If you've got a good player then an amp will only be needed to increase volume. People will tell you that it's not about volume and instead tell you something very vague about "synergy" and "driving headphones properly", but they never seem to have done even one proper level matched comparison...

I would never put that amount of money into any kind of cable.   You don't need to go fancy (or expensive) to get the highest sound quality, as long as you have the right cables. For speaker cables the gauge is obviously very important. For long cable runs, especially with mics or guitars at...

From a technical point of view it can be argued that 24/96 > 24/188.2 or higher > DSD   See whitepapers by Lavry, Benchmark as well as the article on 24/192 on xiph.org. There's more but that's a good starting point.     ^ You can play any kind of audio file at any format even on a 16/44.1...

Have you put in the batteries? Maybe they're dead?     I doubt the transformer would work. It will probably just make things even quieter.

All USB headphones have to have a DAC and amplifier. It can be built into the headphones or be in a small adapter at the end of the USB cable (USB headsets often ship with a little adapter that has headphone-out and mic-in, so there even is an ADC).

Easiest and fairly accurate way is to use a sound level meter. Use a piece of cardboard or a CD to create a seal between the pads and the meter. If you have a smart phone there might even be an app for it (probably not as accurate as a calibrated sound level meter though).   You can also...

What does buko mean, or is it a typo?   Using a similar method (compare the sound of calibrated speakers in a well-treated room with the sound of headphones, ideally in a blind-test fashion) they should arrive at a similar curve. I don't know about Phillips but for example I know from PSB that...

That's indeed a nice way to check accuracy. My phone is off by only about 2 μT. (46 - 50 μT and according to wikipedia the magnet field here should be about 48 μT).   The problem is that with headphones nearby, the measured value fluctuates by a couple of μT over a few seconds regardless of...

I just checked with an LG G2 an on-ear headphone with a small 30mm driver (PX100 like construction) and with 2cm distance from the driver it registered 1.4 mT.   Need some kind of fixture because tiny movements will result in the measured value jumping all over the place.

  Not sure how accurate those sensors are, but valuable data nevertheless. Thanks!   So roughly 1 mT. Beyer T1 or those planar magnetics are probably a lot stronger.     The real question remains though: do these static fields have any effect on our brains? And do the fields change when...

Yes, as I said, a constant magnetic field is part of MRI scanners. Second paragraph:     Because they have completely changed their site and their archives don't go back to 2004 anymore.   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1241963/

No, it's not only a permanent field: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_of_magnetic_resonance_imaging There can be permanent magnets in the less strong MRI scanners, but there are also electromagnets for the oscillating magnetic fields that are needed for the imaging.   Also, check this...

I guess duration, change and locality (where is the magnetic field) are extremely important.   For example, experiments have shown that pointing strong magnets to the left of your brain stops you from speaking but you can still sing. Pointing the magnets to the other half of your brain and...

"No load" means usually that the device under test just has to drive the input of the sound card or audio interface used to record the test signal. That load is usually 10 kOhm or higher.   In the last tables you can see columns called "R250" ... "R16". That means that a 250 ... 16 ohm...

From what I can tell those clicks or pops contain lots of low-frequency energy. Even if you cut off at 10 kHz you could still hear them, so the little extra energy recorded with higher sampling rates really shouldn't matter for that.

Yes, they could.      

I guess you need something thin, light but rigid like a piece of hard plastic.   Whether it sounds better if you mount the boom balls inside a box (similar to a sealed speaker) or on a piece of plastic that is mounted freely on some kind of stands, I don't know. Guess you have to experiment a bit.

But the magnetic field produced by the coil would be magnitudes weaker than the permanent magnet.   I'm not so sure about the "not quite powerful enough". I mean people have posted that they could use their headphones like magnets. Doesn't sound that weak to me.     Also, planar magnetics...

Also see http://www.head-fi.org/t/698290/magnetic-fields-influence-the-brain   Even very weak magnetic fields can have an influence on the brain.     The question is how strong the magnetic fields produced by headphones are and what a fairly static magnetic field does.       We've also...

But perception of soundstage (or as I like to call it with headphones: "headstage") is irrelevant for providing evidence for headphone driver break-in. I also know one or the other thing about that, having developed DSPs that manipulate the "soundstage" (a fb2k crossfeed plugin is freely...

I hope you're all enjoying your holidays as much as I do.

The problem here is that you don't get what I and several other people have tried to explain to you multiple times now, so this will be the last time from me.   Headphone driver -> sound (change in air pressure) -> ear/mic -> brain (The brain has many other inputs besides the ear, that can...

No, but then again I don't haven broken components.     So according to you it is not only impossible to measure sound waves but now it's also impossible to measure electricity? Thanks for another good laugh.   Why do you call people religionists though? Do you even know what the word...

The profit margin is definitely astronomical with stuff like audiophile cables and other shenanigans.   As Kurt Denke (Blue Jeans Cable) said: "in a lot of cases a $17 and a $150 cable may have been made in the same factory and may have cost the same to make".

Don't you see how happy this piece of ... metal ... makes some people? They have heard changes so they must be real. Proof for that are the similar reviews they write. They cannot all be wrong. You evil guys are just trying to take the happiness from those people.     The subjective approach...