Better sound for the HD 650 please?

Quote:

Originally Posted by CardasHD650 

Hello there peeps, long time no post,

 

I need some good advice into better sound quality for my Senn 650HD’s but don’t know where to turn for a much better sound.

 

Currently I’m using :

 

Sennheiser 650 HD + Cardas cable

Creative Titanium HD sound card

Pro-Jet Head Box II

 

(....and that’s it...!)

 

I’ve got around £350/$700 to play with – but not sure what to get – new opamp/amp/pre-amp or what not?

 

I’m looking at the Heed CanAmp atm @ £350 but not sure.

 

Any help will be very much appreciated – cheers ! 

haha i had the EXACT same setup not too long ago (except blue dragon cable instead of cardas)

the head box ii is decent but not the best, i cannot say what u should get, perhaps the asgard or something?

as for the titanium, get rid of it and buy a decent DAC, perhaps the musical fidelity v-link which is fairly cheap or maybe the DacMagic if you wanted to buy something more expensive.
 

@cardas hd650- What don't you like about the sound you are getting now?  What is your player?  What type files?

I used to own the 650s and like many attributes but eventually sold them.  One thing that I learned was they are very revealing of source quality and they tend to be kind of polite.  First place to look is at the source , then the dac.  Amp would be last on my list after those have been sorted.

I spent years trying to make them sound "better" and what most of us find out is the veil is just too much.  Just like the HD-800 the 650's sound like they are being played through a thick pillow or filter.  Removing the foam inside the earcups helps, but to me there was nothing that made them better besides going balanced and using a truly balanced amp.  It will be much less expensive purchasing a new set of cans or simply trading them for a pair of DT990's.  For me the improvement over the 650's was monumental and the enjoyment equally so.  The DT990 responds exceptionally well to better gear.  Out of ipod they sound a tad thin yet airy.  Out of a Bithead they sound a little more punchy and spacious, but still lacking on the low and high ends.  Through an m903 the DT990 sounds simply amazing.  The bass is deep and full.  It lacks boominess and becomes really tight.  The mids are pleasant and somewhat quiet, but jazz still sounds awesome.  The peak in the treble becomes clean and crisp.  It is not bright like a Grado at all.  Most importantly to an HD-650 owner there is no veil whatsoever.  Give them a try sometime.  I know you could trade your HD-650 straight up for some.  I would go for either the 25 Ohm or 250 Ohm versions and shy way from the 600 Ohm version.

The frequency dependant impedance on the HD-650's and many other cans does not aid in finding an amp that drives them well.

Keep in mind I recabled my HD-650's and ran them through an m903 and they still sounded veiled and way too laid back for my tastes.

I will never go back.  My AH-D2000's and DT990 ( 250 Ohms ) are what I use 90% of the time now and never regret it.

I have the HD650, you need very good source material for these headphones. They're quite detailed at certain frequency ranges that will be mucked up by a poor source... I suggest you try the uDac2 with Foobar and the SOX resampler to get 96khz sound quality. Running the uDac2 at 96khz is quite effective and an improvement over 44khz.  The increase in sound quality is uncanny actually, leading me to believe that the uDac2 has less than optimal red book conversion quality. Whatever the case may be, this setup definitely brightens and opens the upper mids and treble on the 650, giving a very energetic yet smooth and non-fatiguing listening experience.

HD650's are very revealing of tension in the upper midrange where human hearing is most sensitive, and poor source quality will be evident here as a slightly muddy and tense presentation that could be described as veiled because details are not being expressed. For me this is very evident around the frequencies the violin plays at. In my listening tests the SOX resampler most certainly increased clarity of the solo violin and symphonic music.

^^^ weird, software resampler including sox always "blur" and mess things up to me..

Quote:

Originally Posted by kn19h7 

^^^ weird, software resampler including sox always "blur" and mess things up to me..

It doesn't matter how a resampler is implemented, whether it's hardware or software, it's all digital processing. The quality of the algorithm has nothing to do with the hardware, theoretically audio hardware offloads processing that the CPU would otherwise have to perform, but in practice CPU's are more than capable of doing the processing these days.

That was sort of what I heard with the standard resampler included with foobar. It was more of a dynamics thing when using PPHS, reduced dynamics potentially a result of smearing. There is no doubt that SoX sounds better than PPHS and to my ear it sounds better than 44.1khz as well. Are you using FLAC's as your audio source?

A couple rules with resampling. You should always upsample from whatever your source material was, so don't rip files into a higher sample rate, always rip at the source rate, in this case, 44.1khz. I also use ASIO4ALL to keep things as bitperfect as possible before it gets sent to the uDac2.