What year is this? 2015? Sold?

Haven't posted on here in years, wow. My brother came to me, "the audio guy" in his life for recommendations for a hi-fi setup. He has speakers for now, nothing too fancy, but is looking for a receiver for his new living room setup (DAC/amp). Stereo setup. What forums, sites, YouTube channels...

Long time no see, Head-Fi, seems it's been a few years! Even when I was active I mostly kept up with desktop so here I am: Picked up a new (to me) laptop with a pretty garbage audio codec, figured a DAC/amp could make sense; something that can take USB in, and ideally OTG from my Note 9...

It's hard to know if the muffled sound is accurate or not - I found the X2s to be a bit veiled (though not as bad as the X1s). Imbalance suggests a greater issue, so I'd return them ASAP.

The Massdrop version of the HHD650 is super affordable, and so is the K7XX they sell (versions of those cans and similar K/Q701/702/712 go on sale a good amount too). The HD650 is gorgeous though a bit warm.

Wellllllll if you wanna get real technical, most Class A and AB amps like to run a little hot, and capacitors are often on their best behavior at operating temperatures - same with the crystal oscillators that control the timing in digital circuits. Leaving everything on is probably slightly...

The HM700 is probably worth like $120 alone (they only sell it in a bundle for like $180 including a pair of $50 headphones) so I'd probably roll with that one. They make good stuff, as does Fiio.

I can say that the Massdrop Noble X fits the bill, as might some of their other offerings. The 3-driver model of theirs is a very nice v-shaped headphones with the characteristics you describe, though the treble is a bit above average which might be bothersome.

It's possible you just wired it wrong, double check your connections maybe? A picture would help.

With the amount of distortion on the R2R board, it wouldn't make much sense to go so far overkill on other stages of the DAC. Perhaps there will be an upper offering with more R2R boards in parallel, but we'll see.

USB power from your phone is nice because a battery puts out DC - whereas a wallwart has to convert it. It really just depends on the DAC/amp as to how good the PSU is, I wouldn't worry too much about these things though it's good to be aware. Unless you have really noisy AC in your building, a...

You can't start new threads in other areas of the forums until you've been around for a while... you should've gotten a welcome email that explains everything :).

Welcome to Head-Fi! Sorry about your wallet :P. What headphones do you have?

XLR vs SE generally shouldn't make a difference on comparable well designed amps, unless you're going over long cable lengths.

To be fair though, battery power supplies are much cleaner than the average wall-powered and converted/filtered supply, so take that into consideration :). Batteries supply the DC you want natively, whereas most desktop gear has to convert AC to DC (though I think Schiit does a good job here, as...