What I said. Glad someone else actually understands how this works. If we're waving willies around with who knows what. I've got a degree in Sound Engineering & have worked on many projects designing studios & high end listening rooms. An amplifier can't improve a signal but it can accurately present it. It's the SISO concept (**** In, **** Out)
I think that is the statement that doesn't ring true for most here as a crap amp will only serve to dampen your listening plessure. That's a better explanation and spot on. As to the Phonostage, I thought it was called that because they were basicaly the same. Low power and highly filtered voltage circuits that were between the pre-amp and power amp? Anyway, back on topic. Why wouldn't the dedicated headphone output be worse quallity than an MP3 player? The only thing I can think of is EMI/RFI or very bad/damaged hardware. Have you overclocked and turned of the spread spectrum in the BIOS by any chance?
just throwing my 2 cents in here, like they've been arguing about, amps dont change the actual sound output, however a bad amp will turn it to crap, and since not all of us have 4-5k to drop on the top end amps to drive those 2k headphones, or even some senheisser 600's, we make do with the cheaper ones. Now, about as cheap as I'd go is this http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=350240347903 It's a very decent amp, with socketed oamps, so you can change em for tuning, some recommended oamps are listed at headfi.org Theres a link on that ebay page to the review of the amp on headfi, which contains alot of good info. The other option is of course, building your own amp from some of the plans available out there on the net, I love building stuff, but thats for those who really know what their doing, and how to calculate how every little change you might have to do will affect the sound, since the good designs are somewhat older at this point in time and you can no longer reproduce the designs exactly. Anyway, a good resource for this stuff is www.head-fi.org for us damn yanks, and http://rockgrotto.proboards.com/ for you uk guys, I've not looked much at rockgrotto before, but I hear its a decent site. Noob
This has already been said and is technically wrong but I would say a decent headphone amplifier does essentially does improve the quality of the sound that you hear, this is because it amplifies all of the harmonic components of the sound wave correctly, will not distort at higher volumes (or in the case of valve amps distort well) and will not end up filtering out parts of the sound and even the internal amplifiers of the source will do this if you turn the volume up. Obviously you need to be feeding into decent headphones and have a REASONABLE source but for a general idea my ipod nano feeding a 320kps MP3 into a good headphone amp is virtually indistinguishable from the same amp being fed from the phono output of a Essence STX playing a FLAC. Try a headphone amp - it will make a difference. Look on head-fi for huge amounts of info on this.
