Amp For Sennheiser HD600 coming from Xonar D2
- Thread starter easyrider
- Start date
Soldato
Working well with the HD600 and other demanding headphones means very little for the NS1000s in passive mode. Their electrical characteristics are very different. Plus, if unamped, the HD600s still sound OK (although not spectacular).
With the wrong source or amp, the NS1000s with ANR off (as I think you know) sound dismal.
I haven't tried the NS1000s with that many headphone amps, especially higher end ones.
I'll summarise a few amps and sources that I have tried with them:
FiiO e5 - pretty good
Juice 2214 CMOY - pretty good - slightly better than the e5
Bravo v1 Tube amp - dismal
Various Yamaha and Sony AV amps - dismal
Xonar D2 - dismal
X-Fi Prelude - dismal
Sansa Clip - not too bad but loses bass control
Sansa Clip+ - sligthly worse than original Sansa Clip
Sony Erricson w850i phone - Surprisingly good. Not on par with e5 though.
Victor SU-DH1 - Pretty good but not quite as clear as E5.
Mackie 402-VLZ3 - poor to middling.
For a long time I've been puzzled as to why amps that do well with other headphones (the Mackie and Bravo in particular sound very good with my HD600s and DT770 Pro/250s) do so badly with the NS1000s with ANR off. I have a few ideas.
One is that many cheaper amps (and indeed some more specialist expensive ones) are designed to either perform well with voltage or current controlled headphones. I think the NS1000s with ANR off need a bit of both.
Secondly 100 ohms is an odd middling impedance for a headphone. Many headphone amps (especially headphone outs built into other stuff) have relatively high output impedances. 120 ohms is the nearest thing to standard but there isn't one really. 100 ohms is a nominal impedance. In reality the headphones will be slightly different impedance for different frequencies. Where the output impedance of an amp coincides with the input impedance of a headphone, strange things can happen to the frequency response: see here for details: http://www.avguide.com/blog/why-headphone-amps-sound-different-frequency-responseimpedance-issues Relatively few headphone amps seem to list output impedance in their specs but I think it may be significant. It will not be as significant for higher impedance headphones like HD600s. I think the rule of thumb is it's better to get a headphone amp with as low an output impedance as possible to avoid weird interactions.
Thirdly - and jamesmiller may disagree with me on this one - the NS1000s in passive mode seem to be oddly power hungry. Maximum power input on the phones is rated as 300mW. That's 50% more than HD600s and 3x that of my 250 ohm Beyerdynamics. Most headphone amps can't put out anything like 300mW. In reality you would never use that, as the headphones or your ears would start taking damage first, but it's nice to have some headroom for dynamics eh? I discussed this with the guy who makes Neco Soundlabs amps (for sale on the bay) and he seemed to think that it did have some importance. He indicated that he thought his 9v portable amp would be stretching to its limits with these headphones and that his 18v portable amp would be more suitable. Who knows eh? Maybe he was just trying to sell me something more expensive...
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Soldato
all you need now is a dac 
Associate
Let me know if you want to sell the D2, I might be interested! 
Soldato
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I use my HD650 directly from an Essence ST (high gain setting) with no complaints. The sound is very lush, forward, punchy and plenty loud with no detectable distortion even at very high volume.
I'm sure the HD650 have more potential with a good desktop amp, but I doubt it will be radically different, just more refined.
I'm sure the HD650 have more potential with a good desktop amp, but I doubt it will be radically different, just more refined.
Soldato
The ST/STX is a very good dac and amp for the price. You will have to spend a lot more to get very slight and subtle improvements.
I certainly wouldn't say my GS Solo is twice as good as the STX despite it costing twice as much.
I certainly wouldn't say my GS Solo is twice as good as the STX despite it costing twice as much.
Soldato
how good is the solo mate ? currently got set-up of nad 315bee amp , sen hd600 and mf v-dac
wonder how much of a difference id get usign a heady amp compare to the nad head socket ?
will be looking to add teh AUDIOLAB 8200CD CD PLAYER as well at some point . the dac in it is worth £400 so what hi-fi? .
Associate
Sounds like a similar setup to what I've got planned, out of interest... where are you planning on ordering the FiiO E9 from? (E-Mail my trust if it's a competitors site)
im looking into buying a sound card from ocuk and noticed the D2. now my gigabyte 890GX features a 8 channel realtek 892 and it sounds pretty good with dolby headphone activated and +1 bass on HD600`s for BFBC2. Flac with wasapi on foobar also sounds ok, nothing amazing but ok`ish i know it can be warmer and better resolved by far.
the question is, use the optical out on the mobo to DAC/AMP or get D2 use for a while and then get external amp with D2?
also if the D2 is amplifying the headphone out put then how can adding an amplifier (ok there are some theories on re-amping) make whats already lost come back?
are there non amped line outs ?
cheers
the question is, use the optical out on the mobo to DAC/AMP or get D2 use for a while and then get external amp with D2?
also if the D2 is amplifying the headphone out put then how can adding an amplifier (ok there are some theories on re-amping) make whats already lost come back?
are there non amped line outs ?
cheers
Soldato
The D2 does not have a dedicated headphone amplifier, but the Opamps are better than the nothing you get on some soundcards.
Does your motherboard output Dolby Headphone over PCM stereo via optical? If so I would look at DACs with optical input and a built in headphone amplifier if a sound upgrade is needed - unless you play many pre-2007 games.
If you're after pre-2007 games it's certainly worth getting a Xonar over onboard.
Does your motherboard output Dolby Headphone over PCM stereo via optical? If so I would look at DACs with optical input and a built in headphone amplifier if a sound upgrade is needed - unless you play many pre-2007 games.
If you're after pre-2007 games it's certainly worth getting a Xonar over onboard.
Associate
Be very careful here Phil, while your onboard chip might support Dolby Headphone, I doubt that it supports encoding it to PCM Stereo / Dolby Digital Live / DTS Connect over optical (if it does, great!). You'll probably find it's either standard stereo out over optical or Dolby Headphone over analogue.
Soldato
In my experience I've found that even if a sound card has an amazing Dac I can still be let down by the output stage...
This is where an external Dac can improve things, or you can even mod your sound card. I have no experience of the Xonar tho, but a few people have modded emu card with decent results... I would mod my 0404 USB but I'm already using an external Dac, with a polypropelene capacitor as my output stage...
DX/Senn 595 user here (upgrading to HD 600 at some point...).
Just ordered one of these from their site ^ (£41.08 with ripoffpal) hope it's good. The fact it runs on a 9V battery ought to do good things for the noise (complete lack of!).
Just ordered one of these from their site ^ (£41.08 with ripoffpal) hope it's good. The fact it runs on a 9V battery ought to do good things for the noise (complete lack of!).
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