Nuforce Icon Mobile: Early impressions - Page 7

so...would you describe the Icon's sound as bright...or neutral?

definitely not warm, right?

It's a little on the bright side of neutral via USB and computer, and I would say not warm but not thin, as it still has a neutral and present bass. It does get a little brighter via analog input which makes it good with a 2G Nano or with my Senn IE8 earphones. I can still enjoy it with HD600, ESW10, Westone 3, D2000, Edition 9. It could stand to be a little warmer with Grados, but with flats my RS-1 are acceptable. It is okay with Nuforce NE-7M doesn't pair well with NE-8 or Head-direct RE2 or AKG K240M, so I suspectit wont do well with Ety ER6i either.

thanks. I went ahead and ordered the vivid v1 today. Should be arriving soon, as they are based in CA.

i hope they are not bright as the nuforce.

Do you hear a hiss?

Hi Larry:

I was thinking of picking this up for my Westone 3 earphones but I wanted to confirm whether you hear a low level hiss with this amp, or do you need to use the Westone volume controller to get rid of it?

Thanks!

I do not hear any hiss with the Westone 3 and any of my portable headphone amps except the Amphora, and even then it is mild and about the same as with the Macbook Pro headphone out.

Thank you...

As always, your feedback and information is very appreciated!

Thanks!

Anyone else paired it up with the HD600? I would like more impressions about them.

Concerning the whistling sound, just my .02$, but it could be the usb cable as well.

I've been listening to my Nuforce for about 20 hours now, and it's very nice. Working with my grado 60s, it's a real joy to finally have a clean source to here (FLAC>asio4all>NuforceDAC>Grado).

But still my annoyance is with the bad firmware in the Nuforce which makes it kick into charge mode if my usb is idle too long, and also on the initial plug-in when my usb isn't quite initialized. If it's on charge mode and DAC mode you'll get a faint high pitch squeal. You can fix it by just quickly unplugging and replugging it in to USB, but it's still annoying.

Maybe that thin sound would go well with these semi boomy HARX700's

Just a note on some of the nuances of using the Icon Mobile that I've come across the last few days. On my MacBook the 'USB' LED blinks quickly whereas on my girlfriend's Vista laptop it is continuous which is much less annoying!

I also get the 'whistling' when I change the input from USB to line in, I'm not sure what part it is caused by but simply disconnecting one of them gets rid of it, really not the end of the world.

After much AB testing I think I do prefer the DAC sound of the Nuforce (48000Hz, 16bit) compared to the onboard Mac one (96000Hz, 24bit), which in all honesty is quite surprising. The MacBook one had much more sharpness to it (not sure if that's a good thing) whereas the Nuforce was more held back but then that matches the Sennheisers in that respect. If anyone could give me a reason for this it would be appreciated.

Despite these things it is a brilliant little device, well worth the money and I can't wait to continue using it and listening to music with that extra detail. =)

I read the whole thread and don't think the question regarding the case has been answered.
Please, what case is this? I am interested, too!

The icon mobile was my first hit of audio crack. Researching it, thanks to an amazon recommendation, actually led me to this site. I love the little thing but it's just too bright for my dt990's so I bought an rsa predator. Now my im has become a really sweet dac/preamp for my truck. As bad as the inside of a bigrig is for listening to music, the im brings out so much detail that was missing from the headphone output on my EeePC. That volvo truck in the pics suprisingly has 3 way separates up front with silk dome tweeters so it sounds much better than you'd expect with a good signal.

WE LOVE THE CASE

honestly i htink its a makeup bag

I certainly wouldn't mind that case.

To mis-quote the film Ronin "What is the case!".