Took the plunge. Purchased some HD650's!

[Gmok Bonecrusha]

Amazon had them for 380, and just said damn groceries this week! The kids will have to salvage nuts and berries in the forest.

Can't wait for them to get here! I have some questions though.

Let me preface this by saying I listen to mostly 70's and 80's R&B. Some old school hip hop from the same era, and a little jazz.

I know I need a headphone amp. From what I have read I want a nice tube amp. Something to give me a smooth sound, like the music I enjoy. Price is an option. Like 400 dollars or so. Will that be enough to get me a decent amp? Any suggestions?

The music will be played from my PC via an X-Fi gamer. I game...ALOT. Will this sound card do the music justice? The cabling from the sound card to the amp; anything in particular I should be looking for? Does it really matter?

I started downloading some FLAC of my favorite songs. I notice a "bit" of a difference on some HD555's and just my sound card. Will the Amp and new headphones be huge sound wise with the format? Or stick to MP3's?

Thanks for any answers.

 

[shizdan]

If your using anything like he HD 555's and up, simply use FLAC. I have owned the whole lineup (555 595 600 630) by far my fav was the HD600. As for an amp, look for a nice tube amp (Little Dot Series) or even get a Little Dot Solid State amp.

As for cabling, I believe that a nice cable from monoprice is the way to go. I dont see any difference unless the cable is a cheap ebay one.

 

[Farkle]

Wall of text incoming!

X-Fi analog stage isn't so great. Consider a Mytek Stereo96 for DAC/headphone amp combo, or maybe a Benchmark DAC-1 Pre if you want those headphones to shine. Both amps on those DAC are quite good. Sennheiser HD650 itself is kind of a laid back sound (definitely not a flat frequency response) and is a bit smoothed over already, I couldn't really see matching it with a tube amp, but it does sound "okay" with the X-Can V3. AKG's and Grado's are better suited for that [tube amps], sonically. Another DAC I'm fond of is the LavryBlue, which I used to use on the mixing stage of my home studio, but that does not solve your amplification problem. I've since sold it off and bought a Mytek though. All grade A+ DAC units, and you couldn't do much better without spending a ton more, and even then you'd be likely paying for features over DAC difference. Grace m902 is a good example.

My advice is to just throw down a credit card and charge a Benchmark DAC-1 Pre to it, have a week or two of listening, and return the thing to put you in the ballpark of how bad the X-Fi is versus a pristine DAC. Even picking up an E-MU 0404 USB would likely give you an idea of how bad the X-Fi is for music over the analog outs. Same goes for a craptastic Behringer ADA8000, which is probably the best bargain there is in pro-audio as far as clean DA converters go (just keep the pre's on it at zero volume.) DACMagic is probably another good source, but I've never heard one, I've just heard the nuts over at Head-Fi rave about how musical they are (subjective, and I usually steer clear of people that call something more "musical", since it means something different to everyone)

I don't even really like the analog stage of my Auzentech X-Fi Forte. The built-in headphone amp on that card is "good enough" to drive the HD650, but there are a lot of problems with that particular card (disregarding sound quality.) Especially if you have a Gigabyte 1366 board with EIST and SpeedStep enabled. Tons of leakage from the backplane on a few cards, but after 3 exchanges I finally got one that didn't buzz, or have load noise. Even with those CPU features disabled, I still had issues until I finally got a card that wasn't somehow flawed. There are various "mods" that sometimes help, by decoupling the bracket from the case but that seems a little absurd to me for a new product. Just bad quality testing in general. X-Fi auto mode changer will also give you stray 0x1E blue screens if the sound card buffer is populated in Audio Recording mode (which you need for ASIO and bit perfect WASAPI) in Windows 7. I had an Asus Xonar STX for a while, and it was a sonic improvement over the Auzentech, but not anywhere near an external DAC in quality. I also wasn't a big fan of the drivers of the Xonar -- in order to get bit perfect audio, you have to set it to the correct sample rate in the control panel. So if you move from a 16/44 to a 24/96 file in playback that causes problems. The Auzentech in the Audio Recording mode, does feature bit-perfect/matched playback in it's drivers. I've also heard that the Daniel K drivers for the Creative X-Fi cards feature similar bit-matched playback. I tossed my X-Fi XtremeMusic a long time ago, due to driver issues from Creative and never got a chance to try the Dan_K stuff.

I found a happy medium on my gaming PC, keeping the Auzentech Forte in my system, and throwing an old DAL CardDeluxe I had laying around in there. I couldn't do that before because I had two GTX285's, and a GTX275 in the way. Now I'm running a single GTX480. Anyway, I connected the Auzentech to the CardDeluxe over SPDIF. I have the Auzentech set up as my default interface, and it just plays in Slip Mode to the CardDeluxe. That way I can change to "game mode" and still use EAX/Alchemy/whatever for games. I usually keep it in Audio mode though. I use WASAPI over analog output on my CardDeluxe in foobar2000 for music (I'm a bigger fan of XMPlay, but Foobar2000's music library is handy), and with ReClock for movies (though, I'm using 24-bit padded to 32-bit output, instead of 16 due to WASAPI limitations -- should still be the same, I'd imagine it nulls) Just as easily, you could slave the X-Fi to another sound card or DAC with a better analog stage and maintain your gaming effects.

As far as amps... like I said, Mytek and Benchmark have great ones. Benchmark actually makes a stand-alone unit, but it's half of the price of the DAC-1 (which already has a headamp in it) so I find that to be a bit of a rip off. My suggestions, without getting crazy expensive (trying to stay within your posted budget):

HeadRoom BitHead - DAC is locked at 16/44, and kind of crap. But the headphone amp is passable on the HD650 (though a little bit light on the bass due to impedance mismatch) I like this over the Airhead because in a rare situation of having to put up with built-in laptop audio, I can just plug it in and have something mid-fi at my disposal.

Presonus HP4 - Clean, loud, almost transparent, pots on it have started to crackle a little, but mine is 8 years old... pristine until this year! Cheap, and can haggle Guitar Center down on price if you buy some cables with it.

Rane HC 4S - Clean, loud, transparent, get a dented rack ear one off eBay for around $100...

AMB M³ (built by MisterX or something) - Depending on opamps, clean, loud and transparent. Probably over your budget by a hundred. Talk to builders.

Graham Slee Voyager -- Nice little amp, Sennheiser themselves use the Graham Slee Solo amp to demonstrate their HD650 and HD800 to people, so the sonic characteristics are likely similar.

I also agree with the other poster, Little Dot amps are nicely designed.

No matter what you do -- Don't let anyone tell you that running your headphones balanced is going to make it sound better, either. All grounds in the audio chain are linked, and it won't make an iota of difference unless you're running extremely long length. If anything, unbalanced connections over shorter runs have a technical chance to be higher fidelity, but in real-world it doesn't matter either way. Steer clear of Head-Fi "flavor of the month" amplifiers. Find something that has stood up to the test of time and isn't constantly popping up on audio for sale forums across the web. Don't bother with products that "need modding" to sound ideal either, unless there are measurements to back it. Upgraditis is a bad bug. Owning those HD650's, is going to be a slippery slope unless you have a point of reference (DAC-1) to compare it to.

 

[Gmok Bonecrusha]

Now THAT'S some help. Thank you both!