[kunuggs]

First of all, sorry if this is in the wrong forum. It involved multiple aspects of my setup, so I put it here figuring I would get the best responses in the headphone forum

What would you upgrade first

Basically, my setup consists of a lot of things that could be considered a bottleneck. I'm a broke college kid who usually just buys decent cheap stuff. All right, here's my current setup.

iTunes -> ALAC -> SB Extigy -> BJC Optical -> Sony str-de485 -> either Senn HD-201, Koss KSC-75 or Creative EP-630

I want to slowly (and cheaply) upgrade each thing in the chain. What you you choose first. Any one thing in the chain will need to be under $100 (preferred as cheap as possible while still seeing improvement). The first logical step, I would think, would be to use foobar with itunes and buy the chaintech av-710 to get bitperfect. The problem is, I can't, for the life of me, figure out how to use the itunes/foobar passthrough thingy. The only other player that I'm vaguely familiar with is winamp (I used it exclusively 4 years ago). Can I get bitperfect with the chaintech with winamp?

Ok, assuming I get bitperfect, I would think that the next most appropriate upgrade would be something like the entech number cruncher off amazon.com (50 & s+h), then an amp, and then headphones.

what do ya think of that
chaintech $24 & s+h from directron.com
entech $50 & s+h from amazon.com
amp???
new cans



The only problem is that I was eyeing the AKG K501's for 100 shipped and I'm assuming that they will be sold out soon. Should I buy the AKG's first? or will they sound like ass from either the sb extigy or the sony receiver?

thanks in advance

 

[exphy]

I would get the cans and a cheap cmoy. And than get the Chaintec. The total would only cost you about 130us$ If you get the 510 than you should also get a amp, and a cmoy works great for little money

 

[jdimitri]

IMO the most important is source (mostly the recorded material) then headphones.. The rest isn't as important

Grab the K501 first, your source isn't that bad

 

[ralphp@optonline]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jdimitri IMO the most important is source (mostly the recorded material) then headphones.. The rest isn't as important Grab the K501 first, your source isn't that bad

I would have to second the above opinion. Get the 'phones first and then work on the amp. In the mean time make sure your source is as clean as possible, i.e. high bit rates or lossless compression whenever possible.

 

[F107plus5]

I'll agree with getting the cans first. I have tried three different sets of phones on the same reasonably good source, and in each case the better cans created the better sound.