Help!
Background:
Sometime back I decided that I wanted to store all my CD's on one media device, then whilst reading about the various options decided that 'portable' was the way to go and ended up buying an AK70 MKii DAP and a pair of Sennheiser Momentum iem's. Spent many many hours ripping around 500 CD's to flac via WMP (10) lossless and then transferred a batch of them to the DAP only to find that no album art was displayed on the dap, wasn't too excited by the sound either. So after a little more Googling I deleted the tracks on the dap, downloaded a trial version of JRiver media centre and imported my existing library, sorted album art and forwarded to the dap...Happy Days!.
However, I was astonished to discover that the cd's I then ripped directly through JRiver were both louder and of better clarity than those previously ripped via WMP..........so deleted my library, paid the JRiver licence fee and re-ripped the original 500 again from scratch. To cheer myself up a bit I also purchased a pair of Sennheiser IE80S iem's....and WOW! I was absolutely blown away (with stock silicon earbuds, did try the Comply version but they were tonally a disaster).
But after a while, as good as (I believe) the AK70 mkii/IE80S combination is, there were a handful of tracks that seemed a little stifled, notably some Classical music tracks were too quiet volume wise (ie: Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet/Valery Gergiev/LSO), Kamasi Washington's The Plan (Vol.1) overwhelmingly boomey and even Nick Cave's 'There She Goes, my beautiful World' sounded a little meh*.
I put this down to limitations of the otherwise excellent and tiny IE80S, so splashed out on a pair of Sennheiser HD660S headphones (naively believing the 'easy to drive' marketing hype....they're not!) thinking that if the ie80s blew my socks off, the hd660s would blow everything off!. Aside from the 1/4" adaptor which was bigger than my DAP and the stock cable as long as an anchor chain, the AK70 couldn't drive them farther than slow and anemic. I panic purchased an Fiio A5 which on High Gain made things a little better (Can't blame the A5, don't think it was designed for the purpose I'd hoped).
Dilemna:
So I'm a little stuck, I want the HD660s to play to their full potential, yet have a DAP that hasn't either Coax nor Optical outputs. Would ideally like a semi-portable amp (accept it can't be pocket sized), but if 'full sized' is the best solution I'd go with that, getting the best music is my hope
* I've since, mostly out of curiosity purchased a Fiio 2.5mm Balanced cable (RC-IE8B) for the IE80S and whilst it produces a slightly brighter sound than the OE cable, sound staging and detail are better, also volume levels are about 40% higher. Also bought a shorter 'Custom Cans' Litz Copper cable with 3.5mm jack for the HD660S which I've yet to try
Background:
Sometime back I decided that I wanted to store all my CD's on one media device, then whilst reading about the various options decided that 'portable' was the way to go and ended up buying an AK70 MKii DAP and a pair of Sennheiser Momentum iem's. Spent many many hours ripping around 500 CD's to flac via WMP (10) lossless and then transferred a batch of them to the DAP only to find that no album art was displayed on the dap, wasn't too excited by the sound either. So after a little more Googling I deleted the tracks on the dap, downloaded a trial version of JRiver media centre and imported my existing library, sorted album art and forwarded to the dap...Happy Days!.
However, I was astonished to discover that the cd's I then ripped directly through JRiver were both louder and of better clarity than those previously ripped via WMP..........so deleted my library, paid the JRiver licence fee and re-ripped the original 500 again from scratch. To cheer myself up a bit I also purchased a pair of Sennheiser IE80S iem's....and WOW! I was absolutely blown away (with stock silicon earbuds, did try the Comply version but they were tonally a disaster).
But after a while, as good as (I believe) the AK70 mkii/IE80S combination is, there were a handful of tracks that seemed a little stifled, notably some Classical music tracks were too quiet volume wise (ie: Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet/Valery Gergiev/LSO), Kamasi Washington's The Plan (Vol.1) overwhelmingly boomey and even Nick Cave's 'There She Goes, my beautiful World' sounded a little meh*.
I put this down to limitations of the otherwise excellent and tiny IE80S, so splashed out on a pair of Sennheiser HD660S headphones (naively believing the 'easy to drive' marketing hype....they're not!) thinking that if the ie80s blew my socks off, the hd660s would blow everything off!. Aside from the 1/4" adaptor which was bigger than my DAP and the stock cable as long as an anchor chain, the AK70 couldn't drive them farther than slow and anemic. I panic purchased an Fiio A5 which on High Gain made things a little better (Can't blame the A5, don't think it was designed for the purpose I'd hoped).
Dilemna:
So I'm a little stuck, I want the HD660s to play to their full potential, yet have a DAP that hasn't either Coax nor Optical outputs. Would ideally like a semi-portable amp (accept it can't be pocket sized), but if 'full sized' is the best solution I'd go with that, getting the best music is my hope
* I've since, mostly out of curiosity purchased a Fiio 2.5mm Balanced cable (RC-IE8B) for the IE80S and whilst it produces a slightly brighter sound than the OE cable, sound staging and detail are better, also volume levels are about 40% higher. Also bought a shorter 'Custom Cans' Litz Copper cable with 3.5mm jack for the HD660S which I've yet to try
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