facelvega
Headphoneus Supremus
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- Apr 20, 2006
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(I just edited the thread title to reflect the direction it took)
I recently bought an Echo Indigo to upgrade from my Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro as laptop dac. I'd been wanting to move up from my cheapo TBAAM for some time, particularly since I realized after an A/B test how deeply inferior it is to an old Onkyo CD player I got off ebay for $20. Yet at the same time I'd say that the TBAAM is clearly superior to the stock soundcard in either of my laptops. I guess it's about halfway up the long range between laptop sound and old midfi cdp sound.
I'd read posts here extolling the Echo, and an article in Stereophile saying that it was right about dead even with the standard bargain hifi cd player of the moment, which I think at the time of the article was a Toshiba. I found one recently for a good price and pounced. It arrived yesterday.
Verdict: I'm selling the Echo and keeping the TBAAM. Here's how I got there:
Equipment: lame 192vbr mp3>Foobar>Echo/TBAAM>Go Vibe V5 w. 18v power supply>Koss A250/HOK 80-2 orthodynamics. These are both extremely fast and detailed headphones, with the difference that one is very easy to drive and the other very difficult. (see amping section below)
Music: 18 tracks selected from 1000 highly varied albums to test different aspects of headphone performance: bass, mids, treble, soundstage, instrument separation, transient response/speed, PRAT, detail resolution, and ability to handle poor recordings.
Observations
Echo Indigo Typical New Price Shipped: $120-150
Perhaps the Echo is merely biased more for use as a speaker source than for headphones. It presents a very forward treble, with good separation and good soundstage, but with a crisp sound, almost to the point of being harsh. Its bass response is surprisingly weak. Clarity and detail were good, but still not up to the level of an old cd player. But somehow, the echo was always lacking: though I could appreciate its strong points, they never really engaged my interest in the music.
EDIT: the noise in the signal previously mentioned here was actually a red herring from a poorly-mastered recording, sorry to mislead. In fact, both cards produce satisfactorily low noise.
TBAAM Typical New Price Shipped: $25-35
To my ears, the turtle beach is simply more musical sounding than the Echo. It has a much greater bass presence that is very nearly as well-resolved as the Echo's, and though it has a relatively slightly muddy detail in the highs and mids, it is nevertheless more pleasing in the way it presents them, perhaps slightly less analytical but with a much fuller sound. At first I thought this was just a case of the Echo being flat and the TBAAM being colored in a way I'd grown used to, but on going back and forth, I realized that they are both colored, just in different directions. The TBAAM is for me simply the more musical choice, even apart from the fact that it costs a quarter the price.
To Amp or not to Amp?
I tried both soundcards amped and unamped with both my Koss A250 and my HOK 80-2 orthodynamics-- two extremely capable headphones, one of which can be driven unamped by an mp3 player, the other needing serious amping to sound its best (it can even be driven directly from speaker outs!). First, what should be obvious: with the less sensitive headphones, the amp made a vast difference and was more or less indispensible. What you might not have guessed is that the TBAAM could handle them better alone than the Echo, which started seriously distorting the bass at a moderate volume. I don't know how many volts go to a cardbus slot, but apparently not as many as USB's 5 volts.
With the more sensitive headphones, however, the difference between amped and unamped sound narrowed. But once again the TBAAM showed itself the more capable device. With it, the amp was almost negligible: there were slight differences, but not clearly an improvement. Of course, I'm using a very cheap amp, a Go-Vibe V5, so another amp with a more sympathetic signature might well have made a bigger difference. With the Echo, the amp made a definite but not a drastic improvement. For someone with a laptop, I'd say it was a better idea to spend $30 on a TBAAM (or even $10 on a generic usb soundcard) than $55 on a cheap amp.
Now what? If the Echo doesn't amount to the upgrade I was hoping for, I still want to move up from the TBAAM. So where do I look? Will a Silverstone EB-01 give me the more cdp-like sound I'm looking for? I hesitate to move up to something like a Zhaolu, which will kill my portability, kind of important as I live both in Berlin and Boston. Any ideas, kids?
I recently bought an Echo Indigo to upgrade from my Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro as laptop dac. I'd been wanting to move up from my cheapo TBAAM for some time, particularly since I realized after an A/B test how deeply inferior it is to an old Onkyo CD player I got off ebay for $20. Yet at the same time I'd say that the TBAAM is clearly superior to the stock soundcard in either of my laptops. I guess it's about halfway up the long range between laptop sound and old midfi cdp sound.
I'd read posts here extolling the Echo, and an article in Stereophile saying that it was right about dead even with the standard bargain hifi cd player of the moment, which I think at the time of the article was a Toshiba. I found one recently for a good price and pounced. It arrived yesterday.
Verdict: I'm selling the Echo and keeping the TBAAM. Here's how I got there:
Equipment: lame 192vbr mp3>Foobar>Echo/TBAAM>Go Vibe V5 w. 18v power supply>Koss A250/HOK 80-2 orthodynamics. These are both extremely fast and detailed headphones, with the difference that one is very easy to drive and the other very difficult. (see amping section below)
Music: 18 tracks selected from 1000 highly varied albums to test different aspects of headphone performance: bass, mids, treble, soundstage, instrument separation, transient response/speed, PRAT, detail resolution, and ability to handle poor recordings.
Observations
Echo Indigo Typical New Price Shipped: $120-150
Perhaps the Echo is merely biased more for use as a speaker source than for headphones. It presents a very forward treble, with good separation and good soundstage, but with a crisp sound, almost to the point of being harsh. Its bass response is surprisingly weak. Clarity and detail were good, but still not up to the level of an old cd player. But somehow, the echo was always lacking: though I could appreciate its strong points, they never really engaged my interest in the music.
EDIT: the noise in the signal previously mentioned here was actually a red herring from a poorly-mastered recording, sorry to mislead. In fact, both cards produce satisfactorily low noise.
TBAAM Typical New Price Shipped: $25-35
To my ears, the turtle beach is simply more musical sounding than the Echo. It has a much greater bass presence that is very nearly as well-resolved as the Echo's, and though it has a relatively slightly muddy detail in the highs and mids, it is nevertheless more pleasing in the way it presents them, perhaps slightly less analytical but with a much fuller sound. At first I thought this was just a case of the Echo being flat and the TBAAM being colored in a way I'd grown used to, but on going back and forth, I realized that they are both colored, just in different directions. The TBAAM is for me simply the more musical choice, even apart from the fact that it costs a quarter the price.
To Amp or not to Amp?
I tried both soundcards amped and unamped with both my Koss A250 and my HOK 80-2 orthodynamics-- two extremely capable headphones, one of which can be driven unamped by an mp3 player, the other needing serious amping to sound its best (it can even be driven directly from speaker outs!). First, what should be obvious: with the less sensitive headphones, the amp made a vast difference and was more or less indispensible. What you might not have guessed is that the TBAAM could handle them better alone than the Echo, which started seriously distorting the bass at a moderate volume. I don't know how many volts go to a cardbus slot, but apparently not as many as USB's 5 volts.
With the more sensitive headphones, however, the difference between amped and unamped sound narrowed. But once again the TBAAM showed itself the more capable device. With it, the amp was almost negligible: there were slight differences, but not clearly an improvement. Of course, I'm using a very cheap amp, a Go-Vibe V5, so another amp with a more sympathetic signature might well have made a bigger difference. With the Echo, the amp made a definite but not a drastic improvement. For someone with a laptop, I'd say it was a better idea to spend $30 on a TBAAM (or even $10 on a generic usb soundcard) than $55 on a cheap amp.
Now what? If the Echo doesn't amount to the upgrade I was hoping for, I still want to move up from the TBAAM. So where do I look? Will a Silverstone EB-01 give me the more cdp-like sound I'm looking for? I hesitate to move up to something like a Zhaolu, which will kill my portability, kind of important as I live both in Berlin and Boston. Any ideas, kids?
