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I'm sure your advice is given in good faith, but do you really think the 601 working to its full potential would ameliorate the OPs harsh judgement? Even an indifferent integrated amp will drive it to 80% of its potential, and the way the OP hates this phone a further 20% isn't going to help. Sometimes it's just better to move on to the next porridge bowl.
Very well put.
Headphones driven by integrated amplifiers are a mixed bag. In fact, when I've started getting serious about headphones my first "head-amp" was my speaker amp, a NAD integrated.
It wasn't particularly bad or good, but I had nothing better to drive my headphones, and dedicated amplifiers were scarce and very expensive to import.
When I've moved up the ladder towards HD600 and HD650 I had to buy a headphone amplifier and ditch the NAD. It just sounded piss-poor (plenty loud, but lots of sibilance, muddy and flat) by comparison.
Even more so with AKGs.
It's impossible to generalize the quality of headphone out of an integrated amplifier.
There are a few truly remarkable (some models from Leben, Luxman, etc), where the amp as a whole is used to drive the headphones via a state of the art resistive network (impedance matcher). These are high end amplifiers and it's obvious that the manufacturers have put a lot of thought in the design of the headphone out.
There are other integrated amps which are quite decent with headphones. They usually have a separate part of the circuit designed as a mini-headphone amplifier. Some I've even seen employing class A biasing, discrete components etc
But the majority of integrated amplifiers have, at best, a glorified CMoy-like headphone amp with wildly varying quality.
In my mind this clearly indicates it's just an afterthought for the occasional headphone user. Remember these are speaker amps and most people use them as such.