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I agree. I'm not sure if they ARE being driven to the max. I'm almost positive they aren't....I mean it's a 250ohm headphone. comparable HD650 is just adequately driven by the E17....but again most likely not fully driven. that's what I want....fulllllly driven
these DT880 250ohm aren't high level enough? I think they are... I don't think I've heard these fully driven yet. I've only heard from my phone/wolfson/voodoo control and 5db amp/
It's not about volume at all. I'm getting plenty of volume. like i said above, I just want to FULLY drive these. What you're saying is to get a more expensive headphone that's like 32ohm, right?
What you mean is that you want to enjoy the detail and clarity as well as having enough volume. I wouldn't necessarily be looking at easier to drive headphones, but instead something that has a wide soundstage and plenty of clarity/detail. Beyer T1. Senn HD800, Audeze LCD-2 or -3, maybe even a Stax electrostatic setup. All of these of course are even harder to drive so they may/will require even more powerful amps.
While you have just taken a leap forward by moving to a phone/media player with a better DAC, your next step is probably to start with better encoded files. If you can, start with some lossless files in FLAC or ALAC format. With your new phone though, you're limited to dual amping via the headphone output as I don't believe it has a line out and it won't support digital out unless you load a modded Android kernel. That's not to say that dual-amping out of your phone won't improve the audio, but almost guaranteed you won't see as big of an improvement as you have by changing player hardware (with the Wolfson DAC).
That said, using Poweramp to play FLAC lossless files on your new phone may yet reveal another layer of detail and clarity. It really depends on the quality of the FLAC encoding though, so as with anything, it will require experimentation. I'd definitely give your E17 a try when you receive it - if it doesn't provide the boost you're looking for, you can probably sell it with little difficulty, being that it's so new. Good luck!