Quote:
Originally Posted by BigTony /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I've had a bunch of amps and they all sound similar, but not the same. The varistions are what were into, to seek out the best. I use my ears, and if it sounds good to me, then i'm happy. And i can tell the difference if my hd650s are plugged into my onkyo 805 or my DV332!
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Hi Big T
Welcome to the fray...........
At one of the NY meets, the year before last, we went around with a portable DVD player and compared some headphone amps using that as a source and our personal headphones.
We specifically compared my Woo3 to a DV336 and decided that the DV336 had a more colored presentation relative to the Woo3. This can be found in the impressions thread if you feel like looking for it.
But headphone amps are preamps not basic amplifiers and as such
can sound differently from each other depending on their circuitry.
My understanding was that the question under discussion was if all amplifiers (meaning basic amplifiers - as cited in the 28 years of amplifier testing) sound the same.
Your Onkyo is a receiver so of course you can tell the difference between its headphone out implementation and the preamp your DV332 is, but, if you were able to safely tap just the amplifier output to your headphones, you would find that it sounded pretty much like all the other basic amplifiers. (and I say "pretty much" because there would be various synergies and impedance issues between the preamp, amp and headphones, that I don't want to go into, but you can read it as "sounds the same")
I did a similar thing with a while ago with my Denon receiver. I took the jumpers out between the preamp and the amp and ran it from my GS-1 to a set of Polk satellite speakers. It sounded exactly the same when I connected the GS-1 to an Audio Source Amp 1. This, of course, doesn't prove anything because I couldn't go back and forth while I was comparing and I knew exactly which amp I was listening to.
USG