[Somebody007]

thank you Peete for the lengthy and informative post. To be honest I don't want to spend to much more on my headphone setup, but I want a good system with no bottlenecks. So getting a decent dac its seems is the way to go. Also I bought 6Zh1P-EV Russians tubes which I installed and am now burning in(not like I notice benefits of this, but it seems to be a must). They were reccomended by this review http://www.head-fi.org/t/309855/review-of-the-little-dot-mkiii-tube-headphone-amp-pre-amp. The reviewer says for the price and availability they are very good choices do you agree?

Also if you don't mind I'd like to ask some more questions.

My little dot gets hot too hot to touch even and it stands under my desk. How long can I leave it on if not forever? And does it need to be in a well ventilated place or is under my desk fine?

I have a pretty decent CD player lying around and if that were to be a better dac then my sound card is it possible to mod it to get the dac out of it? Because if I'm not mistaken there is now no way to use it as a dac for digital input(besides CDs ofcourse). I probably won't let this replace the outboard dac I was going to get but for the time being it seems like an interesting project.

Thank you for your time

 

 

[kiteki]

 
Quote:

Most portable amps sound the same to me.
 

 
x2, that's why DAP's are more interesting, imho.

 

[detoxguy]

The key point is 'most everything'. I have the Grado RS1i matched with a custom MAD Ear+ HD (still only $700 plus shipping) and the synergy is absolutely incredible. Upgrading the stock 12AX7 to a Genalex Gold Lion ECC83 made another difference in sound and I could not possibly be happier. The amp is dead silent and the musicality is beyond what I could have expected. On the other end I am also pleased with my desktop rig which is running an LD1+ out of the DAC on the iBasso D12...
 
Quote:

 
Uncle Erik, I drew a line through tube amps after you told me that most everything under $1,000 is going to suffer from having too many corners cut - admittedly, I WAS trying to match a tube amp with low-impedance phones (Grados). DT880s would be a different proposition.