I’ve been down a similar road. Preamp yes preamp no. Bad match from DAC to amp using digital volume control just upstream. HQPlayer to Holo Audio May L3 to Holo Serene and/or PS Audio BHK hybrid tube pre to BHK 250 stereo. Too much money for it not to work well together. Tried in-line attenuators, meh. Digital gain was much more transparent.
So I bought some cheap gear, Fosi DAC and 3e A5 class D. They are like a match made in heaven. No, they don’t reach the same resolution of the $15000 worth of gear but the gain match is vastly better and therefore much more engaging and fun to listen. I also no longer wish to be beholden to the sweet spot when IEMs have gotten so very good for so little. Oh the freedom to move around with great sound.
Current daily driver is a ‘poor man’s’ DX340 with AMP16. A DX180 with Muse M5 Ultra with tubes…and various sets of iems with vastly different characteristics and much higher everything that I would only rarely get with speakers. My room is bad, err tough to work with…but I digress.
It’s my first DAP since several iPods back in the day with spinning disks. The DX180 serves as a fine transport but I suspect a 340 will be in my future.
Oh, I also have a desktop HP stack. Hifiman EF499 (tried the EF500 for weeks at the same time) and Apos Gremlin hybrid so I can tube roll for fun. The Apos in particular really does drive most of my IEMs better than the DX but yeah it’s not portable.
That’s funny, I’ve been running a “poor mans high current” system consisting of a Fiio JM21 loaded with 2tb of FLAC files (some upscaled) stacked on a Questyle CMA18 with a little perfectly sized USB bridge to hold them together and offload DAC duties to the CMA18 and I had a buddy 3d print me a case to hold them both together as a portable endgame portable brick and I am absolutely loving it and it’ll drive anything but Susvara/HE6/Tungsten extremely well.
On the surface, it sounds like we’re advocating for the same thing. Specifically in iBasso DX320MAX’s case, it has a stepped attenuator for volume control, allowing you to physically achieve the purest and most unaltered signal path (because you are avoiding all resistor in the signal path). It only has 4 gain settings, so it’s extremely hard to achieve the desirable volume level. That’s why I said it’s limiting, I was referring to my experience with the DX320MAX’s secret feature. In reality, it’s a physical feature that I haven’t heard anyone talking about.
I’m currently writing a review about the DX340. I’ve been using it for several months now, and it’s the most impressive piece of gear I own.
Honestly, it’s quite difficult to wrap my head around all the technical audio designs. I’m a listener, so all this engineering is completely alien to me. I’m happy that was able to learn about stepped attentuators through research for my DX320MAX review. It’s interesting for a newbie like myself to successfully learn about these concepts and designs, but the DX340 is challenging me quite a lot with its DAC…
