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Have to worry, not going to drop 530$+tax on headphones I am not positive will work properly my low end 1713 receiver. Emailed Denon a few weeks ago about the headphone jack impedance but no one has replied.
Thanks for the responses everyone.
And seriously, just an advice, DO NOT fall for the, well, I'm gonna put it rough, "nut cases" who tell you that output impedance on headphone jacks will affect the sound you hear drastically. It wont, its just one of those things that are in reality from a practical point of view pretty irrelevant, but a lot of manufacturers use it purely as a marketing scheme.
You can google some measurements and comparisons between close to 0 output impedance and typical 100-200 ohm output on the typical receiver. Differences? Barely measurable on most headphones, let alone audible. Its only audible on headphones such as low impedance Sennheisers which never have flat impedance/frequency graphs, they always have huge spikes in the mid bass area, so there you would hear an increase in bass on a high impedance source, but only maybe 1-2 db, irrelevant. And of course, in ears and similar very low impedance cans would be better off out of a low impedance source. But 300, 600 ohm headphones we're talking about here...plug them in and enjoy.
I would bet my life savings that if you plugged a high impedance headphone into a low impedance and high impedance output and did a blind test comparison, you would not hear any difference, nor would majority of people. I cant hear a major difference between a 220 ohm output and a 1 ohm output with AKG K701 using a $800 DAC, and thats a damn revealing setup and headphones are very low impedance. What makes the difference in sound quality between these low impedance headphone amps and regular headphones outputs is not the output impedance, its the quality of the rest of the components used.
I'm not saying lower output impedance is not better, in theory it is, but in reality, the improvements are in majority of cases far too small to be audible, or if they are audible, then they're definitely not worth a couple of hundreds of dollars in upgrades.
Of course, you're not gonna use HD800's or LCD3's out of a 400 dollar receiver, but with headphones you're looking at, you're gonna spend a LOT of money for a VERY SMALL, if any, and sometimes even the opposite of improvement in sound over your receiver. Your Denon is not bad, not bad at all for that money, and you will NOT get a better separate head amp + DAC combo for that money. I've tried far worse, I've compared my DT880's out of the cheapest receiver they had in store, some Sherwood that costs half of what your Denon does, and it still outclassed the likes of Asus Xonar Essence One and Cambridge Audio Dac magic plus.
Not trying to change your mind or anything, just giving you advice after doing my own testing and research, and figuring that majority of stuff I read on audio forums are exaggerations and often have as much to do with reality as pink elephants and unicorns. But I know how it is, I wouldnt have believed this myself a year ago either, try it yourself.
Again, I don't wanna cause some flame war here, I'm not saying headphone amps are useless, I have 4 of them myself, but I'm saying that if you don't have one, and you already have a good 400-500 dollar receiver as you do, and you will buy some mid-end headphone, you absolutely without any doubt do not need a separate headphone amp, unless you intend to spend huge dollars and get something high end, because only then you will get a noticable sound quality improvement. As for power, as I said already, you dont have to worry, there's enough of it in your receiver to run three HD650's at the same time, let alone one.
Q701's v the T90's... In short I was utterly unengaged with the Q701's.. Mind you, I heard it on a Lehmann, and a Graham Slee Solo Ultra Linear, so it might need more balls to drive them properly.. The T90's have life and verve, with spaciousness. I'm getting another pair
