Some great recommendations in here! I’m glad to hear the Zen CAN made the setup for a while, but we all hit that upgrade point eventually. Happy shopping!
So I am finding myself growing on the focal clears a little bit but I still feel like something is missing. My plan is to rent the RNHP amp for a month and go from there. My concern is that I will also need an expensive dac to go with it. I pretty much like all music except death metal and the like. I have been listening mostly to music on YouTube though will most likely get something like TIDAL for a while.
YouTube actually explains a lot. Audio there is generally mp3 quality, so will generally sound worse as you go to higher-end gear and more resolving headphones.
IMO the most important upgrade you can make is to lossless audio, it will cost you much less than a new amp and will absolutely have a bigger impact. Tidal is doing 2 months for $2 atm so it’s basically risk free to give it a shot. You may find you don’t need to upgrade your chain at all, and if you still decide you want the RNHP you’ll be sure your getting the most out of it.
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Before buying or renting equipment try out a free subscription of Qobuz and see if something is missing. Like stated above YouTube definitely isn’t the best when using higher end headphones.
If you do end up with the RNHP run it for awhile without thinking about the DAC. Really the clears are on the edge of what I consider to be able to hear differences between DACs and even those differences are small. What I look for in differences would be how natural your DAC sounds and really with the level of gear we are talking about here it would be very difficult to pick that out.
In the end the clears might not be for you.
So I’m sending the clears back after listening to the HD 800S. The HD 800S sounded better with my ifi zen dac to me than both the clear and rnhp and a topping D90 combined. I’m thinking about just spending it all on a decent headphone. If you were to buy a headphone as a daily driver for under 3k CAD what would be the best options? I want something that can sound good for games, videos and music alike.
I can get a Diana v2 open box for about 3.2k CAD all in but am not sure how it would be for gaming. Does anyone know if they have a full 360 for the soundstage? Or are they like the HD6XX where it seems to come from the front and the sides with no in between?