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How many people use stereo/surround receivers with headphones?

post #1 of 2
7/27/11 at 11:26pm
Thread Starter 

I just got an Onkyo S3400 5.1 surround sound system.  I didn't even think about using it for my headphones for over a month, and it blew me away when I did.  Sooooo much better than my Headroom Bithead (yeah, I know, not hard to do).  But it definitely made me believe in night and day differences!

So, who else uses a receiver as their source?

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post #2 of 2
7/28/11 at 12:02am

Heya,

 

I've used my Onkyo receiver as an amp. The problem with receivers, is that they're DAC's and AMP's. So any signal you send in is processed by their DAC. And unless you have a high quality receiver (really high quality), I find the signal is definitely degraded compared to a clean signal coming from a stand alone DAC. The receivers have powerful amps. Often times that will make a headphone sound good--simply because of the additional volume. Volume tends to sound better to people's ears. But it doesn't mean it's a better sound. You have to be more critical if you want to listen for a better sound and make sure you're listening at the same perceived volumes.

 

You probably noticed the difference in having a better DAC and a more powerful AMP when using your receiver.

 

For me, when I use my receiver, I notice more noise and jitter and bloated sounding muddy bass when I compare it to my stand alone Matrix Cube DAC and various dedicated amps.

 

Very best,

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