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So if I understand this correctly, the amp that I should be picking up should complement the features that the IEMs are missing
So if the 262s are considered warm, then I should get an amp that is bright and analytical?
And therein lies the road to madness and fiscal insolvency, What you are suggesting is roughly the equivalent of Thai cuisine - get it right and it tastes fantastic, get it wrong and you will end up throwing your cookbook and expensive cooking implements in the bin, I've watched Thais cooking, from street vendors to professionals in 5-star hotels, and they have an instinctive ability to balance ingredients - they definitely don't need to vet a thousand conflicting opinions on how to mix and match to make the
whole better than the sum of its parts.
Kit matching is a dark art - no question - but you should always be aiming for neutrality in your source and amp. Deliberately going after kit that is 'bright' is
never, IMO, a good idea. If anything, many Head-Fiers actually seek out electronics that are reputed to imbue the source material with warmth and veer to the 'less analytical' end of the spectrum. You'll find the 'neutrality and accuracy' mantra repeated in a bazillion professional reviews, but they still comment on 'favourable warmth' and 'a sense of engagement' in kit - all of which drives the objectivists among us to drink heavily,
Do any of my recommendations help if I spend my days listening to sludge metal and you like Dixieland jazz ? Can I tell someone how to cure allegedly 'bright' kit when they enjoy Mariah Carey and Celine Deon at 100dB ? Extreme examples, I know, but I see blanket recommendations all the time - here and elsewhere. I also find it interesting that the first mention of the word 'bright' sends many screaming into the abyss - again, these terms are relative. I'd prefer to see 'energetic' used in place of bright, unless they mean
shrill and then they need to say so. I look very carefully for any mention of an overly 'lively' treble, having owned the Grado SR325is, but Cambridge Audio makes CDPs and amps which are often described as 'bright' on first listen yet longterm owners seem survive all that 'energy' - it certainly hasn't hurt CAs business. I also found that my CA amp settled down after about a hundred hours, but I didnt like the matching CDP at the audition - horses for courses, and my ears may well have adapted to the combination. There are reviews in Stereophile and other publications where the reviewers express their
joy at the presence of tone controls - long considered evil by audiophiles - its interesting that headphone amps dont have that capability, Like software EQ, these things can all be misused, but wouldn't it be better to educate the consumer than remove that option entirely from the product ? As Larry Wall, the creator of the Perl programming language, famously said many years back 'We give you the shotgun - if you want to shoot yourself in the foot, that's
your problem !'. Personally, I'd love to have the option of bringing the treble slightly off the boil on some of my music.
Perfect world, we should be tuning a *neutral* chain with our
headphones/speakers, but I think that assumes that all of our music is immaculately recorded and produced. The problem with your 'Thai cuisine' approach to system matching (and we've all been there ...) is simple : unless you plan to settle on one set of headphones, how many colored source/amp pieces of the puzzle are you willing to buy ?
Neutrality, transparency and accuracy can all be measured against other kit objectively - I'm not sure that the same can be said for subjective opinions on 'warmth' and 'musical involvement', but those things are just as important to the most important piece of kit you'll
ever own - the throbbing mass between your ears,
Good luck, and may your downloads all be at least 256k.
