Best Headphone + Amp Combo for $600 or Less?

An amazing setup would be a pair of HD650, WA6 or Burson 160D, and for the WA6 get a music streamer. 

If I was you I would expand my budget and buy a set of lcd-2's or he-500's and just drive them from your soundcard.

If you can't stretch your budget I suggest you take a look at the he-4's.

For the amp I would get a fiio e9 and for the dac pretty much any emu product .

Firstly, I would recommend against buying a Burson for several reasons:

 

a) Based on a recent Head-fi thread, it would seem they have been misleading about their USB implementation with their DACs - they claimed asynchronous - it is not.

 

b) Their magical discrete opamps have high distortion - they fall down flat compared to decent IC opamps.

http://www.sg-acoustics.ch/analogue_audio/ic_opamps/pdf/opamp_distortion.pdf

Note with amusement that they measure completely identically to some AudioGD discrete opamps.

 

For an amp that I'm relatively confident will beat Burson on every measurable level, grab an M^3. It's a DIY job though, so wait for one to come up for a good price on the FS forum if you don't want to build yourself.

 

As for headphones, without your sound signature preferences it's a bit of a stab in the dark recommending anything. Do you want lots of bass, lots of treble, complete neutrality...?

The thing is people like burson because of it's distortion.

The burson also has terrible channel separation, which I find appalling considering it's price tag.

The Fiio E7 measure quite correctly all across the board, for its low price it has:
- Low THD
- Low IMD
- Low crosstalk
- Excellent Tracking
- Low output impedance...

It's a safe bet when Dac/Amps are concerned.

Headphones are a bit more iffy, it really depends of the type of sound signature you like.
The usual suspects are the HD 650, K701, DT 880, D5000//7000, Z1000, Pro 900

Basically spend as litle as possible to get an amp that doesn't distort and has a low output impedance, and the rest on a pair of headphones.

he-4, d7000, dx1000 and thunderpants are all great headphones that can be had for under $600.

They would all pair excellently with a fiio e9.

If you don't mind me hijacking your thread briefly, I was also thinking of asking in this forum about amps, to avoid as much voodoo as possible. The E9 looks like a solid choice of desktop amp, but I'm a little suspicious about Fiio's quoted frequency response of 10Hz to 100kHz as they don't state within how many dB it varies within this range, or what load this is measured at.

 

Graham Slee seems to be a bit more honest (for want of a better word) with his amp measurements, and I am eyeing up the Novo at the moment. The price difference is very significant, however.

 

It seems to be incredibly difficult to get to the actual performance statistics of amps in the hifi world - I assume this is deliberate?. 

 

Once again, sorry for taking over your thread, Comperic. 

The e9 has an extremely flat frequency response, the reason it is 10hz-100khz is because it is much easier to make the frequency response curve flat (no roll off) if it extends further than it needs to in either direction.

I'd recommend the E9 aswell and use the money you save to get a better pair of headphones I suspect 10hz-100khz is the -3db rating but if you really want to know you can ask feiao http://www.head-fi.org/user/feiao .

99.99% of the amps from $10 to $100,000 are flat within 0.5 dB from 20 to 20,000 Hz, it's actually the easiest spec to respect.
What you should care about is the the output impedance, it chhanges the frequency response of the transducer that's connected to the amp.

The fiio e9 has an output impedance of less than 1ohm so it should be fine.

The E7 was measured at under 0.5ohms , I think the E9 is a bit higher as it's designed to drive bigger headphones.

The e7 actually has an output impedance of 0.13 ohms.

Thanks for the confirmation on the E9 guys - I'll pick one up with no regrets.