(New user post, skip as necessary)
I drive a truck and in my free time I've been organizing a lot of mp3s I've downloaded over the years using J. Rivers Media Center. I listened to The Beatles 1 album and it sucked rocks. I didn't remember it being like that, so I downloaded a 320 version. Better, but it still blared in the vocal range and washed out the instruments. I played with my laptop's sound controls and got it sounding better, but still bad. Well, long story short I started really listening to other albums as I organized them, and figured I needed better headphones. I searched the web (I'm a black-belt level googler) and came up with AKG K702s. I ordered them, and then decided I wanted more control over what drives them. So I looked for a headphone pre-amp. I was about to get a small desktop amp from (I can't remember the company name, starts with k) and was looking into their replaceable op-amps. (Rolling I believe they called it, as in roll your own.)
Well, then I saw a review for the Alpen and fell in love. (I'm a die-hard nut for new stuff.) That was about midnight on Feb 20. I searched the sites that FiiO sells through and found them unhelpful and messy. I found the tweet telling about them shipping a bunch to micca though, so I sent an e-mail to micca asking when they'd be available. Went to bed. Next morning, I continued looking for reviews on the Alpen and found the tweet about 3PM Eastern. My trip for the day kept me on the highway, so I was able to pull off at 3PM and spam the site... and I got one. :D
Knowing how I am, I know I'm going to get into FLAC etc which means I'll have to buy a sixth and seventh 2 terabyte external drive from Walmart (I think my first download will be Norah Jones Sunrise) and I'm really impressed with the people here. So, once my cans and amp get here, I'm going to post how the E17 sounds, how long it takes the K702s to settle in and how the sound changes, and all that stuff.
Edited by RoadKam - 2/22/12 at 8:39pm
