[TheKillerPiglet]

Although I strongly disagree with almost everything you've said (I mean, if you can't tell home made pasta from frozen... mama mia! have an Indonesian cigar for after dinner!) I appreciate and respect your gentlemanly form of expression.
 
 
 
KP

 

[Kodhifi]

Quote:

Although I strongly disagree with almost everything you've said (I mean, if you can't tell home made pasta from frozen... mama mia! have an Indonesian cigar for after dinner!) I appreciate and respect your gentlemanly form of expression.
 
 
 
KP

Hah. No worries.
 
The point I was trying to make is how you think about the food, impacts your enjoyment of it, even if the taste and texture are exactly the same.
 
It would be like winning a new car and you love it, but then you find out it had almost been written off as a loss because so many things broke during factory testing so they got it fixed and gave it away. It's the same car you were just in love with, but now because you think of it as a cast off, you subconsciously consider it inferior to another car of the same model.
 
The mind plays funny games with us in just about everything our senses experience. What you think of what you're listening to, eating, drinking, smelling, feeling, has a powerful effect on your perception of it, more than people realize.

 

[TheKillerPiglet]

I cannot disagree with that:  "we sell the sizzle not the steak," but that is a generality.
 
KP

 

[zazex]

Quote:

It's not about convincing yourself they are all the same. It's about realizing that an amplifier shouldn't change the signal, just accurately amplify the input signal unmolested. Realizing that a $1,000 headphone amp isn't going to sound more real and make sound more accurate than a $100 one. It might make it sound different but if that's your goal buy an equalizer.
 
Audio signals are not difficult to amplify, they don't need much bandwidth, and even dirt cheap Chinese components don't alter the SNR or THD in any audible way. The biggest variable in an audio pipeline from source, to preamp, to power amp, to cabling, is the speaker or headphone.
 

 
 
While perhaps an amplifier shouldn't change the signal, it very often does change the signal. 
 
Since you mentioned Bob W. Carver in a positive light, I'll let him explain his view on this in his own words:
 
 
 
"What I’m going to say will fly in the face of what most people believe.
I believe that you can take two solid-state amplifiers, and provided neither one is overloaded in any fashion, they’ll sound identical.
That’s a big if.
Amplifiers are overloaded in three basic ways. They’re overloaded in amplitude; they’ve overloaded in current; they’re overloaded in speed.
It’s very easy to do this if you don’t have a big juicy amplifier.
Obviously a little Radio Shack amplifier is not going to be able to touch a big Jeff Rowland or a Mark Levinson or a Sunfire amplifier.
Provided the amplifier has flat frequency response and sufficiently low distortion, both of which are trivial these days, and provided there are no interface problems,
the differences will always be the subtle differences associated with overload, either momentarily, like slew-rate limiting or clipping, or just running out of drive current."
 
 
- 'AIG Talks with Bob Carver', audio ideas guide, April 26, 1996

 

[judgementday]

Thanks for everyone who posted their opinion. I read all of it and do gain understand from both sides. I will certainly come back to this post after i bought my esw9 and the amp. And yes, i decide to give the amp a go. Thanks again!

 

[takato14]

Quote:

Hello, im a completely newbie and had jt arrived at the audiophile world through choosing headphne by their apparence rather thn the sq. Currently i own two headphones, monster inspiration and sony mdr-1r. And im planning to gt a ath esw-9. Normally i listen to hip hop, "clubbing" music (dnt kw whts the catagory for it lol) and mainly songs with a piano base. Due to convinient purpose, i use iphne 5 as source. My question will be do i need a amp or/and dac for the three headphnes i own?

My current targets are fiio e17 and jbs labs cmoy bb v2.03. And my budget is only in tht range ad well. Due to tge lack of places in nz to try out myself, may u guys give me some advice? Thanks a lot!

With headphones like that you will not need an amp. Use a well designed amp and DAC (E17 is fine) and you'll be getting 99.99% of the maximum performance.