| Re: What Are Your Top 5 Favorite Headphone Brands? [message #65321 is a reply to message #65299] |
Fri, 17 December 2010 09:22   |
Adveser
Messages: 434
Registered: July 2009
Location: USA
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Illuminati (1st Degree) |
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| Quote: | I would invest in a good DAC and dedicated headphone amp.
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That is exactly why I use Sony's. Their 32 Ohm impendance makes the whole thing unnecessary. They were build to work with common outputs of headphones jacks.
In any event, I bus everything into a Amplifier anyway with the pre-amp gutted out of it and the analogue silicon seems to tame a little bit of the harshness and slightly fattens the signal. It has the perfect amount of "tube" like saturation for my tastes.
Is that what you mean?
The stock sound card in my Sony laptop sounds incredibly good at any rate. It operates up to 192Khz and 24-Bit (there is no such thing as real 32-bit audio yet, regardless what any program tells you.)
Naturally, being Sony, the drivers are customized, so I don't think you can compare the same chipset in a different brand. It's a Realtek HD chipset.
I think upgraded Converters is a red herring. It's a clock and not much more. And upgraded Op-amps are just going to change the timbrel character of the sound. One is not better than the other after you establish you aren't using junk.
Shane is right. Having the right equipment makes the difference, but at times I think people ending up spending money for something they already have, but in a bigger chassis.
For the record. I'm using XP on a computer designed to work with Vista. Sony did us the favor of writing drivers for it anyway, which is an advantage. The old drivers system XP used was vastly superior because it was totally non-standardized. Vendors had to program their machines. Windows demands compatibility these days. The bells and whistles, which is basically garbage software will not work. Basically it's the same functionality Windows has had since windows 98se, but at 24-bits, a frequency range of 10-96Khz, with 32 channel directsound hardware. That kind of setup was hard to come by back in those days and cost a pretty penny. Now it can be had cheap if you don't care about downgrading to XP. It was good enough to record every DAW album from around 98-2007, so it's good enough for me.
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