What would be a good portable Dac/Amp to use with my HD6xx and Sony Xperia 1 V cell phone?
I am new to this hobby. I purchased a HD6XX and plan to use it with my Sony Xperia 1 V cell phone, that has a 3.5mm jack. I was wondering if I needed a portable dac/amp or just a portable amp and if so what would one recommend? Any assistance one could provide, would be greatly appreciated. Kind regards, Haz
Mar 7, 2024
I kid I kid
Far opposite of snake oil , even in headphones. Great acoustic guitars use different tonewoods within the same guitar to attenuate desired characteristics. Of all hifi gear, changing woods in headphones is the most evident resulting audio change for different woods. Crazy idea this is a sales pitch...this is factual hi-end headphone & instrument engineering. Chuckle at mention of density, moisture, grain...there is far more to it. Density, porosity, grain, weight, humidity content, specific gravity, dimensional stability, change coefficient, actual region & soil the tree was grown in, age of wood & tree, height & diameter of tree, torsional strength, dried weight, rupture modulus, hardness scale, tangential-volumetric-radial shrinkage, crushing strength, elastic modulus, janka hardness, weight bearing strength & more parameters distinguish where tonewood application is best used with their sonic properties.
Resonating bodies & sound chambers often blend woods and also engineer interior shaping and configuration to maximize desired characteristics. This is daily work in violin & guitar hi-end manufacturers. Headphones exhibit the easiest recognition of the wood differences in audio gear, moreso than in loudspeakers. Changing woods have profound differences in headphones...those who actually have done this many times will attest to changes. Some of the most renowned pro-reviewers in audio have proven this time & again, both thru their listening tests and very extensive measurements testings of many factors. Just helping others here.
In headphones they're designed to resonate *as little as possible* because resonances in headphones are almost always bad and a cause of loss in detail. You'd never, for example, use sitka spruce on a headphone, despite it being one of the most desired tonewoods on guitars. I don't think it's pure snake oil, but comparing usage of wood in headphones to usage of wood in a violin wildly overstates the difference it makes.
If it made this big of a difference, think of how bad a plastic guitar sounds. Now realize that most of the best headphones in the world are plastic.
The usage of wood here is most certainly 99% about aesthetics, not the tonal properties of mahogany. They chose mahogany for the same reason most furniture makers do, not for the reason acoustic guitar makers very occasionally do.
Further, just looking at the cups, the grain doesn't seem like acoustic grade mahogany (very tight grain) but rather furniture grade mahogany (very figured wide grain).
Wood cups can also help different diaphragm material to sound more organic as well. Say, if you take MDR-z7 drivers and put in a wood cup instead of it plastic-aluminum, the "tint" of the headphones would sound different. The way MDR z7 sounds right now, being stock, there is "metallic tint" and bass distortion in complex bass. This is because the plastic in the chamber has no dampening property, and the resonances were not any "toned resonances, but plain 0 color resonances, so the aluminum coated diaphragm will give out metallic tint timbres"
When the signal is in a headphone cable it's no longer digital, it's analog. Since different frequency signals will be effected differently by different types of cables, it can differentially effect different portions of the frequency response as transmitted to the driver. Now certainly USB cables can't change the sound at all, because they carry a digital signal.
That being said, the difference is certainly small, even at the extremes of copper vs silver.
Copper is cheaper, more flexible, and readily available. OCC copper or OFC copper is all about efficiency war again. However the differences are minimal to the minutes, ofcourse the sound would be affected, but silver will bring out the most obvious differences.