Amp advice for a hardcore newbie

[mentalfloss]

Hello!
My name is Devon, I've got a few questions about headphone amps in general (forgive me if I'm grappling around in the dark)
feel free to barrage me with as much insane technological ranting as possible, it's the only way I'll learn

I'd really appreciate everybody's input on any of this, I'm particularly interested in hearing from people with very strong opinions and people who see "both sides of the field" so to speak.

Sooo...
1. Can a headphone amp with a dac be used as a line out to drive an amplifier and speakers? I have a digital dj setup and I was looking to dump the $$$ into a high quality solution with a single output (most really nice sounding souncards are cardbus and/or you are paying for an insane number of in/outs). Is there any reason I can't use a headphone amp as a soundcard? (is there a significant difference in how the sound is treated as opposed to a regular soundcard) Are their latency issues with headphone amps (I was looking at the pricier headroom micro or portable desktop)

2. I read somewhere on this forum that high end solid state headphone amps (which I beleive is what the aformentioned headroom amps are) are silly because the purpose of a solid state amp is to produce the sound flat (as flat frequency response, which most fairly inexpensive ones with inexpensive dacs do quite well. I listen primarily to electronic music (mostly psytrance) and some folk music as well. Would a portable tube amp be the thing for me? It is quite likely I have blown my ears out from too many raves

(please no scary statistics about hearing loss, I'm kinda phobic about that stuff) and I'm not really interested in clarity (In the "I can hear the celloist breathing through their nosehairs kind of thing") as much as I'm interested in "impact" and "warmth". I don't really care about my music being reproduced accuratly, I just want it to sound "rich". I know these are very subjective terms because I don't have the terminology for them. I've noticed Tube amps don't have Dacs (for obvious reasons). Would their be latency in piping sound from a computer to a Dac to a tube amp. It doesn't seem so...can anyone confirm this? So, would a tube amp be the way to go for me? Are their any good battery powered portable tube amps? What are the tradeoffs of tube amps vs solid state? (besides the whole warmth vs clarity sort of thing).

3. I've noticed most portable audio players don't have a digital out or any way to bypass the dac so that you can do all the audio processing within the headphone amp. I assume if you're amplifying the analog headphone output of an audio player with cheap Dac that the quality loss from going digital to analog is significant as compared to if you could pipe the digital signal directly to the headphone amp? The only digital portable players I could find that had digital outs were the discontinued Iriver Hp-120 and 140 and minidisc players (Portable Dat players and those solid state recording devices seemed out of the question, but if anybody recommends them for any reason let me know). I don't really want a minidisc player because it looks like a pain in the rear to get wav files onto the minidiscs (you can't do it with a computer, is there a hack?) and I don't want to use a lossy/proprietary codec. Figuring out how to crack the copy protection (SCMS defeater chips and the like) looks quite difficult. I don't want to deal with the Sonic Stage software. Iriver discontinued portable is out because it's not availabe and because I am nervous about a hard drive based player. Soo...does anybody have any good ideas about cracking open an ipod and modding it to bypass the internal dac? I will likely get the Ipod nano next week (even though I am not so fond of apple) because of the likely future podzilla support (hopefully flac) and flash-based memory. Does anybody recommend alternatives?

Thanks,
-Devon

 

[nikongod]

1: yes.

2: the purpose of solid state is to have parts that dont look like glass and are allegedly not fragile. for warmth, they often sound frigid. tube amps are often equally linear compared to the solid state amps. solid state amps typpically use less power at idle and while playing, this is a HUGE advantage portable tube ampos are excessivly rare.

there are a fiew tube output stage dacs available, they seem nice. others will know more about them than i though.

3: which minidisc has a digital OUT? crazyness, they are uber-rare. although minidisc is pretty heavily compressed, it actually sounds better (most people agree) than all but the "least compressed" mp3, and variant formats. some of the archos players also have digital outputs. mine only has 100gb, sadly i dont think it can play wav, im happy with vbr average about 200kbps. and there is the ever popular totally non compressed (well only nominally comopressed) cd format lots of cd players have digital outputs, mine was $50. i would not wory about the hdd in a portable player unless you are planing on running a lot with it. i am also not a fan of the ipod brand players

i would say find something better, they are about in large amounts.