Headphone Heights

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RE: Best headphone set up?

Posted by nl on July 16, 2015 at 06:08:19:
Like many things in audio, headphones are something of a personal preference.
I personally have used the HD600 for more than a decade, and like them better than the HD800 and some other options which were supposed to be oh-so-much better than the HD600. You never know until you actually listen to them, if you will like them. Other people's opinions are worse than useless. Price, for anything over $250, does not necessarily mean anything. Any headphone of more than $250 or so (new market price, not retail list, dynamic headphones) will be pretty well made and represents a manufacturer's top effort without major compromise. I suggest starting with models like the HD600, Grado SR325i, Beyerdynamic DT-880, AKG 701 and other such top-quality models that are not so boutiquey. Listen to these for a year at least. If you find something better, great. I never did.
Even for planars and electrostats, excellent models abound for $400 or so (Stax 407 for example), and I would not assume that more expensive offerings from even the same manufacturers are necessarily better.
I find that poor electronics are far more apparent, and far more irritating with headphones than with speakers, where things like crossovers, cabinet and room resonance tend to obscure things.
I personally do not like electronic feedback in headphone amplifiers, whether tube or solid state. I've used tube amps with things like solid-state current sources, or solid-state amplifiers based on bipolar outputs, and find them quite poor. My no-feedback SE DHT headphone amps, and also my no-feedback solid-state efforts, are far superior.
I am now using something a little special: the Metrum Octave DAC, which uses an R2R configuration and has no output stage, combined with a 600 ohm autoformer from Dave Slagle. This drives my HD600 to satisfying levels on most recordings. I am listening literally to the current output of the R2R converter on the chip, with no intervening electronics.
This is hard to beat. I haven't beaten it with either tube or solid-state approaches. You can use it with headphones of any impedance, but the efficiency must be high, around 97db/mW or better. But, there are other options too, such as electrostats or vinyl. I think that there is quite a lot of improvement to be done with electrostatic amplifiers. Recent very ambitious attempts such as the Gilmore Blue Hawaii often have a lot of solid-state feedback, feedback with tubes (all Stax offerings), etc. Feedback can be important for speaker amplifiers due to difficult speaker loads and need for high power, which leads one to Class AB approaches and inherently nonlinear devices (power pentodes, Mosfets) that benefit from feedback, and also devices (transistors, opamps) with such high transconductance that they need to be restricted by feedback. However, headphone listening is typically a low-power, easy load (single driver, no crossover, high impedance, low current) so it should be possible to use no-feedback approaches without much compromise.