The Shures are very low impedance . Unlike some IEMs and a lot of full-sized headphones they don't need much power, so an amp may well be overkill.
Will just clarify this with details so people don't keep repeating this without a better understanding of the bigger picture. Low impedance does not automatically guarantee that there is no need for a purpose-built amplifier, sensitivity at the operating distance (ie speakers are measured at 1m standard and used from much farther than that in most cases; headphones at a few inches; etc) does.
Low impedance, high sensitivity loads may not need a lot of power, but the combination of those two can mean lesser amplification circuits will have a problem. "Lesser" doesn't always mean "less power" either. It just means maybe it gets more power at the cost of noise, just that in some cases if you actually need power, chances are you might not hear the noise to begin with. Case in point: many speaker amps actually have a lot more noise than headphone amps (or the same amps when hooking up a 300ohm load into their headphone outputs), which you can hear if you pause the music and then stand near the speakers. Technically, the noise is still there interfering with the overall sound (ie a "blacker background" doesn't just mean more noise, it can seem to have "more bass;" this is why in some cases more power can sound leaner instead of getting low end oomph), but you no longer hear the noise as a distinct sound when you're sitting 2m away.
If anything, in some cases not requiring a separate amp tends to mean whatever you have has very low noise. Like an iPod. Or some DAPs, whether it's the older circuits that are like portable amps or the newer ones with higher power, low noise chips that apart from being better are otherwise similar to what you'd find in most smartphones (at least before they started getting rid of the 3.5mm jack).
I currently have a pair of Se846's and se215's. I dont want to use them outside of my windows PC. I use them for music and gaming and zoom calls. I want to amplify their sound/use them properly and am looking for a DAC+amp that just simply works for PC without issues. I have a magni 3 amp currently and tried ways of plugging my iem's into that but it has a 'ground loop' crackle feedback with the sound.
Ground loop wouldn't automatically go away using USB. If anything, maybe some USB devices and AC devices can get rid of it, but there's not enough guarantee for me to say you should go buy any of these.
I have also found upon research that there is interference or problems with USB specific headphone amp/dac's and more specifically sometimes with Shure's.
I'm not sure what to even go with or 'try' to improve these without adding on a side effect of crackling or buzzing or humming. When I operate them without an amp and simply just plugged into a Razer usb Sound card, they sound fantastic, and comes with a very very very low buzz thats not audible when any sounds are playing.
USB having issues with Shure is not always necessarily due to USB. It
can, of course, if there's noise going through the USB port then gets to the DAC and eventually, to the amp, similar to a ground loop problem. However if it has to do with Shure it usually has more to do with the amplifier circuit being designed to produce more power at the expense of some noise. Shures are very low impedance
and very high sensitivity, which means it can make amps produce noise or makes noise far more apparent than if you were using that amp to drive a very high impedance load or lower sensitivity load (more so when they're designed for headphones that actually need the power for the aforementioned reason).
Think of it this way: NVidia can tell you you only need 225watts to run that graphics chip at its advertised clock speed, and gaming can make graphics chips run at lower clocks vs some stress tests (assuming you have enough cooling) due to the variable load, but you still have your computer shutting down because you're tripping OPP and OCP on the power supply thanks to how that particular chip in that particular board pulls 200% more power for a few microseconds (enough to trip protection on the
I'm not sure what to even go with or 'try' to improve these without adding on a side effect of crackling or buzzing or humming. When I operate them without an amp and simply just plugged into a Razer usb Sound card, they sound fantastic, and comes with a very very very low buzz thats not audible when any sounds are playing.
It's hard to tell what will sound cleaner than that more so if you get something that's designed to drive something that has much lower sensitivity as well as much higher impedance.
A lower power DAP (lower power vs older DAPs, but more power than your average consumer device despite using a similar type of circuit ie an integrated audio chip) might be safe, but since you're likely to hook it up via USB, then there's still a good chance of the ground loop being a problem. Maybe if your motherboard has built in BT (not a dongle on the USB, although you could try that too if you're up to it) you could transmit to the DAP using that.
