The idea of getting a headphone amp started off with the realization that I could play songs off a 32GB iphone -- if and when I get it -- at work with some decent headphones...and a really decent set-up would require a decent source, i.e. the 16 bit CD 44.2 kHz Wav format or one of the 24 bit formats like Flac -- which does not work on iphones -- or Apple lossless. Given file sizes 32GB might not quite cut it, but you could get playlists on the device. Getting a 64GB current gen itouch isn't going to be worth it, nor would a 64GB iPad. My current first generation 8GB itouch won't do it.
I'd like to run decent headphones off the iphone and that is going to require a headphone amp. Headphone amps run from $22 to over $2000, with the cheap ones aimed at exactly this sort of iphone set-up. But this reminds me that I might want to try out a good headphone amp at home. I'm currently running a Claro sound card with a headphone amp rated up to 600 Ohm to drive Sennheiser 300 Ohm HD 650 headphones, but I have the (mistaken?) sense I could do better with these headphens with a better headphone amp. What I've found looking around is the NuForce HDP, with is a DAC/pre-amp/headphone amp combo that should be able to handle any decent headphones. I may also go shopping for a 2nd set of headphones, but I'll leave that for later. Getting the NuForce HPD does mean I'll get to mess with an ASIO driver on my computer (like using ASIO4all) and figuring out how to use my sound card's S/PDIF for higher than 96 kHz sources or if I want to play with an equalizer etc. (which I need to do now to get decent sound, it may not be necessary with good head phone amp?), but that seems doable.
Issues: where to get 24 bit >96 kHz source files? Does my DVD drive read SACDs? It appears licensing issues may prevent this. But there are online sources for some 24 bit files. And stanard 16 bit 44.2 kHz WAVs are probably fine.
Update #1: The NuForce HDP shows up next Wednesday, so we'll know more about how well it works by the end of next week. Seems like a long wait, seven days to ship from San Jose to Northern VA.
Update #2 (Sep 22): I've been reading a bit about audio management in Windows 7. This may be fun...basically, I need to kill as much Windows interference with audio as possible, getting to, if I understand this correctly, kernel streaming using a player like Foobar2000 to get as directly to my S/PDIF output as possible using ASIO4all or similar drivers, with the correct boxes checked to not have any quality reducing format conversions take place from the source file to the outside DAC.
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