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Best Lineout On a DAP (unmodded) - Page 2

post #16 of 21
6/26/08 at 12:22pm
I like my iPod Touch a lot. *shrugs* I think it sounds better than my iRiver iMP-450 and iPod Photo, that's all I know.
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post #17 of 21
6/26/08 at 2:04pm
i would have thought that putting the mp3 volume to minimum (or very low) and using an external amp would be better, as the weaker, internal amplifier of the mp3 player is working less, and so affects the sq the least.
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post #18 of 21
6/26/08 at 8:15pm
Thread Starter 
I think that would distort the signal.

The source signal 'clarity' (right word??) is extremely important.

ie -Bad or ok source + good amp + good headphones + lossy file = qgood amplification of bad source

-Good source + no amp + ok headphones + lossy file = ok sound
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post #19 of 21
6/27/08 at 3:43am
Thread Starter 

lineout sq

Was out with a friend at lunch today.

Came up with an amusing annlorgy

Source is kind of like:

when your having a steak at a restaurant...no matter how good it is cooked or marinated etc how good it can be really depends on the quality of the original meat...

mmm steak
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post #20 of 21
6/27/08 at 4:18am
A good sterling silver can be overcooked and still taste bad (bad amplification), or the customer is asking for the wrong thing if he likes his steak cooked well-done, on a quality steak (wrong decisions, like buying a K701 to be coupled with an iPod); source is important too, but you should also be considering a good amplifier.

The biggest improvement you can make in your old rig (if you still have it), is to send the iPod to be modded by redwineaudio.com . If you still don't like the idea of modding something, you could do some digging on eBay for old PCDPs.
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post #21 of 21
6/27/08 at 5:47am
It was discussed many times - line-out is bad when used as headphone out, headphone out is OK to great when used as the line-out. I had the iRiver H340 for a couple of days, and neither its line=out, nor its headphone out were as good as the iRiver E10's headphone out used with max volume and EQ Normal as the line-out for the headphone amplifier. Gloryfying the PCDP's is a mistake nowadays - their internal hardware is pretty the same as the mp3 players' excluding the CD transport which is total crap in portable devices in most cases, so compared to decent mp3 player reading lossless and HQ lossy formats, the PCDP's are simply inferior due to poor quality digital data readout. Of course, anti-shock buffered models don't suffer from the data jitter but it's still at best the same level as the top mp3 players.

The idea of using headhone out or line-out is to use the external (more powerful, better) amplifier but when you connect it to the headphone out you unload it due to high load impedance compared to headphones which results in low distortion, and again, more powerful external amp is more immune to loading, and doesn't distort either. So you get overall better sound, and it doesn't matter if it's headphone out or line-out from a DAP. The matter is to choose a good sounding DAP to feed the music to the amplifier.
Setting volume to the maximum makes full use of the internal DAC resolution and maximizes the S/N ratio at the amplifier input.
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