I'm looking at one thick silver strand on the outside and two very tiny strands in the middle, isolated from everything else and colored white and red. If any of the three are disconnected, there's no audio whatsoever. What do you think is the function of each strand?

I've currently got the Sennheiser HD-800 and the Objective 2 headphone amplifier.   I've always bought new stuff like amplifiers and DACs and always assumed and thought the music sounded different on the new thing. Then at some later date I would set up this test where I can listen...

  I realize discussions of soundcards should usually be in another area, but seeing as I am speaking specifically about it's headphone amplifier relative to other full-size amplifiers I felt this was the correct area.   The Xonar cards are often getting trashed here on the forums as not...

What's been bothering me lately is the fact my current soundcard, the Asus Xonar STX, boasts incredibly good measurements for something that costs a fraction of the price of external devices that have a hard time matching it. I have extensively compared it to a Musical Fidelity V-DAC and a Heed...

Current rig:   Asus Xonar STX -> Heed Canamp -> AKG K701     I've had the K701's for over three years now. Having originally upgraded from Sennheiser HD570's, I was happy with how much the K701's opened up the records compared to the muffled sound of the 570's. However, the longer I've...