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After owning, and neglecting a set of KRK Rokit 6s for a while - I finally decided that if 99% of my home audio was done via headphones, I might as well invest in the best sound I could afford. I picked up some Grado RS1i's after auditioning a few in that price range; now I have the somewhat more involved task of making sure I match the rest of my gear to the quality of these headphones.
This situation falls under a couple of the forum categories on the boards here, but I put it in Computer Audio since that is where the most involved questions lie.
My entire home entertainment setup is run through my self-built PC; basically I play games on my LCD TV, watch movies, FLAC library, etc etc, all through the one source. My plan was to use my Creative X-Fi Titanium's TOSLINK; and buy a PeachTree Decco to act as a DAC and headphone amp.
Unfortunately, as I'm not very informed about digital audio, I've not really a good idea of how much of this is redundant overkill for what I'm doing. Because I need to have the X-Fi for gaming support, I'm unclear how it interacts with a secondary DAC, Ideally what I imagine happening is while gaming and hooked up via optical the X-Fi simply acts as a hardware sound processor, and offloads the conversion to the external DAC; and for non-gaming the X-Fi just outputs untouched Digital to the DAC... but is that what actually happens, or I'm I blending this smoothie twice, so to speak?
Also I'm not totally clear on the value of an external DAC with a built-in headphone amp, as compared to say, a WooAudio 3 amp hooked up to X-Fi HD or something similar.
After buying the Grado's I'd like to get away with spending $1200 or less on additional gear right out of the gate.
If anyone has a similar setup, and could give me a few pointers, I'd be hugely thankful. I know it's a pretty specific set of requests! =)
(Also, my first post on Head-Fi, so I'm sorry if I failed to follow site rules, or posted in the wrong area)
This situation falls under a couple of the forum categories on the boards here, but I put it in Computer Audio since that is where the most involved questions lie.
My entire home entertainment setup is run through my self-built PC; basically I play games on my LCD TV, watch movies, FLAC library, etc etc, all through the one source. My plan was to use my Creative X-Fi Titanium's TOSLINK; and buy a PeachTree Decco to act as a DAC and headphone amp.
Unfortunately, as I'm not very informed about digital audio, I've not really a good idea of how much of this is redundant overkill for what I'm doing. Because I need to have the X-Fi for gaming support, I'm unclear how it interacts with a secondary DAC, Ideally what I imagine happening is while gaming and hooked up via optical the X-Fi simply acts as a hardware sound processor, and offloads the conversion to the external DAC; and for non-gaming the X-Fi just outputs untouched Digital to the DAC... but is that what actually happens, or I'm I blending this smoothie twice, so to speak?
Also I'm not totally clear on the value of an external DAC with a built-in headphone amp, as compared to say, a WooAudio 3 amp hooked up to X-Fi HD or something similar.
After buying the Grado's I'd like to get away with spending $1200 or less on additional gear right out of the gate.
If anyone has a similar setup, and could give me a few pointers, I'd be hugely thankful. I know it's a pretty specific set of requests! =)
(Also, my first post on Head-Fi, so I'm sorry if I failed to follow site rules, or posted in the wrong area)
