Budget DAC/AMP or AMP for Jamo S803 speakers

Do you know what I can pair with my Jamo S803 speakers? Something that is not really expensive around 300$.

Do I also need a DAC or an AMP it’s enough?

I’m quite new to this, so please don’t judge if I sound stupid. :slight_smile:

An all in one unit like a smsl ad18 has lots of features and sounds good.

You could get a topping pa3 and topping d10 for a stack that I think would be better then the smsl. You could even swap the d10 out for the topping dx3 pro and have a built in headphone amp in the dac.

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Topping MX3 is Dac/Amp/Headphone Amp with Bluetooth.

I didn’t like the amp portion for the mx3. It didn’t sound very clean, and measures poorly

Edit: I think you would run into the same distortion problem with this unit

I was just reading that the power handling of the speakers is 80W / 160W, but the majority of DAC/AMP combos is around 40 - 50wpc. Am I looking at this wrong? People are saying that the AMP should have ALWAYS more power than what the speaker actually need.

By power handling, I’m going to assume that would refer to peak power, and in that case, no, because the peak power is how much it can take before having extreme anomalies or destroying itself. Most speakers at nearfield, if their fairly efficient, will really only need a few watts to get to listenable levels. The extra power comes in when there is a really loud noise the speaker has to produce, or if you crank it past normal volume levels for a party or movie or whatnot. If you look at the sensitivity of your jamos (87dB) it will produce 87db of sound using one watt measured from one meter away. This isn’t the most efficient speaker, but it’s good enough. It’s also rated at 8 ohms, so if you take the topping pa3 for example, it can output rms (constant) 70 watts at 8 ohms, plenty for your jamos. Now if you ever actually reached into that, the distortion in the amp would go way up, but you would definitely be damaging your hearing quite substantially at that level.

So you will definitely be fine with this amp. I would say you would want at least 30 watts RMS (constant) for your speakers, and in the 50+ watt range you should have no problem driving them. You would only reach into the 60 watt and above if you were trying to fill a very large room with sound at louder then normal levels

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What did you end up getting?

I will be out of the country by the the time the PA3 arrives so boredom struck and now I’m googling too many amps.

Kind of interested in the Basx a-100 but I suspect it might be overkill.

I don’t think it would be overkill, it’s a great amp if you have the space, and you can use it as the op headphone amp

The headphone amp does look interesting. Will report back once I blow up my dt 1990’s.

Yeah just be careful with it. You will blow your ears first before you would blow the headphones lol. Perhaps blowing your ears could be nice, as you would never be able to hear the name audeze or their headphones (which would clearly be a benefit to you lol)

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So turns out amazon.co.uk also sells the PA3 and I’ll be able to get it this side of Christmas. Decision made then

The pa3 is pretty sweet for the size and price

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Almost did a stupid when ordering… in my head, 4 banana plugs was enough.

PA3 arrived…It’s deceptively small actually.

Can’t wait to try the S803. Luckily Amazon sent the speaker cables in a separate shipment… FFS!

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Nice, curious to see what you think :+1:

Scraped some RCA’s together for the evening… Sorry neighbours.

Sounds good to me :+1: Strange not hearing this bloated boom on the desk I’ve had my entire life.