Hello everyone,
I know i'm late to the party but today is the day my T1se Mk3 arrived and i might as well admit, today is the day i realized i was living in a lie. I have a pair of DT880's, 600 variant, around for close to 2 years now and i've never had the time to look for a proper DAC/amplifier for it. When i re-built my desktop computer, i ordered a MB which SUPPOSEDLY had the ability to drive phones up to 600 ohms. In the short time i had at my disposal, i noticed that while it did give a boost to volume, the sound was, well...dead
. No low,mid or high presence at all. I tinkered with the EQ a bit and managed to bring it to a decent level but still, it was miles ahead of what i KNEW these phones can.
Enter T1se (stock tube). I feel reborn, i swear. The soundstage it brought, the tempering in the highs and the presence on the lows is...damn, breathtaking. It's my first true endeavor in the audiophile universe but holy God it feels good. I have a lot of FLACs on my disks and dvds and for the first time in my life, i could feel a difference between a 320kbps MP3 and a FLAC. I feel so sad for the Beyers...
To add something useful to the thread, i noticed that this combo (On-Board audio source of the z270x Gaming 7+DT880+T1se) really shines when listening to orchestral music. I'm not keen on classical music (Mozart, Beethoven, etc) but i do listen a lot to Two Steps from Hell/Thomas Bergersen, Enigma, A.R.Rahman, Shanti's Buddha Bar/Tai-Chi volumes and that's where i felt the biggest difference yet. I'm listening on repeat to Rahman's Mumbai Theme Song and it's making my heart skip beats. It starts with a centered flute and a cymbal - all in the center of the soundstage. Mid-song it switches to some pads which are as stereo as they come, with height perception (which i never had before); shortly after, a strong bassline comes in (it might be just a low pad) which fills the entire audio spectrum. After taking a small "break", where the cymbal accompanies some strings/pads, it goes off again. What i can tell you is that the sounds are never in one place. I paid ~300 euros for this small monster (I know, it's expensive but that's what you get when you have only one authorized reseller in your whole country) and i don't regret it one nanosecond. I would of paid, now, that i know what it feels like, 500 euros for it. It seems that my onboard audio has enough power to act as an AMP (up to a certain level, after which it plateaus) while the T1se does it's job as a DAC wonderfully.
I've read a lot before buying and i noticed many owners going the route of tube-rolling. Sadly, the only place where i can buy tubes (the same from where i bought the dac) doesn't have any decent (or affordable) ones. If, by any chance, anyone of you guys and girls, at some point, decide to sell either the Gold Lion E88CC or the Amperex 7308 Golden Pin, i'd like to try and buy one. So far, i'm more than thrilled with the SQ i'm provided and probably don't need another tube but i'm also aware that you can't realize what you're missing till you've had it.
Oh, and another thing...i had to amp the whole 16DB to properly drive the Beyers. I guess this means i'll have to look for a proper amp, sometime in the future. TIll then, i will recommend the T1se to everyone i know (and maybe convert a few) looking for a different audio experience.
A BIG thank you to everyone who contributed to this thread, it really made my decision that much easier. I would of never decided to pull the plug if it weren't for you. Thank you!