[neworder]

Hello Boys and Girls.

I am very new to all this Hi-Fi headphone stuff but wanted to get a good set up so I jumped in.

I do not have a lot of experience with headphones and most of my life I have used the sony Vertical in-the-Ear style Headphones

I always thought the sound was pretty good and thought that you just could not get really clean sound from a set of phones.

About a year ago somebody mentioned how good the Koss Sporta Pros where. When I first saw them I thought "You have got to be kidding" since they looked cheap like all the other foam looking small headphones. Boy was I wrong! I was very surprised on how good they sounded for cheap $20 headphones.

After reading a lot of the message boards on the net (including the one over at headwize) I decided to get serious and buy some serious headphones since I wanted to record my vinyl collection into my computer. I ended up buying the Sony CD3000 headphones. When they came in I put them on and my wife just laughed at me thinking I was some crazy air traffic controller. When I first listened to the phones, I was a little disappointed. I was not use to the brightness of good phones and was use to the heavy bass of the sporta pros. At this time I did not have a headphone amp so I just tried it with my portable players and the headphone jack on my sony receiver and was not very happy with the results. I just could not get use to the brightness of the phones.

I knew I really needed a headphone amp to let the cans perform to their best. After getting sticker shock on seeing how much you can spend for a headphone amp I decided on the Corda. There seemed to be a log of positive feed back on the Corda and the crossfeed feature really caught me. My Corda just came in a few days ago (I bought the one already assembled) and hooked it right away.

The sound was a lot better than my portable devices but it still seemed like something was missing. I must like more bass than normal because the low end was just not there for me. After trying all sorts of stuff I said heck with the pure signal stuff, I am putting an EQ inline. I am now very happy with the sound and the quality is amazing. The EQ is giving a boost in the 21-61HZ range and a few other others which I really like. The bass is amazing once I got the EQ just perfect and the way I like (I am using a 31-band behringer EQ).

It has taken me awhile to get use to the brightness but now I really like it. The detail is amazing and I can hear every little thing. This kind of set up also shows any imperfections in the recording. After listening to a lot of my CDs I have found out that some of the recordings are not the best which I never noticed before with a cheaper set up.

I used CDs to test out the set up but I am really a MP3 junkie and hooking up my MP3 Neo Jukebox sounds really good. It seems there are not very many MP3 players that have a clean output so now I am going to buy a Art DIO and use the digital output on my Archos recorder to see what kind of quality I can get with MP3.

Anyway.. I thought I would just say HI.

 

[joelongwood]

Hi neworder. The CD3000s are, indeed, excellent headphones. However, they do reveal every little fault in the rest of the system. From what I've read, the Corda is also a very revealing amp because of its ruler flat frequency response to beyond the range of human hearing. I find the Total Airhead amp, with its slight high-end roll off to tame the brightness of the CD-3000s somewhat. The Creek OBH-11 also does a nice job in reducing the highs a bit. Your electronic equaliztion is probably accomplishing the same thing. What I, and many others here, have discovered is that there is no one set of headphones that does it all with all types of music. At least I haven't found one. If you like the sound of the CD3000s, but find them a bit too bright, you might want to be on the lookout for a used pair of CD-1700s. The soundstage and comfort is on a par with the CD3000s, but the midrange is the focus, with excellent bass and very detailed, but not overly bright, highs. As with most everything on this site, this is just my opinion. I hope you have as much fun with this stuff as I'm having.