Go ask x RELIC x 'cuz according to him I don't know jack about audio. Because I'm done with head-fi. There's no point. You people don't care why sound works, don't care why your low impedance headphones sound like **** when you use them with high impedance outputs, don't care that you're wasting...

I'm going to harp on this point: it's not a headphone jack. It's a hybrid line out jack, and when I say hybrid I mean that it has an amp that's designed to be a pre-amp for self-powered desktop speakers but can also drive high impedance headphones well enough for gaming and voice chat and...

Because of this: "I've never heard an 'upgraded' soundcard alone sound better than a dedicated amp or amp/DAC (portable or desktop)." Based on this it seems you think that sound cards and "dedicated DACs" are different things. Based on this it seems you think that anything labeled "sound card"...

Any change will change how a headphone sounds. tdock has some thoughts about different pads in his first post of the thread. I have a pair of SRH1540 pads on mine right now; I posted some thoughts about them a page or two back and those have not changed in the past week with them. Beyerdynamic...

A sound card is a DAC. How do you think a sound card turns bits into sounds? Magic? An orchestra of tiny fairies? No, it's a digital to analog converter -- a DAC. The point here is that most sound card amplifiers aren't able to drive easy headphones like K55x. The power output is too high and...

Depends on the sound card and the headhpones. A good SoundBlaster sounds just fine with 200+ ohm headphones. It's just that, well, use the search function: http://www.head-fi.org/t/613707/the-akg-k550-appreciation-discussion-thread/1320#post_10393889 Anything pushing 10mW or more with an...

There's your problem. Efficient, easy to drive headphones like K55x sound like crap from most computer sound cards. The strange-sounding bass is probably bass roll-off due to the too-high impedance of the sound card's hybrid line out amplifier, and the grainy sound is probably you diving through...

Everyone's benchmark for "budget" is different which is why for the $200 rule. The idea is that anyone can, in principle, get the same thing for about the same money. I don't have a camera handy so I can't post my latest obPhoto: Sansa Clip Zip that I've photographed previously + Koss ProDJ100...

Which arrived just a short while ago. They're larger than the M50 pads. Duh, they're Shure-sized. Mounting on ProDJ is similar. They're larger but the material that fits in the grooves is wider so they stay attached quite well. Installation is easier since there's much less stretching involved...

Good speakers are defined by flat frequency response where "flat" means precisely that: it's a flat line from 20Hz to 20kHz when measured at a distance of 1 meter. If you've ever looked at a headphone frequency response graph then you've seen that no headphone measures close to this. An ideal...

One of the reasons why K550 -- or any headphone -- sounds the way it does is because of the work of Fletcher and Munson. The frequency response curve of any decent headphone isn't a straight, flat line because we know that human beings perceive certain frequencies as being louder than others...

We don't fully understand why the human brain works the way it does but that's something different from how sound works which is quite well understood. We've understood it for going on 80 years. I point at the work the many engineers at Bell Labs in the 1930s. For example, Messrs. Fletcher and...

This is not "black". Black when describing sound means silence, as in no amplifier or other equipment noise. When the music stops and you hear nothing? That's black. What you've described is something else. It's called sound localization. It's all in your head. Literally. I can do that with any...

Ear size and shape. I can't get a decent fit with the stock pads either on-ear or over ear. My ears protrude too much. Foam or felt tends to absorb high frequency sounds as they pass through the material. You need a fair thickness or density of material to have an appreciable effect, but too...

tdock really didn't like K55x: http://www.head-fi.org/t/571216/koss-pro-dj-100-the-budget-king/660#post_8534227 I like K55x more than he does but... it has some problems. While K551 is marketed as a portable headphone (in-line iThing controls and all) it's not really portable. It's huge, which...