Sennheiser PC37X randomly goes bad after disconnecting the cable ?
Greetings, Yesterday I was using my headset like normal with my macbook, just listening to music and on a call with people like usual, and the headset was perfectly fine. The stock wire that came with the headset is extremely long and yesterday it annoyed me very much that it kept getting tangled with itself, so I decided to see if the cable is replaceable. I pulled out the cable from the headset and saw the adapter, and looked online for a replacement. Upon plugging it back in, the audio sounded extremely muffled and washed out. Im not sure what I did wrong to make it mess up like that as I've always taken good care of it, ive had it for about 2 years and its always just been chilling on my desk, but anywho I thought the cable just went bad and ordered a replacement. The replacement came, and the issue is still persistant, so I am not sure what the issue is I've tried multiple different headsets and the issue is not with the port, and I also tried it with my windows laptop and...
Apr 23, 2024
Need being the wrong word for what is really being asked aside; the answer is always, "YES!" shouted as loudly as you can without scaring someone. You certainly don't need it, but you certainly will benefit from it in terms of sound quality.
There are better and worse amplifiers and this article(is that what these are called?) touches on that a little but alludes more to a necessity to drive higher impedance cans. An ideal amplifier can drive an infinite slew rate and source infinite current to drive any load to the target voltage it's trying to output. It's not physically possible for an amp to do that but the closer you can get to that ideal, the closer you'll get to recreating the original signal (or a higher magnitude version of it at least). Higher output power means better signal reproduction and a more responsive amplifier not that it will blow up your low impedance cans. It certainly can do that too, but won't unless you're doing something wrong.
Can you drive 32Ω headphones with your iPhone? Yes, but they will always sound better being driven by an amplifier with a higher output power rating and that's just physics. The output amp on your phone is a trade-off between performance and battery life, just like everything else in the device. You can get a decent little amp for ~30USD that has ~2x the output power capacity of an iPhone (or most any other mobile phone) if you're on that kind of budget.
It really doesn't, but that's a long discussion for another day.
There will be a point where the higher power amp won't improve perceived sound quality anymore because the frequencies that filter out with the lower slew rate will be higher than the human audio band. So I'll concede that point. There's still a clear difference between the 27mW an iPhone can source and the 270mW that a FiiO e11k for example can source to the same load though.
Now if your load is being underdriven (or has insufficient headroom, yadda yadda), then yes having an amp with sufficient power is likely going to sound better than the underpowered one that's clipping or running into its distortion limits. It's possible the high power amp sounds like crap regardless of headroom too though.
I'm not sure what point you're making about the slew rates. If your slew rate was insufficient to actually reproduce the signal, someone screwed up very very badly (you'd practically have to be deliberate to mess that up). You do not want a super high slew rate either as that can lead to other problems.
you should have written : they will always sound louder (not always better). Sensitive/low impedance headphones designed for portability don't sound necessary better with an external amp. There are many cases where, volume matched, the quality of the sound will be the same, and you won't even (blindly) recognize when amped or when played directly from a DAP. Now of course if the amp colours the sound (if it introduces distortion), as tube amps do, that's another debate. And many (not so portable/sensitive) cans always sound better when amped.
Here's my anecdotal evidence since it appeals more to some: I'm using the most sensitive circumaural cans I've ever come across on my portable rig (AKG K267 with 112-117dB sensitivity depending on who measured it), but I still don't like to listen without my FiiO e11k because it brings out so much more clarity and detail (and soundstage and headroom and...) than straight from any portable source I've used it with. Granted, I've not tried them with a really good DAP but most of those that are built for high quality audio will be built with a good output amp anyway so they must be viewed differently than a smartphone.
Sounds like you're contradicting yourself with that last sentence. If the point you're making is that more power does not lead to better sound that is.