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
Personally, I use a 5.2.2 setup for watching movies/gaming but when playing music I always go into Pure Direct mode for 2ch stereo. Mind you, this is in a larger room with loudspeakers at a distance of ~10ft from the seating position and roughly 8 feet between them angled at roughly 30 degrees from center. Despite being in stereo, it's very holographic and can fill a room easily with sound. However, every now and then, I do run 2ch with presence speakers and that does add an interesting bit of height but it's very track/genre specific. Really the only time I even use 7ch stereo is when listening to classical and usually have an appropriate hall-effect DSP to add in some reverb, delay, echo, etc.
Here's a diagram with placements and angles to give you a better idea:
Honestly, it may be wise to invest in a budget AVR as these days they have microphones that can dial in the sound for wiring, distance, and various speaker layouts to suit a room. They're not 100% but they do get damn close and you can always dial-it in yourself and EQ as necessary. Even if you wanted to forego a traditional surround setup (5.1), you could always run a "front surround" setup and it would virtualize the rears to the front channels. I have a similar setup in my smaller office that is technically a 5.1 setup but all from the front. You could also forego the rears and run a 3.1 setup to achieve most of the effect since the rear channels would be routed to the fronts and processed accordingly by the AVR. I only recommend the latter if your room is on the smaller size but it would do a fairly good job of giving you a "surround sound" despite not having read speakers.