Okay at some point, when I get rich, my new dream is to get a really good tube headphone amp with an optical in to run my Kenwood PCDP into. I have seen some gorgeous looking tube headphone amps & currently drooling over a Woo Audio single ended class a headphone amp. The only is that it's line in only & no optical in. I realize the full potential of my Kenwood PCDP & with my Sennheiser HD497's I can only imagine. I'm just wondering what experience any head-fi'ers have had using a PCDP with a top flight headphone amp. I'm trying to take portable audio & make it realtively hi-fi

If you wanted to get an amp with optical in, that's mean you need an amp with built in DAC. If you think your Kenwood PCDP sounds good as what it is, you just need to connect it to the amp to the line-in.

Otherwise, get an external DAC, usually they accept Coaxial & Optical input as the default configuration, but some accept USB or even AES input. Connect your PCDP to the DAC via optical, then from there connect it the RCA output to the Amp line input.

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Hi Pmartel,

If you read my review of the Zero DAC/Amp, it may make things clearer for you. It is here: http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f5/rev...re-amp-269458/

The folks that frequent the review thread are friendly and helpful too.