Silly topic names aside. At the moment my SD-793II gives more then enough power for my current set of m40X’s. However I am currently looking to upgrade to a harder to drive set of headphones and I wondered how far could I push my amp before I absolutely had to get a better one. If I was made of money I’d just go ahead and buy a new amp and a new set of headphones all at once. On the topic of upgrade paths what is the better path of upgrade DAC/AMP first or headphones first?
That amp is relatively under powered and you might want to consider something different depending on what headphone you get. The headphone is always going to make the biggest difference, so I would put most of your budget towards the headphone. You might have to get a new amp depending on what you decide to go with
well I new I would have to get a new one, its just not in the cards to get a new amp and a new set of cans at the same time.
I would just focus on the headphones and worry about the amp later, you could still use your amp until you have the funds to get a new setup. You can get a killer dac amp setup for under $180 these days.
What headphones are you eying?
I got a strong case of eyes bigger then my stomach as the argon mk3s have been giving me dirty looks. thing is I need to find an easy way to tryout lots of different headphones all at once to really home in on what I like.
Well if you got the argons you definitely would want an amp upgrade. The wait would also be pretty long for the argons, so that could give you some time to amass some funds. If you have no brick and mortar stores around you (like most people), amazon’s return policy is your best bet, as you can easily try out and return items within 30 days (although I’m sure they don’t encourage this)
the cost aside I would also have to give a long think into how I would have to modify my stack. atm I am using my 793 to as feed out into my desktop amp to power my RB42s
well, if you wanted an all in one unit, the topping dx3 pro is around $200 and has a dac and nice headphone amp, and line outs for speakers. Also has bluetooth in and a remote. But does not have analog in.
You could also get something like a topping d10 and a monolith liquid spark or jds atom if you need an extra analog input. They have a preamp out so you could control the volume of the speakers with the headphone amp. You could always just get the liquid spark or jds atom and feed it with your sd-793II, and then pass through to the speaker amp. That way you would only spend 100 for an amp and get a dac later on if you want one
i had thought about getting the atom, would just need to get some sort of splitter so i could output from the 793 to both my speaker amp and the atom.
You could just run the 793 to the atom and then use the pre outs on the atom
huh never thought of daisy chaining the dacs. that stack would look rly wierd tho.
after some thinking, what you suggest would work but would be a pain in the ass as I would have to unplug/plug in the headphones and readjust all the volume nobs every time i wanted to switch between headphones and speakers. whereas if I used a y slitter at the line out of the 793 to feed into both my SA-98E and the atom i could use both volume nobs independently.
Yeah then you could just get a splitter if you wanted to