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Post by nickh on Mar 12, 2007 19:55:17 GMT
Hello everyone, my first post here. I'm writing a piece for the FT about how to get hi-fi sound from an MP3 player with an over the top money no object approach. Products I hope to look at include:
- Voyager - NKK-O1se - ACS T2 and Active Ambient 3D
Any other suggestions? Things have to be easily available in Britain and suitable for travel use, i.e. battery only and no leaky phones.
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Post by PinkFloyd on Mar 12, 2007 22:00:52 GMT
Hello everyone, my first post here. I'm writing a piece for the FT about how to get hi-fi sound from an MP3 player with an over the top money no object approach. Products I hope to look at include: - Voyager - NKK-O1se - ACS T2 and Active Ambient 3D Any other suggestions? Things have to be easily available in Britain and suitable for travel use, i.e. battery only and no leaky phones. Hi Nick, I'm not into MP3 but plenty here are.... give them a few days and they'll creep out of the woodwork for sure You mention the Graham Slee Voyager, it won't be out till early summer, you could also try the Ray Samuels Tomahawk if it's a purely portable amp you're after. Personally I think strapping an amp onto an MP3 player kind of defeats the meaning of "portable" and "convenient" why buy a matchbox sized MP3 player and then strap an amp onto it with (one would assume given your money no object brief) uber expensive interconnects dangling all over the place? You've gone from portable and discreet MP3 player to a rig which resembles that normally found on a suicide bomber.... do you really want to be carrying about all those little boxes with you? You won't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and "amping" an ipod, for instance, will not improve the sound in any way shape or form.... probably better (and cheaper) to stick with the head out and find a good pair of sensitive 'phones to partner the MP3 player with. Remember, this is coming from someone who detests MP3 and detests hundreds of people on a train all ignoring each other listening to music..... I don't like the medium and I can't stand the effect it has on society with everyone wandering about with plugs in their ears.... if I had my way headpones / IEM's would be banned in public places (as would mobile phones, fat people, vegetarians and non smokers) As I said...... I'm probably not the best person to answer your question......... ;D
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Post by PinkFloyd on Mar 16, 2007 15:14:16 GMT
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rickcr42
Fully Modded
Rest in peace my good friend.
Posts: 4,514
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Post by rickcr42 on Mar 30, 2007 20:42:07 GMT
The quick and dirty/rickmonster version of "Why ? Why a headphone amp ? "The only good reason to amp a portable is if you want to step up from typical "portable duty" headphones and use a real set of home headphones for ultimate SQ on the go. Lately the big players are moving to higher efficiency and lower impedance so as to allow the headphones to be driven straight from the headphone jack of the portable where formerly only Grado offered this ability in a full sized headphone with the reason being lack of voltage drive being available from a teeny teeny batter device.Playback volume level is no longer the issue it once was making a headphone amp more luxury device than neccessity. so why the headphone amp ? Because if your headphones are of a high enough quality they will only improve in sonic quality as the quality of the signal feeding them is improved and the external headphone amp being a devicve designed for a specific narrowly defined end use creates an optimal interface between the actual music delivery platform,the portable player,and the final transducer that interfaces to your brain-the hreadphones. Because the headphone is a more personal means of listening to music,one that shuts out the world and creates a one-to-one unity with the music any sound not part of the music will be magnified on the irritability scale so dead silent and glitch free are a must unlike with loudspeaker listening where room ambient noise (the world is a noisy place folks) creates a masking effect that glosses over short duration abberant behaviour. In short there is nothing to distract you from the music so it damn sure better not act up.NO surprises allowed ! In that case straight to the originator/innovator.The guys who started to Music To go revolution no matter what anyone else tells you because where these guys lead everyone else follows turning a nice tidy profit once they seen how to do it : HEADROOMYou will not find a better system level integration,a better human/machine interface or comfort in the product since I doubt there is a better"please the customer first ! Everything else is sendary" mid size manufacturer attitude on the planet.If they can't satisfy no one can. www.headphone.com/
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Sol
100+
loves motorcycles !
Chief Technical Numpty
Posts: 135
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Post by Sol on Mar 30, 2007 22:47:51 GMT
MP3 sounds shite .. end of story .. why bother amping somethng that's pretty ppoor at source. OK a 300K MP3 is betetr that a 183K MP3 ... but why not start with a lossless portable format like apple lossless or FLAC. next take a player that supprts lossless Next forget open backed headphones or amps ... choose an easy driven IEM. I'be never understood this idea that a portbale player, and amp, and greet big headphoine sare portable! My personal recommendation is a set of shure 4C IEMs and an Iaudio X5L with flac files playing. IEMs cut out the background (20db or so) have as much detail as you need wit hteh right player, and look cool Ignore Mike ... the reason we wear IEMs on trains is that the majority of peeps who travel into big cities are sad city workers with no conversation anyhow.
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rickcr42
Fully Modded
Rest in peace my good friend.
Posts: 4,514
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Post by rickcr42 on Apr 1, 2007 4:26:54 GMT
Called working with what you have and making the best of it dude.For instance I run an ancient MONO tube tuner with hoseshit specs through a few thousand bucks worth of electronics which some would say is a bit lame but from my perspective it is ONLY a freakin RADIO for cripes sake so how fkn good could it possibly get if i spent another few $K on a better tuner ? Listening to the local classic rock station or getting a weather traffic report on a mega K dollar tuner will not make the weather any better or the bandwidth limited signal suddenly open up to a wider freqency extreme so instead of throwing good money after bad i set about making what i HAD sound as good as it was capable of sounding by A-updating the tube output stage of the tuner B-using an impedance matched PROPER mono-to-stereo splitter circuit to feed the left/right inputs on my control console C-enjoying it for what is is and not asking it to be what it is not BTW-tried every conceivable stereo multiplex device from integrated circuit based to vintage Fisher,Scott and Leak and STILL the tuner sounds best in mono.There are various reasons for this one of that the capture ratio and selectivity of the tuner not exactly state of the art so noise levels climb dramatically in stereo but that does not explain the HUGE difference in SQ when the switch is made from mono to stereo yet that it is there is readily apparent to even a casual listener so it must be signal based (that or FM MPX Stero just sucks in general ) so why use $500 electronics with MP3's ? Why not is my question ! Why make bad worse when there is no reason to NOT make the headphone interface as good as it can be then if/when the front end swapped out for a better type,maybe even at home,the headphones/amp combination will allow the addtional content to pass through to the ears whereas a lesser system will only be capable of playing up to a certain point making a front end upgrade come with an additional cost in amp upgrade or THAT would bespening good loot for a losing cause. When building a system (fixed installation OR portable OR dual use) you always need to make choices on where the majority of your allotted budget will be target and that choice is usually front end source or final electronics/transducers and while the old "GIGO" (garbage in/garbage out) does hold water the inverse is also true where it will be the "weakest link" holding bac the system so your choice is always where to put the weak linbk until in a position to upgrade 1-at the beginning 2-in the middle 3-at the end and considering nothng is perfect only degrees of good or bad oe maybe even personally acceptable it should not be system related on if or if not music can be enjoyed for what it is only to the degree of foot tapping it brings to the party so even mono AM/FM radio and MP3 has a seat at the table.Maybe not the HEAD of the table but a place somewhere in the middle that says "welcome.come as you are and hang for a bit"
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