Question about Total Bithead - Head-Fi: Covering Headphones, Earphones and Portable Audio

thebikingengineer · 02-04-2008, 02:58 PM

Hi, new member here with his first post.

I have a question about the Total Bithead. I went to listen to some music on my iPod this morning and had a horrible noise come out of the buds. My setup is a set of Ultimate Ears Super Fi 3 ECH's plugged into a Total Bithead with an iPod mini (headphone jack out) as a source. It seemed like there was a lot of signal noise, but the overall sound was more than just that. Is it just that the ECH's are too low impedance, or might something be wrong?

To note, this same setup but with Senn HD 555 cans sounds wonderful.

Thanks,

Mark

Joelc87 · 02-04-2008, 06:49 PM

The iPod headphone jack is extremely noisy...so that in combination with amping the noise up with the bithead and then hooking them up to ECH's which are the most sensitive type of headphones, will most likely result in lots of white noise. If you haven't already turn the gain switch on your bithead to the low position. The Senn's aren't as sensitive and so won't pick up all the white noise like that.

JorgeC · 02-04-2008, 06:58 PM

Hello,

You'll definitely want to employ the 'low-gain' setting on the HeadRoom TBH amp for use with highly efficient (sensitive) low-impedance ear canal headphones ... The amp's high gain setting is likely best for high-impedance designs like most full-size headphones for example but can be a bit noisy with ECHs.

Lower bitrate, highly compressed digital music files will tend to exhibit higher background noise floor issues, especially when "magnified" via a dedicated head-amp. I would suggest using principally 'LossLess' files offering improved sound quality. An iPod line-out 'dock' device that allows for analog signal output via the iPod's bottom pin-port (made by SIK.com and SendStation.com -- amongst many others!) are also highly worthwhile and will help to tamp down the rather noisy headphone jack connection from iPod to head-amp.

Cheers,
Jorge
HR Sales /Product Manager

thebikingengineer · 02-04-2008, 08:50 PM

The amp is set on low gain currently. I may just not use the amp with the ECH's, they seem to sound ok straight out of the iPod. I mostly just use them for tunes in between classes and generally on the go, plenty of ambient noise flying around anyway (the reason I went with ECH's in the first place).

As an aside, the DAC functions of the Bithead are awesome. Everything is very nice and clear coming out of the computer.

JMCIII · 02-06-2008, 11:02 PM

Try a new set of batteries. When mine start to go, they make a god-awful noise through my headphones - either gain setting.

thebikingengineer · 02-07-2008, 12:29 AM

Brand new batteries in this amp, it's not even burned in yet. I'm thinking it was just a combination of signal noise, low bit rate (128), over-amplication and the very sensitive ECH's that made the noise. I'm currently listening to this same amp straight out of the computer on my HD 555 cans (Stephen Lynch is a funny and talented man BTW) and it sounds wonderful.

n_maher · 02-07-2008, 02:12 PM

While not specifically with the Bithead I have had noise issues on the USB output if I had my laptop plugged in. This has varied from computer to computer, but might be something else to check out. The bithead I had on loan for a short while (for a Boston meet) was darn near silent in my work rig.

thebikingengineer · 02-07-2008, 02:17 PM

On my desktop at home I get a silent noise floor no matter what headphones I'm using. I'd venture to guess that your laptop's AC-DC converter is throwing some white noise around. I was getting this when I had my Bithead near our wireless router. Moving it to the other side of my desk quieted everything down.

tfarney · 02-12-2008, 10:57 AM

I use 320kbps files in my iPod Nano and plug Etys (ER6) in directly. It's pretty quiet, even though the ER6 requires a lot of gain from the iPod. When I plug it into my Airhead, the noise level comes up a bit, even with my Senns. Oddly enough, the set up is much quieter out of the headphone jack of my Apple laptop. Better components, I suppose. I really wish I had something that plugged into the firewire port and contained a high quality dac. Soon...

Tim

probedb · 02-21-2008, 04:23 PM

As already suggested you should get the small ipod connector to line out adaptor. This gives you a line out like you'd get on a dock instead of going through the headphone amp in the ipod.