The All Purpose Advice Thread

Do you think the Massdrop/Fostex TH-X00 would be a good fit for your preferences?

 

I've thought about the TH-X00, however, from everything I've read they would be more of a sidegrade than an actual upgrade. That and I find closed back headphones difficult to wear for any extended period of time because my ears get hot.

 

Just grab the HE-6 with whatever mini power amp you can find... Topping has a bunch, the Nuforce Icon if you can find it, NAD D3020... here's a Winsome Mouse: http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=143261.0
etc etc

 

Can't help you with the Schiit stack, but I own the Mojo and the Th900's. It's the best I've ever heard them sound.

Thanks Bixby!! Perfect answer for my question.

 

You might want to look at the DT770 as well. I have the 80ohm version and it avoids most of the problems I associate with closed headphones, and doesn't seem to have the sharp treble people talk about with other Beyer cans. The bass is definitely emphasized, but clean and well extended. Maybe you could eq it down.

 

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@Warrior suggestion is sound, might as well throw the Fostex T50RP Mk3 closed in there as well.

 

@Eric_C Thanks for the advice mate. I'll definitely try to find somewhere to demo the HD600s, although where I live that's not the easiest thing in the world. Sounds like they might be exactly what I need.

For the record I don't find the DT990s fatiguing at all, which is why I was vaguely looking at the T90/T1, but maybe that's just the result of listening to too many treble-happy cans over the last two years...

I have the Mk2, and although they sound great they required mods and pad changes. The consensus appears to be that the Mk3's are better but I'd still imagine anyone considering a T50RP should factor in having to do at least some basic mods.

 

@mawk, my suggestion was not for you but rather @caralhete

sorry to confuse you

 

How do the HE-6 sound through these mini power amps? These amps would be ideal if they sound as good as larger amps.

 

Look, I'm a card carrying HE-6 nut, but unlike ohhg I focus heavily on small amps. I'm not going to spout any flower words about how amazing and impactful and luscious a particular amp sounds. These are ones that I've heard that I like. My first choice right now in the not-stupid-money category is a Bryston 2B, but it's still kind of big. Next would be the Nuforce Icon but those are hard to find now. The D3020 next, advantage here being they are easy to buy. The Topping is last, though there are many versions and I haven't heard them all (frankly I can't tell them apart because they all look the same). I would still pick a Topping amp over the overhyped Emotiva Mini-X. I haven't heard the Mouse personally, but it seems to review well. Same goes for the TBI Millenium. I'm only throwing them out there because this is a small category so I'm just giving you options.

You have to be realistic with your expectations here. You'll get good sound, but you're not going to match up with the 200 lb behemoths. Right now, my amp is the Bryston 2B. Before that, it was a NuPrime IDA-8, and it was the NuForce Icon2 before that. I cycled through many many others in between, but those are the ones that stuck the longest for me.

 

If/when I go back to the HE-6 down the road, this will be the tactic that I'll use myself. My Odyssey Stratos (which was sold locally prior to listing my HE-6 here) was 54 lbs. While it was the best I've ever heard the HE-6, it was just way, way, way too f'ing big and heavy for my preferences.

 

You are certainly entitled to disagree with this advice. And your Daphile plus MPD setup may sound great. Yet not everyone can deal with the subtle intricacies of setting up a Linux system.

I disagree that many Linux setups are easy to setup. I have not tried Daphile nor will I based on the many excursions I have made into getting sparse Linux flavors to work properly with a random high quality pc.

Just this week I took a great older HP Elitebook that I used with Windows and loaded Mint on it. Wow, it sees my Firewire Hard Drive, wow, it see my sd card. Wow the Bryston bridge driver is there. Wow music with deadbeef sounds good.

A few swaps with another dac and back to the Bryston, NO Effing SOUND. A few hours on the web and I am not the first one to experience this. Something about Alsa being borked when you do not turn off a dac. Easily fixed by several different command line code trials or reinstalling Mint and finding and reinstalling Alsa.

Nope, not going down that road again, unless someone can confirm it is truly plug and play on pretty much ANY hardware. It may sound better than my Mac or Windows setups, but I am just too effing stupid when it comes to tinkering with Linux.

So to the other person, you want to go down the road of hardware or drivers not working with your random pc, flaky behaviour of a key audio component of Linux? go right ahead.

Maybe Zerodeefex can be your support person.

In all seriousness, I long to have a working, reliable Linux setup, but I just cannot seem to do it on my own, cheers mate!

 

At one point I had a wheeled cart with rackmounted mono amps and an isolation transformer. Then I thought... wtf am I doing? So now it's down to a single 2B on my table and I'm using the headphone out of a puny usb dac/amp because screw it I'm not stacking a pure dac and pre on top.

 

@bixby
Wow... now I understand why you're upset with Linux
If you haven't tried daphile you can give it a try. It is easy to install and configure. You can also try it in a USB stick.
@zerodeefex has a good point saying it sounds very good or at least better than windows on the same hardware. Plus you can get away with a cheap low power client pc like a 35/45 euro futro and invest in a psu. Daphile is the only way I know to play music to several dacs at the same time. It is very useful if you are testing different dacs. I have plugged and unplugged dacs with it and I never experienced a problem.
I only dropped it to pursue the raspberry road, which is also mpd based.

 

@Vastx
you are too kind

I know, I give in after 4-8 hours trying to fix stuff.

I've been though Suse, Fedora, Elementary, Lubuntu, Puppy, and Mint and others too old to remember form 20 years ago. All had issues. See why I am gun shy

But hey, since I have already sold the Mint lappy and have a spare usb flash drive, perhaps I can load the iso of Daphile on it and give it a whirl. You think it will see the video card, SD card reader, firewire NTFS drive, etc?

And MPD is not a nightmare command line based setup? No client server setup, just boot daphile and it's all there and ready to play all of my files?

Then I shall give it a try

 

Is this similar to the Squeeze server I used years ago with my Squeezebox touch? Nevermind it seems to be. Any setup tips for it to see my external hard drive connected via firewire and pull files from there? This is direct attach not a nas drive.

 

Like @sorrodje said. I haven't written a single line using it. I haven't tried it with fire wire, but I know for sure that it reads USB ntfs hard drives. It derives directly from the Logitech media server in the squeeze box iirc.

 

Thanks @bixby and @sah.
None of those were on my list, great recommendations! The dt 770 seem to be bass heavy (although they look really nice to my taste and comfy) and the fostex were not even considered. I added the brainwavz hm5 to the shortlist, so it's the m40x, hm5, and k553 as the main options. I'm going to look at frequency response graphics and try to make some sense of it.