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Heefty
1387
Dec 6, 2018
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Claiming to drive 600 ohms is a selling point that any amp maker is going to feed you to try to get you to buy their amps. Don't buy it. Learn how to do the calculations or visit an online drive calculator - see @jaydunndiddit's comment below.
I do not know of a portable amp that can fully drive HD650 (ifi has an offering that is the closest I know of, but still has a 2V gap to fill on its rails). The sound blaster mentioned falls far short. Don't forget that they were designed long before listening to music was a mobile experience. They are meant to be driven by a desktop amp and most of those can't even do them justice these days. Which magni are you using? If it's not Magni3 it is not capable of fully driving them either. Magni3 just gets you there.
Now that that's out of the way: How do you listen? Are you concerned with instrument placement and being able to picture the symphony in front of you or do you just want a rough estimate and great tonal balance to realistically represent the piece you're hearing?
This is, of course, the never ending Tube vs SS amp argument. Tubes provide a much more expansive sound stage, but skew the tonal balance of your music. SS provides the most neutral reproduction but with smaller sound stage and less intimacy with your music. It really is a hard choice for some of us. Personally I must have at least one of each type of amp on-hand so I can switch depending on my mood. If you want to be really drawn into your music, I would point you in the direction of getting a decent tube amp (I hear good things about Darkvoice and Bottlehead but I've built all of my tube amps so I'm not overly familiar with which consumer models to point you to). Pair that with a stellar DSD DAC (Topping D50 is a great place to start) and library of DSD files and you're going to feel like you're the conductor.
Don't get tricked by folks who tell you that you should be scaling your amps with how much you spend on headphones. I've heard HD650 paired with many a $100 amp and also with a couple of $5k+ amps and must say that they are equally at home on either as long as they are capable of fully driving them. That is a stellar set of cans.
That being said, when you get around to upgrading to the HD800 range, make sure you're making an informed decision. Go find a store somewhere and listen to the models you're considering for a good long while. At that price range you've earned a good 30-45 minutes of listening to them in someone's store. I had to learn recently that 10-15 minutes isn't long enough, and was pleasantly surprised by what I ended up with. It would be terrible to have the opposite happen at that price range.
jaydunndiddit
3262
Dec 6, 2018
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HeeftyHopefully, this helps some folks but these are my two biggest resources for calculations and other information. I have others but these two cover 90% of any conversion I may need to do.
http://auditry.blogspot.com/2014/02/headphone-amp-power-calculator.html
https://reference-audio-analyzer.pro/en/w-r-v.php & https://reference-audio-analyzer.pro/en/calc.php
https://reference-audio-analyzer.pro/en/w-r-v.php & https://reference-audio-analyzer.pro/en/calc.php
Heefty
1387
Dec 6, 2018
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jaydunndidditThanks.
Keep in mind that these show bare minimums needed to get to a certain dB SPL and you need some overhead beyond that to keep from clipping. Anecdotal on that: with HD 650 I hear a substantial difference between 10V rails (can just cover your 120dB peaks) and 12V (can get you to 122dB) rails and built my amp for them to have 18V (can explode my HD 650s) rails due to discernible improvements there.
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