Basshead looking for a decent upgrade at 1k price

Hit up @NtraXMod and he can sort you out. He knows which pads I use, but also might be able to help you tailor the sound to your preferences. I do like the style I have because of their ability to take a pretty fat bass shelf while also keeping the mids and treble in a nice balance and imo one of the most important things you can do with most headphones and especially Hifimans is to get off of angled pads. Angled pads are exclusively bad in every way on every Hifiman. And almost every other companies headphones as well with rare exceptions like angled drivers or extremely shallow pads on some headphones.

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Sounds like exactly the sound signature I’m looking for

Oh my doesn’t the A70 have like 8-10 watts on 50 ohms ?

The He6seV2 definitely is not a lie when they say it’s chugging power

I read that article and none of it lines up with what you’re saying if I understand it right, could be wrong, but seems the opposite to me. You want enough gain for your amplifier to be able to reach its maximum rated output (dependent on the source material), then attenuate with the volume knob on your amplifier (or preamp for power amps like Vidar)). I don’t see anywhere in the article where he says that you want your volume knob at maximum output, then reduce gain to hit your listening levels…

He even says, “When you turn “up” a potentiometer, you’re merely controlling the input to the amplifier. The amp doesn’t have variable gain—it runs the same gain, full out, all the time. It doesn’t care about attenuation.”

Basically, it’s not going to affect the dynamic range or the ability of your amp to hit those hard dynamic swings when they come out.

In the section of the article about gain vs noise, there he mentioned you don’t want more gain than you really need, to keep the noise floor down. BUT you still want enough gain to hit the maximum output of your amp. You don’t want to control your “listening levels” with gain. Especially not from an EQ program…

I won’t try to debate it, I could be 100% wrong, but you did post the source, which I’m grateful for. So anyone can go and ready it and decide for themselves. :slight_smile:

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No, you’re totally right. You do ideally want to run your amp at maximum power so long as you aren’t clipping but that isn’t a possibility most times and the attenuation your get from some of the newer volume control stages is actually better than the amount of dynamic range lost from not running an amp at full tilt. That’s all I was getting at. There’s no scenario where you’re going to put the 20w at 14ohms or whatever some amp puts out into something like the Nanos without instantly popping your eardrums and the volume control attenuation you get on something like an D50 III is just a lot more forgiving of the losses than the losses you take not using the maximum output of your amp because the attenuation itself on some specific amps or DACs is better. Potentiometers of any kind are lossy, but some are just less lossy. There’s also input vs output gain and input vs output impedance of DACs and amps that comes into play to further complicate the whole mess, lucky for us. There are scenarios where you’re running an amplifier at full volume but since there’s a better attenuated input, you’re using more amplification to bring that lower level input up to volume. It’s all just one big convoluted mess of bullshit to trudge through but an easy way to avoid all the math and spec hunting is to just use one of the best forms if attenuation available at one point in the chain and wherever that may be, just stick to that spot as your volume control. There’s also the inverse of all of it where you can intentionally force dynamic range losses, which is just compression, to tailor the sound as well and some people like compression. Having the quiet parts be louder and more in line with the louder parts of a track can reveal some stuff, but I know I personally would much rather have the dynamic swings.

If an amp is receiving a lower input signal, it can be run at full tilt and still be listenable because of a low input signal and if that low input signal has less losses you get gains in performance because you are actually running the amp at full power. In the same way that an amp playing quiet sounds in a track at full power, is still at full power.

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