Setup advice for someone with eventual goals? Thinking of an Audio-gd stepping stone.

If your budget is $500-700, dac19+c2 is outside your budget once you factor in shipping.

There's many differences between sparrow and fun, but audio-gd says they sound similar.

Sparrow is a lot smaller, and is lower cost, but with minimal sound signature tweakability and flexibility in gear pairing, and to use with very sensitive headphones would require audio-gd to lower the gain permanently which should be fine unless you have some very low sensitivity headphones as well.

Fun is quite bigger and is more expensive, but has more tweakability and can be used with an external amp, or an external dac. Gain button which is very useful to avoid volume channel imbalance if you have very sensitive headphones.

If you don't want to experiment with tweaking components, I would definitely get the sparrow. If you want to save more money, get version B which uses less expensive parts, and ask them to put the wm8741 dac chip in it.

Something maybe in your budget and also what you may be looking for, is audio-gd's NFB-3 and C2. NFB-3 is a promo DAC with a discount and isn't for long-term production. If you get it you would be the guinea pig for the new dac, but by looks it seems it may be quite a bargain.

Well your IE6 in-ears are 16 ohm and 115dB/mW. People have said the 25 ohm 106dB/mW denon d5000 are borderline volume imbalance with the sparrow or fun at normal gain, your IE6 is several times more sensitive than the D5000, so yes you would have to lower the gain quite a bit. Send Kingwa the impedance and sensitivity of the IE6 and he can recommend how much to lower the gain, maybe ask him to put a gain switch in the sparrow but that may not be possible or will cost more. Otherwise you have to choose between normal or lower gain in the sparrow, or else the fun which has a gain switch, and maybe ask for the fun's lower gain to be lowered even more.

I had planned to order a NFB-3 and ACSS cables to go along with my C2 shortly after the product was rolled out.  I asked Kingwa about the differences and this was his response:

The ACSS sound much neutral, but RCA transmit can bring different sound flavors, you can get more soft/warm sound or more dynamic sound by replace the OPAs in C2.
The NFB3 can match to C2, it is promo products, we only made least benifit of this products.
Its sound still had some distance with the DAC19 but it is best for money.

The NFB3 sound can't as good as the DAC19DSP. But the different not much, and the price is had some different, so which one is your choice depend on yourself.

I ended up ordering the DAC19DSP and ACSS cables as I already have the Xonar Essence STX as a source that works quite well and decided to get an R2R DAC instead of a better implementation of the same technology I was already using.  I am willing to bet that I would have been quite pleased with either option, I just wanted something that was a little bit different.

So I can't comment on how good the NFB-2/NFB-3 are, but from Kingwa's description I would assume that it is quite good, with the NFB-3 being a bit of a bargain.

Your ESW9 are fine with normal gain. The reason why this dac/amp has issues with high sensitivity headphones is that the ALPS pots have channel imbalance at low volume, and because audio-gd wants the sparrow to be able to power very low sensitivity headphones with a lot of headroom.

If running my balanced audio-gd gear in single-ended mode is similar to NFB-3+C2, and they should be similar in a few important ways, the main difference you would notice versus the sparrow is a better soundstage foundation and more complexity and directionality in expression, may present music more honestly than you're used to if you don't have much experience with real life music. The sparrow has very impressive raw macrodetail, but doesn't do some microdetail and soundstage detail exceptionally well, but pleasant to listen to and you don't have to worry about accessories or recordings to make it sound good.

Now that I know you haven't tried any external dac's and amp's yet, the sparrow would be a good starting point to help you figure out what you want out of audio gear. Imo when you go beyond sparrow which sounds quite impressive imo, you are paying for more precision in micro-details and soundstage, areas where tiny improvements contribute to nuances and realism. Some people just may not need more refinement than the sparrow offers to enjoy their music.

English isn't his native language and it shows.  If you aren't getting answers to the questions you are asking try to break them out from each other and simplify them.

I am making assumptions here, but they should be accurate based upon your conversation with Kingwa and my discussions with him.  I am throwing in a little knowledge from reading reviews of the FUN/C2C/C2 as well, but only in the assumption that the C2 is a higher end amplifier than the FUN.

1) Judging by the comments that Kingwa gave you, the Sparrow and FUN are pretty much equal when it comes to sound quality.

2) From my limited understanding, the C2 is a better amp than what is built into the FUN, so that will outperform both the Sparrow and Fun with a good source.  I can't expand on the differences are sonically, just that it is a higher end design.

3)The Fun/Sparrow version A use a single WM8741 DAC.  Since the NFB-3 is two WM8741 DAC chips with a greater amount of supporting circuitry compared to the DAC section in the FUN, I would imagine that it should do everything that the FUN/Sparrow version A do but somewhat better.

I can't guarantee any of this, but I think it is safe to assume that a dual mono implementation of the WM8741 as a dedicated DAC paired with a C2 can and will outperform a FUN version A.  I could be horribly wrong, but I think that my assumptions are safe and correct.

In isolation, if you are having second thoughts about getting a Sparrow instead of the much more expensive NFB-3/C2 combo, go buy the combo.  On the other hand, with the $490 difference + $60 in shipping, you have 70 to 90% of the required cash to buy the W1000x.

Given the low price of the Sparrow version B and the WM8741 upgrade, I would be extremely tempted to buy the Sparrow and the W1000x at the same time.

You will probably get a much larger improvement from buying the headphones you want and a new amp instead of keeping your current phones and spending all that money on an amp/DAC combo.

Edit: Found lower priced W1000x, updated numbers.

Nanago,

LOL that's the most hilarious thing I seen him say. Don't be offended by Kingwa... his English is not good and he just chose very very wrong words here. He just means to say they are in totally different leagues as evidenced by the 4-5x price increase. It's like comparing $200 speakers to $1000 speakers, you just don't do it.

I have the dac19mk3, older version of dac19dsp, and the price is just $30 more than the $450 NFB-2. If Kingwa says the $300 NFB-3 is sort of in the same league as the dac19dsp, then yes, NFB-3+C2 is in a totally different league than the sparrow, but keep in mind Kingwa is someone who has a very seasoned ear and expensive reference gear to judge the sound of his lower end gear. Someone who is new to audiophilia, the sparrow would likely fit his preconceived expectations of "good sound quality", but NFB-3+C2 is truer to the recording with more accurate timbre, more variety in soundstage size, and less compression during complex passages, and with very revealing headphones or speakers, more detail.

I said before I think the NFB-3 is quite a bargain for $300 yet still being somewhat comparable to dac19dsp, but it may be outside your budget or not be what you're looking for. If you told me you wanted your audio gear to sound more precise in microdetails, obviously I would advise NFB-3+C2. But if you aren't a demanding audiophile listening for fleshed out microdetail or you just want something with texture and liveliness, sparrow could be all you ever need.

I would hold off on upgrading headphones, you may find out you have all the fidelity you need with your current headphones and sparrow. I usually upgrade things one at a time so I know what sound characteristics each thing has, and which direction I want to go next or if I even need to upgrade.

I have not found the W1000x for $490 + $60 shipping, that was in reference to the price difference between a Sparrow and the NFB-3/C2 combo.  My very limited searching shows the W1000x at $626 shipped from PriceJapan.

I agree with haloxt, that if you order the Sparrow you should spend some time with it before deciding if you want to upgrade your headphones.  I just suggested that if you were looking at new headphones and were already willing to spend the money on something like the NFB-3/C2 combo, the Sparrow and the W1000x together are fairly close in price.  I can't tell you if the W1000x will provide the improvement you are looking for, or if you will even care for the improvement, its just an expensive set of headphones from the same brand that you currently use that you listed.  I am just stating that if you are spending that much money, especially with broken ESW9 headphones, there are other options besides spending it all on a DAC/amp combo.

I can't hope to know what you would like better, just that spending it all on a DAC/amp isn't your only choice, I just did an example based upon your post and stated what I would be tempted to do.  It isn't what I did but it would sound tempting, especially if my main/only set of headphones was broken and out for repair.

Good luck with the decision making process though.