Well, I wasn't confused as to who was the OP, I just wanted to defend classical recordings to Graphicism
. Anyway it's not a big deal, as I said before there are plenty of classical recordings with significant noise so I can totally understand if that (unfortunately) formed the bulk of someone's limited experience with the genre. One of the challenges of classical is doing the research to find the best recording of any given piece, and usually by "best" people mean the finest performance/interpretation, not the technical quality of the recording. Still, there are plenty of recordings out there that are both superb technically
and in terms of performance, like that Mahler disc I mentioned; I wouldn't want a potential classical music lover to be turned off of the subject by a couple of sub-audiophile grade discs.
ANYWAY, back to the original thread; unfortunately I don't have any of the recordings you mentioned, Shoenberg3, so I cannot comment on your source files. It's funny, I can get the HD650 on low gain setting to go WAY louder than anything I would ever voluntarily listen to, on the vast majority of my recordings (some notable exceptions). Also, on many recordings I have absolutely zero hiss. I'm wondering if there's some more siginificant problem with your setup that hasn't been identified.
On my computer, I usually use the following sequence:
1. Rip CDs to Apple Lossless in iTunes using error correction turned on (just to be sure, haven't had problems ripping without error correction).
2. Play in iTunes (this is a Windows computer, so yes, KMixer is doing nasty things most of the time)
3. Stream via USB to Total Bithead which is on low gain setting, USB power, crossfeed off.
4. Turn up volume to a comfortable level, which is usually very early in the travel of the volume wheel.
Plugging in my USB TBH automatically puts the computer volume sliders all at max (as it should). The iTunes volume is correctly set to max as well (double-check this! In fact, if you use iTunes,
double-check all your settings).
For the purposes of the above test, I used FB2k+ASIO4All, and ran the TBH on battery, but I just did a second check using my usual settings and still zero hiss on most recordings. I also checked some of my 192 and 128 kbps AAC and MP3 files, and none of them had introduced hiss compared to the hiss-less lossless files (everything ripped via iTunes). They sounded like lossy files, which is a whole can of worms on its own, but hiss wasn't one of the worms.
Good luck figuring out what's going on,
-GLL
PS - the first time I ever heard Imogen Heap on a pair of high-end headphones (E500 through iPod) I was horrified by how breathy her tone sounded compared to my Senn PX100s. That was 95% psychology though as within about an hour of using the AKG K701 I had gotten over that initial reaction and realized how insanely better everything was about the sound in general.
Of course, one of the reasons I didn't end up liking the K701 as much as the HD650 was that the HD650 rendered female voices less extremely breathy, so...
