Hi all,
I just put in an order for my LCD-3's. I heard them at Canjam at RMAF in October, and they've been on my mind ever since. I did the best, longest "sleep on it" job I could do, saved up the funds, and ordered the headphones. This, from a HiFi guy who is purely into speaker setups, and who was previously biased against headphones. These LCD's seem like just the ticket in terms of delivering tonality on a level that good speakers do.
Next step...amp! Based on what I heard at Canjam - these are not the world's pickiest headphones. They sounded fantastic out of the Soloist, Mjolnir and WA22 that I listened to - with the Mjolnir being a slight step behind the other 2, and the WA22 focusing more on depth of texture whereas the Soloist had a slightly thinned out but detailed/refined tonality to it (compared to the Woo). While I like both presentations - I'm leaning towards the Woo side. My plan is to break in my headphones over a couple of weeks, and then bring them to the Montreal audio show's Canjam in late March to determine my amp.
I have a question though...and that's how to best integrate my vinyl setup into the system. I'm currently using the phono stage that's integral to my Shindo preamp as my phono stage. Given that it's orders of magnitude better than most separate phono stages out there, I'd like to use it for headphone listening as well. Of course, headphone amps all have integrated preamps...so...Is it a bad thing to drive a headphone amp with a signal from a preamp rather than directly from a source? I have a good DAC to drive the headamp directly - so it's just a question of the phono, where I would be using a pre-amp'd signal.
Any help is appreciated...and I can't wait to start using my LCD3's!