Advice Needed: Best Portable Headphone Amp for Pro Use - Page 4

no I mean the pico with its less than flat response is not suitable for mastering. sounds great; but not strictly tonally accurate. also analogue out on minijack is far from ideal

I would second this opinion.

I use Lisa XP with my K701 RAL recabled and ended with the Furutech plug and the sound is great. As the OP wants to use the K702 and K701 is very similar as I'm told, the Lisa would be a great piece of device.

Secondly, may be a musician is more sensitive to the SQ than most of us. My wife is a pianist and she can tell the difference between a WAV and a ALAC file. Also her student and her niece(incidentally also one of her students) can tell as well. I'm not kidding -- none of them enjoy listening to Hi-Fi rather than the real instruments. I ripped a track in WAV and in ALAC and asked them to listen to one at a time in 3 three different time. They didn't realized that I was repeating the experiment. I asked them 3 questions afterwards: "Any difference?", "What's the difference" and "Which sounds better". The thing that stroke me was that the answers were identical =="Yes", "One is more spacious, the feel of space is bigger/better", The WAV file sounds better.

My source was IMod 4G, the LOD was ALO's Jumbo Cryo, E530 the IEM and probably the Toma or the Corda Move the amp (can't remember as it's more than a year ago). As half a mathematician, I knew that ALAC and WAV should sound the same. However the identical experimental results could not be denied as well and my own conclusion was that the decoding mechanism of the IMod was not good enough so that WAV performs better than the ALAC. But, at least to me, the more important conclusion was (and is) musicians do have better hearing abilities. In this case, I think Lisa is a better choice if you don't mind about the size. If you can live with 8 hours of play time, try the std version -- it's size is shorter than the Sony Vaio P netbook -- a netbook that claims that it fits for the pockets of a pair of jeans.

Lastly, Lisa do hiss with ES3X, one of the most sensitive IEM. In case you're going to use it in the future, bear this in mind.

Finally, I think it is only you who can weight the size/SQ factors. HPA and others are much more knowledge than me and they've provided lots of information. That should be enough for your decision. Try go to a meet to listen to the amps mentioned in this thread.

My 2c.

Good Luck.

The Apogee mini-DAC is very good, and what I would recommend for what you need except for the price isn't <$500. I have one and use it daily. I feed the XLR into a balanced Single Power amp, and the 1/8" out into a Woo WA6 tube amp. However, the headphone out of the Apogee is pretty good by itself. I haver the jumpers inside moved to let the Apogee volume control affect the XLR and 1/8" jack's output levels, and use it as a preamp.

You will not be able to feed an analog XLR signal into the Apogee, only digital, and the USB was discontinued in favor of a firewire option (I have the USB version, and the USB conversion works very well). You could use a separate USB to S/PDIF adapter if you needed to.

I don't know any DAC/amp with analog XLR inputs - does the Grace M902? I have read good things here about the Grace, and John Willet of Sennheiser uses one in his recording studio and loves it.

why's nobody recommending any iBasso here especially the D10. I'm not a pro in any way. I'm just an average listener who appreciates good sound. anyway, yeah, why no D10. This forum has been flooded with lots of compliments and good reviews about it. or maybe there's still more suggestions coming. and also the Minibox E+. i believe it has 18V battery which I guess is enough to power the Senns. just reading here and there...thanks.

For size and ease of use, especially when it comes to battery recharges, why has no one mentioned the xin supermini?
Build quality up to taking on lots of unintentional abuse, AAA batteries for power, fantastic sound (tweakable to, opamp rollers dream ).

Forget all these big boxes, great sound from a tiny ultra convenient box= supermini

I think the OP has moved on no-one has recommended the D10 as it doesnt IMO have the power to drive senns that well; I love mine, but I dont think it provides the power or the neutrality for monitoring. dont get me wrong its a great sounding little box and i'm one of those people thats been singing its praise everywhere. but I just dont think its suitable. besides if you look at when the OP was made; the D10- didnt even exist. IMO and out of the portable amps that I have heard, the Lisa III and iqube are the only 2 that have the kind of power and neutrality to work in a monitoring environment. i've heard the D2 and own the D10 IMO neither are suitable. i've heard the predator and owned the pico and dont think either of them are suitable. I havent heard the supermini, so I cant give an opinion on that. its likely the minibox E+ has enough power, but I dont know if it is transparent enough; because again I havent heard it. i'll leave it at that. maybe this will help someone else.. but I think the op has moved on. not sure because he said the tour has been delayed.