I need some help cause I am confused about all this. I am looking for an Amp that is around $150. It would need to handle a pair of Sennheiser HD 58x and either a pair of Micca RB42 or a pair of Fluance SX6. I haven’t decide on which set to get yet. Also, Should I pick up a DAC? If so I’ll put up a post over in the DAC section. The input source will be my PC.
My overall budget is $400 for Amp and DAC
So mainly a speaker amp? Do you want it to also power headphones? For around 100, you can pick up something like the topping pa3 or smsl sa300 which will be very clean sounding amps that will power both speakers well. You could end up with a stack with a dac, speaker amp, and headphone amp that would give you lots of flexibility and optimize price to performance
A chain with a dac like a smsl sanskrit 10th mk2 splitting it’s signal to both a speaker amp like the topping or smsl, and also a headphone amp like the schiit magni heresy or a liquid spark would be real sweet, with a very solid headphone amp, dac, and speaker amp, with easy potential upgrades in the future, but this combo would be 300 ish all in.
Emotiva BasX A-100 can do speakers and headphones, is more expensive than $150
The a100 is also sweet, and if you go with that, you can also power your headphones decently well
I looking for an amp that did both, but if it is more beneficial to separate them than I would do that. $300 not bad my overall budget is $400 for an amp and DAC stack.
Ah, that fits well in your budget then imo, it should offer a lot of performance and flexibility for the price. I think if you wanted something that would do it all well, you would be looking at something like a denon pma600ne or ps audio sprout100
The PMA600NE would be nice for expandability. The Record out (external Headphone amp?) and two Toslink inputs in particular.
Putting in the good word for Allo Volt+ Double. Absolutely clean and mid-fi sounding amp, probably cleaner than something like Topping PA3, for $130, if you don’t mind the flimsy clear plexiglass case.
Man, it’s probably not the case, but it looks like, I don’t know, half of the money went into the volume pot, lol.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, in high end designs lots of attention is put into the volume pot (stepped attenuation in the volt + double)
Yeah then they ran over budget before including a drop of factory grease in the pot. Seriously the stiffest pot I’ve ever tried to turn. I’m afraid while turning the pot to the next click I will literally break the case apart, it squeaks and stretches when force is applied to the pot. I just control volume exclusively via preamp lol
Oh shit lol 