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Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2009
- Posts
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- 82
Quote:
You've just come to the same conclusion I came to years ago: that amps make very little difference. The fact is, amps are supposed to merely amplify, and unless they're adding gross colouration, either through bad design or running out of steam, you shouldn't hear them at all. There may be slight--read slight--differences in terms of one being a little warmer or brighter than another, and this can be useful for matching, but you will never turn a veiled headphone into an incisive one, or tone down "hot" treble, unless the amp has tone controls--and that's another story.
Incidentally, there have been plenty of comments here over the years (never gathered together unfortunately) from people--even people with $500+ amps--saying they wish they'd never invested so much in their amps as it hasn't paid off. But of course that won't stop people here from posting to say I'm talking through my hat.
I really disagree, one of the biggest improvements I've ever heard was when I first hooked my Koss Pro4AATs up to my Gilmore lite for the first time (an amp that no one will call grossly colored). The music simply became more involving and impactful, and I suppose that more subtle details were brought out, but that's a less noticeable change. However, that is going from an iPod Nano amp that is truly deficient in powering the beastly Pro4AATs to a decent desktop amplifier with power to spare.
My philosophy with gear is that differences are pretty difficult to hear when going from a familiar component to a new piece of hardware. I suppose that this is due to the fact that you are very used to listening to your older equipment, you know what parts are well played on your older gear on it so you tend to listen to what is already strong on the old setup and that would decrease the relative benefit of a new component. Also, any difference if noticed is most likely going to be pretty strange and you might not appreciate the new sound for what it is at first. The last part I really noticed when I got my HD650s as an upgrade to the Koss set, I was kind of mystified by the sound and I wasn't totally sure that I liked it.
Because of these things, I feel that someone needs time to settle into gear before making evaluations on how something sounds, and even if there is an improvement or not. I suggest to the OP what I do myself. Listen exclusively with the amp for a week or two. Just enjoy the music, don't worry about highs/mids/lows whatever because they aren't important to the enjoyment of music anyway. Then, after that time, feel free to try listening through whatever setup you were using before. I can almost guarantee that you will feel that either there is something missing, or there is at least some qualifiable difference in sound that you notice.