Portable sound: what's your budget ? - Page 2

Westone 3 is about as far as I need to go for on-the-go audio. I might get some custom tips, but thats about it.

300$

My favorite portable is an old discman and maybe an external amp from the lineout sometimes. for low price and high audio quality.

no limit, if I feel I will find improvement, I take steps to make it happen.luckily I have abilities and equipment that makes it cheaper for me to realize an excellent rig or 2; plus for me, my rigs can be considered a tax right-off I disagree with not needing to spend money on source when you have great headphones, since when has this logic applied with home rigs? you would be laughed at for running HD800 out of something comparatively cheap. IMO there is no point buying amazing headphones if you cant supply them with the goods to show off the sophistication they possess. I agree that spending money on a portable amp, without taking care of source is misguided and far too common on here though.

sorry but this statement is incorrect IMO. many of the players with the best sound quality are considerably older than 2 years and mine arent looking like going anywhere soon. my iriver iHP132CF was released in 2004 I think, so much more than your 2 years. admittedly i'm only using it for transport duties and my DIYMOD is a modified DAP for several years ago as well. neither of these are going anywhere soon; now if you care about things other than sound quality, you might have a problem, but thats not what I buy DAPs for. I have my iphone for all the other bells and whistles; my DAPs are there to play music and both of them still do a very good job of it thanyou.

next up for me is the alexmod, which is a modified Cowon X5L. the alexmod involves installing a daughterboard in the X5L which has upgraded caps, dual PCM1798 Dac chips (i'm using PCM1794A personally) and a high powered lipol cell to enable powering higher quality opamps like OPA627 or whatever your choice and high quality Ti headphone drivers. these components not only compete with the parts used in some mid-fi home rigs, in some cases they are superior; add to that awesome battery life, a compact case, true line out and rockbox and you have a portable machine that for the money certainly beats what you could purchase were you to put the same money towards a home transport, DAC and amp combination. pair this with my JH13 and i'm not sure many would complain, no matter how spoiled you are by home gear. In fact IMO it is a competitive or more likely superior sounding, much more compact player than recent developments and again, the DAP is getting old in the tooth, but has the advantage of leaving the i2s signal exposed, has great battery life and is rockboxable.

now this doesnt mean i'm not investing in a higher quality home rig, but who said you cant have your cake and eat it too??

well I use my JH13 pretty much anywhere. I bring my case with me and if they arent in my ears (unlikely) then they are in my rig bag, which comes with me to carry my ...errm...rig I dont see them as being vulnerable at all really. all the same I try to look after them well, but I bought them so I could enjoy awesome audio whereever I went and i'm not giving that up to baby them so they never leave the house. of course if people want to do that, I have no problem with that, I dont quite understand it, but hey, each to their own. IMO if you cant afford to buy new ones if something happens to them (or insure them) possibly you should think about how you are spending your money. of course I would be emotionally crushed if something happened to my babies , and I would hate having to buy new ones, but that doesnt stop me wanting to use them to their advantage.

fixed

hehe, yeah well, all the better to convince my wallet

indeed it would, but the amp and source you would need to make HD800 sound as good as they deserve to, will cost you almost the same again or more. the only area I find the JH13 lacking in comparison to HD800 is soundstage and possibly slam when comparing to a balanced HD800 out of a powerful amp. I spent some time with HD800 at the last sydney meet and while I was impressed, I did not feel I was taking much of a sound quality hit when I went for a walk outside to have a cigarette with JH13 and iriver/D10. much of the improvements I heard could be attributed to the excellent rig they were plugged into buffalo sabre 32->Beta22

well its not really very accessible to the average person at this stage. it can only be bought as a daughter board, you must CF mod the cowon to provide enough space by getting rid of the HD, then the dac board and batteries must be soldered/patched into the i2s; along with a modified version of rockbox installed.

as far as it being FOTM, AFAIK noone here has even got it yet apart from the inventor of the mod. I simply saw the thread, saw the potential and made steps to get myself a cowon, so I could try it out when he gets more boards. even if I dont end up doing that particular mod, the i2s is very accessible in the cowon, so could fairly easily be tapped and sent to perhaps the new (unreleased) D11 or a portable modified twisted pear OPUS, while skipping the often jitter inducing and Signal degrading step of converting i2s to spdif and back again. also the modified rockbox bu8ld for this projsct supports hirez

I would rather spend far far more on my home rig than my portable rig tbh.

Luminette's post on portable hi-fi made far too much sense for me to spend a crapload on portable hi-fi.

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f105/l...-silly-374155/

That said though, I am a smart audiophile and will buy bang-for-buck stuff regardless of brand. I have zero brand association when shopping for stuff. I don't believe in interconnect cables for example (science gets in the way of that). My IC is a $7-8 shielded 2 RCA to 2 RCA cable.

My budget is really US$200 for earphones and probably about the same for the source. Remember in audio, it is a very loose correlation between price and performance, much more so than in other things.

Same, though I don't consider myself too "smart," just cheap. I still consider the JH13 to offer tremendous bang-for-the-buck considering its pure versatility (translating seamlessly from the finest portable set-ups into the most ludicrous, ear-dropping home gear).

well all together i paid about $600 for my mobile setup with my ipod, or u can say 700 with my walkman. cause my walkman doesnt need an amp it sounds good enough.

I don't have a problem spending money on portable goodies but I'd rather invest in my desktop rig first. In part this is due to the fact that I'm much less likely to break/drop my desk in the water, etc that I am to some how do in my portable stuff.

It also seems like you can get more quality for less money when you are not concerned about size. For someone like me who's on a budget that's another thing that pushes me toward a desktop rig first.

Somewhere around $2,000 I guess...
±$1200 on a pair of IEMs (JH-13 Pro, UE11 Pro, ...), ±$500 on amplification (HeadAmp Pico Slim, Emmeline "The Shadow", ...) and ±$250 on a DAP (iPod nano, touch, ...).

Depends if you are really hardcore on the street or at home...

But portable setup is a good introduction to music from a budget perspective IMHO. 3 to 4 components and you get hook up in no time with decent sound.

Home system on the other end is extremely expensive cause you will invest on speaker, cable, turntable (yeah portable turntable, heard it before, never seen one in life), expensive amps and you need a dedicated space for it, which to me, is another ball game. But they do last 10 years or more. But the money is at least 20X my portable setup. Some may argue you can start cheap but what you pay is what you get - to get to a decent level...

For serious listening I still prefer to have a good home system - You cant really concentrate outside anyway. However if you cant build one (staying with parents, join rental, KIDS took your music room!! etc) then going all out onto portable maybe sensible.

Oh, how much? I invested a ibossa10 and HD-238 and using Ipod Shuffle 1GB. I'm planing to get a zune since I'm archiving everything to WMA loseless. So I would say everything below 600 for me. Rich man may spend 300X but I'm not rich

Btw, 30 DAP is so legendary... I envy you!!!

whatever it takes =)

So far my rig isn't that much, but rather impressed. I still need to get a proper source for my Little Dot MKI+, but my AMP3 and any custom monitors i own at the moment are more than impressive. Liking it a lot, total costs right now ranges from $900-$1500

A year ago I might have said $500 or $600, but right now I'm gonna go ahead and say whatever the price of an 8gb clip and some pk3's (or something comparable, not really up on the IEM / earbud market) .... so like, $130-$150 ....