Hello everyone, my name is Jerome. I'm 35 and I have just awoken to the world of audiophile
I just ordered the AKG k7xx as my 1st real headphones, and I'm about to pull the trigger on a DAC/AMP. Most of the reviews I was looking at lead me to here, so I figured I might as well become a member. I also like Zeos's youtube channel and his reviews on there and reddit as a quick and simple review, and over here, its usually much more technical.
I first started looking around because I always saw that gaming headsets were garbage, and audiophile sets were much, much better. About 4 years ago, I purchased the Astro A40's with Mixamp from Best Buy, because I didn't know any better and of all the headsets they had, these got the best reviews. They were pricey at $250, but coming from garbage $40 headsets, I thought I was in heaven. Well, those broke and with the Best Buy warranty, they didn't have them anymore, so they gave me the wireless A50's. At the time I thought they were good, but lately I've been feeling mehh about them. After researching a lot, I pulled the trigger on the Mass Drop special K7xx's and I am currently awaiting them to arrive. I knew from reviews that HyperX Cloud II's were basically Takstar Prod80's with their USB DAC thingy that has garbage 7.1 virtual surround. Immediately these sound better than the A50's to me, so now I am super excited about the AKG's coming my way in a few weeks.
I just really wanted to come in here and say hello and introduce myself. I'm an IT professional by day, father/husband and aspiring youtuber with my oldest daughter, who is 7, and we are making a gaming channel and a kids channel for her. SO hello everyone. I've taking a lot of time to research and read up on a lot of things, but until I start getting some real equipment, its all book work and I want to gain real world experience, so when I hear all of your jargon being used, it will make since to me.
And since this new found passion, I also figured my audio collection would probably need to upgrade from the crappy 128 kbps MP3's to Flac and other formats, so I've begun researching that and collecting music in the appropriate format. That also lead me to discovering Foobar2000, and I must say, with its components and everything else, I like it so far. I love the built in converter after you get the correct things, like the command line Flac codec, etc.
So overall, I'm jumping in head first and its exciting. Just a little bummed out that I've waited this long before getting into it. now onto deciding my DAC/AMP combo. I've looked at the Schiit stack like a lot of others, but then I'm also looking at the SMSL M3 or M6, as well as the Fiio E10k, E12, E18k, and a whole bunch of other things. Man I will say this, there are definitely no shortage of choices in this area, but that is also a curse for me, as I read and review everything as much as possible.
