Got my Asgard and D5k's today. Obviously I would need a few weeks to really get good impressions here, but i'll keep it brief.
First off, I feel stupid for not amping sooner, low end=unlocked. I thought the Essence ST amp would be fine, but it's not terribly loud at 100% at least on normal gain and the bass wasn't quite there.
So after a few hours my asgard arrived and I bought some FAIL BUY Rocketfish rca cables to use with it. Well after trying just two tracks I could tell what I was missing for a very very long time with my old denons and most headphones: raw power.
Seemed to help the soundstage a lot more, but it's still denons and not a huge soundstage. The low end is earth shattering though and almost effortless, I'm shocked the 5k's can handle all the power that the asgard gives them at 2 o' clock, that's a ton of low end to keep up with and I didn't know the denons had it in them!
With the amp turned all the way up I hear like maybe 1% hiss it's nearly impossible to hear, but oddly when I get up there I can hear some random-ish crackling that goes away and comes back randomly. I expected something like this, just not sure what it is. I have the asgard pluged into a power conditioner but it's plugged into the same outlet as my PC.
All in all killer amp, it screams build quality and seems to pair very nicely with these cans, now I have to go through my whole music collection again.
