Denon D2000? - Page 3

yes hahahaha lmao as soon as I saw that I was like home alone!!

Your impressions about what you hear seem honest and described well and I assume accurately for what you hear. There's no need to apologize for that.

The D2000 is picky about amps and isn't. It's kind of an either the amp works well with the D2000 or it doesn't. It will work well enough with a lot of different amps so in that sense it isn't too picky.

What the D2000 is picky about is having an amp that can deliver enough power and current. Some amps just don't and they will sound dull or just or wrong (frequency response shifts). Some amps have a high output impedance that doesn't match well with the D2000 25 ohm impedance and in those cases you can get some strange alterations in the frequency response of the headphone.

I think it is quite possible to amp the D2000 with quite modest amps. I've plugged the D2000 directly in some home CD players that have a headphone out and the D2000 sounds just fine. I've plugged the D2000 in others with not so good results. It depends. But it's pretty obvious when the D2000 is being driven poorly. The headphone amps that are in home CD players are quite modest yet some of them do fine with the D2000.

The times I've had problems with amping the D2000 seem to be cases where the amp is being stingy with power. Portable devices are battery powered and often stingy with power to preserve battery life. That could be a reason why some portable amps don't sound good with the D2000. But there's also cases where some portables sound fine. Amps that are powered from the USB port are often underpowered for the D2000. There just isn't much current and voltage available on the USB bus to be able to drive the D2000. You can't defy physics. If the current and voltage aren't there at the power source you can't magically make them happen in some miracle amp design. The D2000 is a low ohm headphone and full sized at that. The low impedance means an amp has to deliver more current. Sometimes that means the D2000 may demand more current than the amp can deliver and then the D2000 and the amp suffers.

I have a portable amp that is able to drive my HD600 and my Grados but is unable to drive my D2000. Play the D2000 and the amp distorts. The amp is just physically not able to do what the D2000 needs it to do.

Why doesn't someone who does have an EE background our something similar spell it out to us unwashed masses about why a low impedence phone like the D2000 sometimes sounds like crap with different kinds of amps - portables, usb powered, etc. There must be some sort of mathematical formula that can be set up so us less-educated serfs can "plug and chug" to get a basic idea of what's up. :-)

Well, I came down hard on General Failure, so I'll step up.

The basic premise is this:

Headphone manufacturers often state a headphones resistance in ohms as part of its specifications. The D2000 is 24 ohms, the AKG K701 are 62 ohms, and the Sennheiser HD600 are 300 ohms. People often jump to the conclusion that a lower number here is easier to drive and that's that. The fact of the matter is that Resistance is just one variable in an equation that has 3 components. This equation is Ohm's Law.

Ohm's Law


Ohm's Law defines the relationships between power, voltage, current, and resistance.


These values are more complicated when it comes to circuits with capacitance and inductance, but the principle remains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm's_l...arying_signals

Consider that home stereo speakers are typically 8 ohms, and car stereo speakers are 4 ohms. Often, when there is a need to deliver power the resistance (ohms) goes down to facilitate this.

Power or watts are what determine how much work the circuit can do. Amps x volts = watts. So, a headphone amp can deliver power with a combination of these as increasing output of either increases your total power. In practice, the chips or components have a maximum operating voltage, and amperage becomes the critical factor to deliver power since your resistance and voltage are fixed. Once this limit is reached, the amp basically gets sloppy. Once the circuit is stressed, it can only approximate an amplified version of the original signal. This is audible as a loss of dynamics, and definition as the driver is no longer being given what it needs to articulate the desired signal, if the cone only moves half as far or as fast as needed while the amp tries to catch up, you hear it.

The D2000 has a large driver and a low impedance, it really shines when it can have all the power it wants. Yes, it will still sound pretty good straight from some pretty minimal sources, but anybody who has heard one properly amped can tell you it's not a subtle difference.

I do believe a great many headphones can be driven just fine without an amp. I also believe that a sound card or USB device can be of good quality. However, since these are all amplified using IC opamps, some things are beyond their reach. For instance, a well regarded opamp the Burr-Brown OPA2134 can handle up to 36 volts and 5 milliamps- giving a max output of less than a quarter watt at the ragged edge of failure. This is beyond what most headphones need, but then again the circuit is not likely to have 36 volts available anyway, and who designs an amp to run at max capacity anyway? Good amplification requires headroom and clean power.

That's my stab at it....

Great posts Ham and Sinner - Sinner, you hit it on the head regarding resistance. I generally don't agree with the blanket statments that some people make on this forum like "a 300 ohm headphone is so much harder to drive than a 62 ohm headphone." It's just not that simple and it's counter-intuitive to speaker resistance in general. Current requirements and sensitivity are not discussed here as much as they should be and people are just led to believe that the higher the resistance rating, the harder the 'phone is to drive.

I think a lot of people are misled about the D2000 based on info they read on HF. They spend money on these phones thinking that they can just plug them into their mp3 player and they'll be getting 100% of what the D2000's can deliver because "everyone" says they're "easy to drive." They find that they're not overwhelmed and then they post about how the Denon's are overrated, the bass is muddy, etc., and then they end up selling them and going through the process all over again with a different headphone.

I try to take advice from people who've owned and spent time with the products I'm interested in. There are too many "FWIR" posts here on HF. Remember, what you read may be an opinion formed by what one person read from 10 other posts, based on what they read from 10 other posts, and so on... It's like the "grapevine" theory - a lot gets lost in the passing of information and the original message becomes distorted.


I've been into audio since the mid-80's, but I've only been into headphones for the last few years. I've bought and sold thousands of dollars worth of amps, dacs, speakers, cables, and "snake oil" remedies searching for perfect "affordable" sound. It wasn't until I heard a friend's HD580 with a Go-Vibe portable that I realized I was spinning my wheels with traditional 2-channel set ups. My point is that you CAN get audiophile-quality sound with headphones for a fraction of the cost of a speaker set up; however, it's not as simple as dropping a few hundred dollars on the D2000s and expecting your search to be over - or any headphone, for that matter.

fascinating Sinner. i'm curious on your opinion Sinner, and EQ-man Ham, on my D2000. i have them running from a D4 i recently purchased. 

 

to my ears, changing the gain changes the sound. up, it boosts the lower mids, and makes the sound beefier. down, it sometimes works too -- sounds more clinical and the highs are more separated and sparkly. dunno if you're familiar with this specific amp, but plugging it straight out of the DAC only (volume then adjusted solely with iTunes digital knob) gives a very slightly different sound than the gain switch down i believe. this is much more subtle than between the two gain settings and their respective sound differences, though.

 

my biggest beefs about D2000: the highs are too harsh sometimes, where i'd simply want to hear more mid and bass (not lower end <75Hz bass tho). to Ham, the iTunes EQ is a 10-band EQ. is this good, does it work well or simply murder the sound? is iTunes a good program to play music on my Mac to begin with?

 

thanks guys, also, do any of you have the J$ pads? i heard it can make the highs less sibilant, so that appeals, whereas lessening the bass at all would not be in my interest (controlling is okay).

Edited by kelvanE - 5/6/10 at 9:32pm

The problem with 6 band and 10 band and similar limited band graphic EQs is they don't allow fine enough selection of the correct frequencies.  You'll end up over-boosting frequencies that shouldn't get boosted.  That would create new peaks in the Denon frequency response when there were no peaks there to begin with.

 

I've tried using some limited band EQs that are common as stock EQs in Windows media player applications.  Typically 6 to 10 bands.  They didn't work right and some of them sounded just odd.  You might get lucky though with a stock EQ if the frequency divisions matches what the Denon needs and the "Q" (how wide the bell shaped EQ curve is around each frequency band) of the EQ just happens to get it right for the Denon.

 

What I've been fiddling with are parametric EQs that let you zero in on specific frequencies and also let you adjust the "Q".  I also found a 31 band graphic EQ plug-in that allows fine enough control to be useful.

 

I don't have a Mac and have never tried the Mac's iTunes EQ.  I don't even know if/how you can add in a better EQ.  I'm not that much help there.

^ thanks. it does seem to help. i didn't know if this was a no-no in terms of audio quality tho. it sounds good to my ears as of so far.

 

I boost (slightly of course): 64, 125 (bit more) Hz, then 8K Hz

 

I reduce: 32, then 16K (bit more) Hz. 

 

I find reducing the 16K helps out a lot actually with the sibilance. those intense highs were a bit harsh for my tastes before. now the snare has punch at 8K, but the real high highs are cooled down. same idea for the bass, just in reverse order...

A few cards by Auzentech have discrete amps that sound pretty good to my ears, at least with the D7000's.

 

Edited by chris.d.m. - 3/17/11 at 6:26pm