The incredible (and incredibly expensive) world of high-end personal audio

The law of dimin­ish­ing returns applies to audio too.

Ama­zon Music and Tidal power­bomb Spo­ti­fy’s quality.

or buy your own musi­cal instru­ments and form a band and play live music 😀

Is there a cable (usb) to plug these amps to Android or iOS?

I think the qual­i­ty of oth­er stream­ing plat­forms like spo­ti­fy have high enough bitrates to sound just as good on high end equip­ment, to be hon­est I have some local­ly stored music with even low­er bitrate than spo­ti­fy pre­mi­um and I can’t tell the difference.

Clev­er­ly hid­den tidal ad well done

If you spend 8 hours+ sit­ting at a desk work­ing, play­ing games, lis­ten­ing to music, watch­ing youtube videos, you can jus­ti­fy spend­ing 150–250 dol­lars to buy an exter­nal dac/headphone amp and a good set of head­phones. If you already have the head­phoens, just spend 75 dol­lars on a fiio e10k.

he got the schi­it stack

lol. he’s got a $1700 pair of head­phones and a $200 dac/amp com­bo. You should be spend­ing at least half of what the head­phones cost on a dac and amp. It would be bet­ter to spend the same amount on both head­phones and dac/amp.

Can some­one please tell me if its pos­si­ble to buy OR DIY a head­phone amp with a mid/side func­tion? PLEASE!?

Cheap stuff but if he’s hap­py with it …

There are dif­fer­ent ways peo­ple choose to spend their mon­ey. Some peo­ple like indulging in lux­u­ry hand­bags wal­lets, belts and clothes, some peo­ple like build­ing high end pc’s with top-tier com­po­nents, some peo­ple buy expen­sive cars or mod out enthu­si­ast cars over and over again with many expen­sive parts also. The lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence is no dif­fer­ent. We choose to pay what some may con­sid­er out­ra­geous amounts on audio equip­ment because to ‘us’ (not you), it is worth it. Sure you might dis­agree but it just means we val­ue dif­fer­ent things dif­fer­ent­ly and that’s total­ly fine, hav­ing dif­fer­ent opin­ions is what it means to be human.

But the real cost of that head­phone is less than 100 dollar…

Gra­do SR80e or sr225e?

You only need blue­tooth con­nec­tiv­i­ty that match. Or is back­wards com­pat­i­ble. That’s it.

4.0 to 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 etc.

Not 4.2 to 4.1, 4.0 etc.

Trust your­self. Your ears are going to thank me.

With the high imped­ance, the “amp” inside the Scar­let Solo should be able to deliv­er enough pow­er to sound half decent, but it won’t like­ly deliv­er what those head­phones are real­ly capa­ble of, Sir Which Head­phone ampli­fi­er is best for bey­er­dy­nam­ics DT 770 Pro 250 ohms, which also con­nects to my audio inter­face scar­lett solo 2nd generation ?

Incred­i­bly expen­sive. Pho­to on front of two of the cheap­est bud­get amp and DAC around, schi­it mag­ni and modi

Tidal BLEH… try Qobuz and buy FLAC files… I’ve almost start­ed cry­ing. My cheapo AKG K701 became so clear and defined com­pared to the “super high” qual­i­ty setting.

So I have a ques­tion about DACs and amps. My ques­tion is actu­al­ly about how a DAC would fit into my set­up. I am cur­rent­ly using a vin­tage Sher­wood S‑7100A as my amp/receiver. It has a stereo head­phone out­put that I use when I lis­ten using my head­phones (Sennheis­er HD6XXs). I pri­mar­i­ly lis­ten to records on my set­up but have a Tidal HIFI sub­scrip­tion I stream from as well and right now I’m plug­ging my com­put­er direct­ly into my receiv­er which I know isn’t opti­mal. I often see DACs and Head­phone amps togeth­er like the Modi/Magni combo. 

My ques­tion is, Do I need to even look at get­ting a ded­i­cat­ed head­phone amp or is the Sherwood/DAC com­bo good enough?

this video is a joke
-head­phones are cucked by design, buy iem’s or speak­ers if you don’t want to waste your mon­ey
-Dacs and amps are essen­tial­ly cables and telling the dif­fer­ence between that and an apple don­gle is near­ly impossible