Throw in my 2 cents. I have the exact same portable/home phones. SE530s, and the K701s. I bought a RSA Predator, and find the predator is great with the SE530s (which are very easy to drive), and find that the SE530 with a LOD from an iPod, the predator gives me far less hiss than straight...

Removed.

I second (third, fourth...?) the recommendation of BeyerDynamic cans. Of the many headphones I own, the DT770s are definitely comfiest. And to MaZa, What is with those BUMPS?! I have always wondered about that. If not for those, I think the 701s would be on par.

I have always loved my DT-770/80 Pros. While the highs are not as nice as my K701s, the DT770s are way easier to drive, and they have a ton of bass.

My understanding is that there were lots of problems when people upgraded from the iPhone 2G to iPhone 3G with regards to auto kit compatibility. The reason was that Apple finally removed the legacy firewire charging mode from the iPhone. This meant that any auto kit that was using the USB...

Quote: Originally Posted by carbombncowboy Hi, I'm currently looking for a good gaming headset. From what I've read getting a good pair of headphones will do better than the top brand headsets they have out. If the sound quality is better, I'd def get headphones & a desktop mic over a...

x2, and with the new iPods 'n such that have 160 GB, forggedaboutit. It's especially a non-issue with me, as I have about 8,500 songs in my library, and I tend to grow only about 300-500 a year. HD innovations have well outpaced my library growth.

Quote: Originally Posted by badmonkey Your post is pointless because it doesn't state the exact encoder version nor settings used. A crap MP3 encoder makes enough of a mess of music even at high bitrates that it's no surprise you can hear a difference, while current versions of LAME at...

A good idea. As well I'd like to do the same ABXing with a lot more different types of music, as well as using AAC encoding.

Quote: Originally Posted by b0dhi I suspect that the part of your brains allocated to processing sound is more developed than most people, and that this is a genetic trait, because most people cant tell the difference between -v2 and lossless. You know, you might be on to...

Azhrei, I can only speculate as to the cause of your iTunes troubles. It might have been a very obscure hardware or driver conflict. But I do want to say that I use iTunes on my various Macs, and on the one PC I have, and they do not exhibit this popping problem. I can completely understand...

Krmathis, if that was directed at me, I think you read the title only and not my post :P

Oya, I agree. However I would go even further to say that for most normal listening Apple Lossless is probably better since it takes up less space, and is easier to stream to media centers! (or if your media center doesn't support ALAC, then use FLAC). The CPU required to play Apple Lossless...

If you are on OS X, there are two very good and free applications to convert FLAC (as well as almost any other format) into Apple Lossless (or almost any other format . The first I recommend is called X Lossless Decoder. The second is called xACT. While there are others, those are the two...

Vegaman, I was using the iTunes encorder (iTunes version 7, Fraunhofer). I believe a lot of people feel that LAME is better, but when I started this experiment, I didn't expect to hear the difference at 320. Bigshot, the way my setup works I use my iTunes library as the cornerstone of my...

I know a lot of you are going to say "no duh" to this thread, but I post it only because I have heard the following statement a bunch of times; "no one can tell the difference between 256kbps (or put a bitrate there) and lossless." I finally got off my arse and did some ABX testing to see if...

Chzplz, I have a normal iPod 5th gen, iPhone and Nano. All three work perfectly with my Lisa III with their line out docks. The Lisa is able to drive all my headphones to the point of distortion. These headphones include, but are not limited to, K701s, DT770 80s and MDR-7501s.

I have K701s that I use with my Lisa III. I can hear a noticeable difference between using them on my Lisa III and my RSA Predator. It's not that the predator is bad, in fact I still use it with my K701s a lot. It's just that pushing the K701s is a tall order for the predators very small Li-Ion...

Ace8888, x2. That's expressly why I bought the Predator, that and the fact that it has lifetime warranty and twice the runtime. I find it works very very well with my SE530s.

Ash, or get a PPAv2 or Lisa III with bass boost knobs. I know the PPAv2 isn't portable, and the Lisa III is "sorta" portable... but hey you're using K701s. It's not like you're going jogging.

I spent some time with my DT770s and my father's MDR-7506s, and his Sonys are super bright, very sharp sounding. Too much so for extended listening. We discussed it, and he admitted that they were overly bright, but that he liked that for his application which was not casual listening but rather...

Sbulack mentioned that with more money a predator would have been the amp that they picked up. I just wanted to say that I am running a non-iModded 5th gen iPod into a RSA predator then into SE530s. I really enjoy the combo. I'm not going to say it's "the best combo" because I've not heard...

I second what grawk said. My Shure IEMs block much more sound than both the Sony and Bose active noise-canceling headphones. I did a side by side, and the IEMs win hands down. Not all IEMs block well, but the ones with foam-style tips usually do well.

Good to know. I have ordered some K701s off eBay for a steal ($236 with $19 shipping) so I'll try them out with the predator when I get them. I have only about 100 hours on my predator so far, because I haven't been rigorously burning it in yet. I figured I'd wait until the K701s arrive and then...

Ed, you mean CanJam 08 in Florida, correct? If true, I don't see a Florida meet as a mutually exclusive event to a Socal meet. At least for very casual site members like myself.