Those headphones are low impedance and high sensitivity, so you should go with low gain settings, maybe even 1x and using the amp as a simple current buffer.

I've only heard good things from this headphone, besides the wonky comfort.

  No problem!   Merry Christmas to you too

I never used that plugin but I think if you don't have a DSD DAC, foobar converts your SACD files on the fly to PCM so you can listen to them through "normal" means.

Check this out   http://sourceforge.net/projects/sacddecoder/

  But if the source is subpar, at least a DAC would be an improvement. And a good amp with unity gain would act as a nice buffer and wouldn't hurt.

Oh, must have made a confusion somewhere. Thanks for the info.

I know this has likely been asked a thousand times, but...   What should I invest into, the X2 or the HD650? I heard they were really close (which is a nice surprise coming from Phillips if true).

Here is mine tiny and tidy!    

Got this little fellows some months ago, and I have to say, I was not prepared for the bass, coming from other bass light IEMs. But once my ears got accustomed to the sound of it, my opinion of them improved by a lot! The bass is hard hitting, with only a oh-so slight bleeding into the mids...

DO NOT plug your headphones into that amplifier, you might destroy them with that DC offset.   Seems like a problem with the feedback loop part of the amplifier. Check the opamps and surrounding components.

Nice toaster!   Eager to try on myself when they're released.

1. Yes 2. No shorts 3. No, but I reflowed it (yet again) and now it gives me an oscillating value, between 2.8 and 3.4. Looking good. 4. Soldered the caps: voltage drops to 0.5 or so again. What the hell? I guess I have bad caps.   Is it possible that I have received a bad batch of regulators?

Well, this is a first. Never had any sort of problem with SMD soldering before. The board looks fine, there are no shorts anywhere, I've tested every pn on the ICs and they are soldered properly. The electrolytic caps are soldered right. PC feeds 5.18V into the DAC. The LED lights up as it...

First time on Head-fi, because I can't seem to find this information anywhere.   Does anyone know where can I get one (possibly more) Carrie v2 boards? I have a AMB Mini3, and this Carrie amp interests me greatly! I read through the whole thread, so my hopes are low (really low), but if...