What could be the cause of such disappointing audio quality?

viivo

viivo

[H]ard|Gawd
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PC USB > JDS Labs OL DAC > Maverick TubeMagic A1 (new GE JAN 5654W tubes) > 600ohm DT880s. PC settings: 2 channel, 24/48, full range.

My main complaint is that things sound weak overall. Dynamic events in games and movies lack the clarity amped headphones should deliver and instead seem to retract and distort. I began to notice this when I started playing Far Cry 5 - explosions have no power or range to them. They sound tinny and one-dimensional, like being played through a drive-thru speaker.

I know my setup is low-end, but it shouldn't sound worse than my motherboard's integrated headphone amp. I have tried both analog and line-in on the amp and different cables. Any suggestions as to potential causes would be greatly appreciated.
 
Have you tried with different headphones? May be as good a place to start as any imho. Just to get a feel for if the problem is in the signal chain or cans.
 
viivo said:
PC USB > JDS Labs OL DAC > Maverick TubeMagic A1 (new GE JAN 5654W tubes) > 600ohm DT880s. PC settings: 2 channel, 24/48, full range.

My main complaint is that things sound weak overall. Dynamic events in games and movies lack the clarity amped headphones should deliver and instead seem to retract and distort. I began to notice this when I started playing Far Cry 5 - explosions have no power or range to them. They sound tinny and one-dimensional, like being played through a drive-thru speaker.

I know my setup is low-end, but it shouldn't sound worse than my motherboard's integrated headphone amp. I have tried both analog and line-in on the amp and different cables. Any suggestions as to potential causes would be greatly appreciated.
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Something is wrong in your setup. Most obvious place to start investigating is to switch your DAC and tube headphone amplifier. Tubes are very picky on impedances.
 
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I would make sure there's no loudness equalization going on in your sound settings by disabling all sound effects.
 
Also, is it just FC5, or everything?

One of those things that it definitely used to sound great, but now doesn't and something has changed - or you just kinda noticed it and maybe nothing has changed other than your perception?
 
If you have enabled surround sound in your FC5 settings it will sound very weird through stereo/headphones. Explosions will lose body because they go to the sub channel which you dont have.
 
Brian_B said:
Also, is it just FC5, or everything?

One of those things that it definitely used to sound great, but now doesn't and something has changed - or you just kinda noticed it and maybe nothing has changed other than your perception?
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Far Cry 5 is the first thing I've spent any time with since acquiring the gear. Previously I attributed any lacking low end to the DT880s.


B00nie said:
If you have enabled surround sound in your FC5 settings it will sound very weird through stereo/headphones. Explosions will lose body because they go to the sub channel which you dont have.
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There's no option in the ingame settings, but I will check the .ini files.
 
Try setting your PC to 16bit/14.1k instead of 24/48 and see if it helps. Higher bit ratio is not always better.
 
Your problem is the amp. It’s a 20w+20w speaker amp designed for 8ohm speakers. You have 600ohm headphones. Huge difference. It is highly likely the amp doesn’t have enough voltage swing for the headphones.

You have hard to drive headphones, and would benefit a lot from a good headphone amp with at least 26-30v swing (ideally 36-40v swing), or selling the headphones and looking for something in the 16-32 ohm range
 
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Keljian said:
Your problem is the amp. It’s a 20w+20w speaker amp designed for 8ohm speakers. You have 600ohm headphones. Huge difference. It is highly likely the amp doesn’t have enough voltage swing for the headphones.

You have hard to drive headphones, and would benefit a lot from a good headphone amp, or selling the headphones and looking for something in the 16-32 ohm range
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You don't plug the headphones to the speaker outputs :D

The amp has a separate tube prestage for headphones and according to manufacturer specifications it should be able to handle all types of headphones. Of course its possible the specs are bs. It's easily tested by using another amp.

One thing worth trying is to lower the output gain at the PC side. If you overdrive a part of the signal path, that's going to ruin things royally.
 
Looking more closely at the amp design, the tubes are 12v tubes, which means a swing of 12v as a maximum. This is far too little for 600ohm headphones

Most headphones top out at 300ohm, it is likely that the manufacturer was thinking of this. The cans you have are literally one of the hardest sets to drive.
 
Keljian said:
Looking more closely at the amp design, the tubes are 12v tubes, which means a swing of 12v as a maximum. This is far too little for 600ohm headphones

Most headphones top out at 300ohm, it is likely that the manufacturer was thinking of this. The cans you have are literally one of the hardest sets to drive.
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You should stop commenting as you clearly are not qualified. The tubes he's using are tested in fixed-bias mode at a plate and screen voltage of 120 V and a grid voltage of -2.0 V.

These are the specs:

Headphone maximum output power: 1000mW x 2 (32 ohms), 500mW x 2 (300 ohms), 300mW x 2 (600 ohms)

Headphone outputs:

Standard 1/4″ jack

Minimum headphone impedance: 16 ohms

Maximum headphone impedance: 600 ohms

Headphone output power: 300mW ~ 1000mW

The reviewer didn't have any problems with the headphone stage using DT-990s.

What _is_ possible however is that the bias adjustment is wrong after the OP changed the tubes. The 600 ohm cans are going to be much more quiet than lower ohm ones so what I said earlier about overdriving the signal stage is a very real possibility if the user tries to push more volume than the source and the amps can give.
 
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My mistake, I’ll own it. Still think it could be a mismatch here between amp and headphones. I’ve seen better amps fail with the dt880s.
 
It can very well be the FarCry5 issue. As I recall FarCry4 had weird preferences for speaker setup/audio quality.
 
Keljian said:
You have hard to drive headphones, and would benefit a lot from a good headphone amp with at least 26-30v swing (ideally 36-40v swing), or selling the headphones and looking for something in the 16-32 ohm range
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Innerfidelity measured the 600-ohm 880s at 0.514Vrms for 90dB. Assuming you meant minimum 26V p-p, I calculated 115dB. That's RMS! And the lowest possible interpretation of your recommendation, right?

Seems like a lot. I'm not saying it's unreasonable, but not everybody needs so much SPL. Do you believe that massively powerful amps sound better even when using only a small fraction of their output?

B00nie said:
Here's the DT-880 graphs: http://reference-audio-analyzer.pro/en/report/hp/beyerdynamic-dt-880-pro.php
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That's the 250-ohm model. Innerfidelity's data for all 3 variants is here.

B00nie said:
I'm surprised about the nonlinearity of the DT models, almost 12db peak at 8k is nothing to write home about.
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Amen. My 250-ohm 880s absolutely butcher cymbals without EQ.
 
HammerSandwich: I'm saying that if the amp can supply more rail to rail voltage than is required, it's likely not to be running at its limits at "reasonable" listening volumes, therefore will sound better than one that is. Then there's overkill vs massive overkill - I'm relaying stuff I learned with a combination of building headphone amps and listening to headphone amps.
 
I certainly agree that some headroom helps. OTOH, without knowing the OP's SPL habits, I'm not sure we can say that he would benefit from such an amp.
 
DT880 600ohm:
Power Needed for 90d BSPL 0.43 mW
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Headphone amp putting out 300mW at 600 ohm is going to give a little less than 110BSPL max output. That should be plenty for most situations.
 
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