolve the basic issue.
Next went back to the Parasound manual to see if there’s anything in there that would give me a clue what’s up. Nothing…manual says the Zdac headphone amp section should be good to drive headphones ranging from 32ohm up to 600ohm. That statement reminded me that, when I checked the B&H website, I noticed that there are three specific models of the DT990 headphones available; 32ohm, 250ohm and 600ohm. Recall from earlier than when I walked out of the store, I thought I’d gotten the 600ohm model. So I went back to my car trunk (where the box was still located) and pulled out the box. On the box top, there’s a check-box identifier showing which model is included inside the box. Obviously, I hadn’t seen this before, but turns out that he gave me the 32ohm version of the phones.
Well, it was about 10pm when I made this discovery, so I wasn’t going to go any farther, but I went to bed thinking that’s probably the explanation for why I’m not getting good sound out of the amp…but honestly this morning I’m confused. I don’t understand necessarily why I’d have to crank the volume on the amp to get a decent volume level with these, when I get decent volume from that el cheapo fiio amp. Also, I get great sound out of that amp and even acceptable sound out of my ipod, but not the Zdac. Which is confusing. Since I had to get up first thing and come to work, I haven’t really had any time to investigate (and since I just spent an hour writing this post up…LOL)
So, that’s my initial experience. So far I’m really excited about the sound I’m going to get, but right now just slogging through what my issues are with the computer based set up. Any ideas and/or feedback appreciated…obviously right now I’m thinking these particular phones aren’t matched well to the amp, even though the amp manual says it handles 32ohm headphones fine I’m wondering if that’s my issue.
Regardless of any of this, Happy New Year everyone! May your 2014 be filled with lots of great taping experiences.