[earmonger]

That's interesting about the Sundara. Sundara and AT were the two I was torn between after lots of reading, and with no way to test either one before buying, I went for AT because of all the raves and all the praise for how comfortable they are. Happy you prefer the AT; I won't have Sundara regrets.

I've found the AT to be great for electronic music because all the spatial effects come through so clearly and the bass is so deep.

I mean, crazy stuff like this:

Rắn Cạp Đuôi: "Aztec Glue"


The voices sound human, the bass lands hard (drop at 1:11) and all the other sounds go spinning around nicely.

I may be wrong, but if you stay with the AT for a week and then go back to your other phones, you may find that after the AT's neutral tuning, the others feel unnaturally emphasized in certain ranges.

 

[silvershadelynx]

Thanks for your link, very special music

It was actually my girlfriend who noticed that my second amplifier, a Denon, has a 3,5mm headphone output! So just for fun I listened to a cd and compared the AT and cheap headphone. There was a big difference in overall performance! Everything sounded better on the AT, but for instance different layers in the low frequencies were completely absent when listening to the cheap headphone.

When I streamed a classical music track from youtube I compared it to the CD version (AT headphone connected to Denon / CD and to laptop / youtube) - there was also a clear difference to be heard: the sound quality from the laptop was lower than from the Denon amplifier + CD player.

Unfortunately I didn't expect such a big difference between laptop / youtube and dedicated amplifier and cd player. If I had known this before I would have tested the already returned Hifiman as well...

The next question is what is causing the sound quality degradation: the soundcard of my MacBook Air 2018 and / or the youtube stream? Update: I just read that youtube audio quality is either 126 kbps AAC in an MP4 container or anywhere from 50-165 kbps Opus in a WebM container. I didn't know it was that bad / low quality as I remind friends telling me sound quality on youtube was very good. So I guess youtube was a bad source to do headphone comparisons.

At least I'm much more convinced of the added value of the AT now.

 

[earmonger]

The next question is what is causing the sound quality degradation: the soundcard of my MacBook Air 2018 and / or the youtube stream?

At least I'm much more convinced of the added value of the AT now.

Both.

The ATH-R70X does benefit from an amp, though it's not bad straight out of the Mac. Mac soundcards have a reputation for being fairly good, better than a PC for quality. But the amp also adds power on top of that. Glad the girlfriend found the headphone jack!

YouTube audio tends to be 128 kbps .mp3, which is low quality--the kind of files that were being sold on early iTunes when bandwidth and storage space were less available. Depending on the source, some YouTube audio is even further degraded because the uploaders don't care or they want you to pay for better-quality versions.

Mp3 is "lossy"--to keep the files small, it discards some of the information in the music file. Mp3 was engineered to keep the parts of the music file that it's most important for you to perceive, but the smaller the file -- the lower the bitrate -- the more you lose.

High-quality mp3s have a bitrate of 320 kbps, nearly twice as much sonic information as 128 kbps. And a CD is playing lossless .wav files, 1411 kbps.

If you want to test, try a YouTube version vs. something you have on CD or in a .wav or .flac file on the Mac. You'll probably hear the difference.

The downside of a better headphone is that it can be more revealing, while cheaper stuff blurs the sound. Me, I prefer clarity.

 

[silvershadelynx]

@earmonger: thanks again for your extensive reply. I wasn't aware of youtube having such a low sound quality, but it explais a lot! Lots of music sounds lifeless on youtube in my opinion - even tiresome at times.

I ordered a 3 meter extension cable to extend the AT stock cable which is quite long already, it will get me 6 meters of total length so I can comfortably sit in my sofa which is separated 5 meters from my Denon / Quad stereo system. I'm sure it wil make a huge difference after some small testing.

I will first try to find out / measure the power / impedance and distortion of my Denon DRA-F100 integrated amplifier before considering a dedicated headphone amplifier.

 

[earmonger]

@earmonger: thanks again for your extensive reply. I wasn't aware of youtube having such a low sound quality, but it explais a lot! Lots of music sounds lifeless on youtube in my opinion - even tiresome at times.

I ordered a 3 meter extension cable to extend the AT stock cable which is quite long already, it will get me 6 meters of total length so I can comfortably sit in my sofa which is separated 5 meters from my Denon / Quad stereo system. I'm sure it wil make a huge difference after some small testing.

I will first try to find out / measure the power / impedance and distortion of my Denon DRA-F100 integrated amplifier before considering a dedicated headphone amplifier.

Here are the Denon specs: https://www.manualslib.com/manual/38469/Denon-D-F100.html?page=2#manual
THD is 0.7%, which is under the 1% distortion most humans would ever perceive.
Since it has enough power to drive speakers it certainly has enough power to drive headphones. Denon would not put a low-quality headphone jack into a high-quality receiver.