First, are you listening to CDs or lossless music (or at least very high quality lossy music)? If not, then this is likely your main problem.
Second, can you lend a DAC from a store to try at home (or buy with full money-back rights)? If not, you will have a hard time knowing how big of a change this actually is. It's not as significant as one may initially suspect (depending on if your built in DAC is absolute crap or only fairly bad). The impact of the headphones themselves and the quality of the music (in terms of being lossless or at least very close to lossless) is by far the biggest impact you will have on sound quality. After this, the amp is a given third in terms of impact, followed by the DAC as the least impacting unit (as long as it is a decent enough unit). I haven't tested low-end DACs for a while, so I'm not your guy for a good bang-for-the-bucks solution there. There's a thread at http://www.head-fi.org/t/566866/does-a-dac-make-a-giant-difference which talks more of this. If you get an external DAC, make sure you have all settings so that it will indeed be the DAC that does the converting. You have to send the unchanged (ideally 24 bit, 192 kHz) digital out signal from your computer to get the least affected signal to your DAC/Amp and headphones.
Third, I haven't tried the M-Stage but several swear by it as suitable for the K70X headphones. Thus - this is not likely to be your problem.
Fourth, it often takes a while to really let the differences sink in. Many times, it is only after using something for a few days (without swapping back and forth) that it becomes really clear what the differences actually are (once you do switch back to the old setup).
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Inconsistent 
So I just received my matrix m-stage and I have not been too impressed.....
Currently I'm listening through my laptop's head phone out but I've also tried listening out of the HM601 line out and in my opinion I can't discern much of a difference when using the amp or without. The volume does increase after I've set the gain to 10db, and also there "might" be a slight increase detail to the music but for $250 I don't believe it justifies the price especially since I could have bought another set of head phones.
Does anyone know what may be wrong? I'm considering in purchasing a dac, however after my disappointment with the amp I can't justify purchasing an expensive DAC and not hearing the improvements that have been allegedly reported by many.
Thanks again.
Edited by Trasselkalle - 8/18/11 at 2:37am
