[mbhaub]

Quote:

Originally Posted by pbalcer I agree that the prices of the headphone amplifiers are very high. I think it is because the market demand is relatively low. Good luck!

Yeah, and because of a built-in snob appeal. Not that I mean to insult anyone here, but some of the insanely priced heaphone amps are just not worth it. There are too many other variables: recording quality, cd player quality, headphone design, not to mention the unchangeable: your own ear. I have two headphone amps: the Earmax Pro does a superb job and I have no complaints with Sennheiser 650's. They work well together. But to be really honest, the sound coming out of the Marantz cd player headphone jack is pretty darn good, too!
The other amp I use is the headphone jack on a Yamaha RX-V1 surround sound system. It has what they call Silent Cinema. You can watch a surround sound movie or listen to music and somehow miraculously, you feel like you have a the whole 5.1 speaker set up in your head phones. It's truly amazing. For SACDs it's awesome.
I don't think that the headphone amp was an after thought for Yamaha. It beats any outboard amp I've ever encountered.

 

[Patrick82]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sembiance I don't know anything at all about SA-CD.... I think I'll need to do some research on that. Someone on another board mentioned that I'm still not experiencing my music fully without a 'headphone amp'

You want to go SACD without a headphone amp?

Perhaps you should read this thread.

 

[Sembiance]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Patrick82 You want to go SACD without a headphone amp? Perhaps you should read this thread.

After investigating SA-CD players, and seeing how expensive they were, I had major hesitations about buying into them.

After reading more and finding out that you can't rip SA-CD audio to a computer, I was firmly against SA-CD.
See I gave up switching around CD's a long time ago.

Every single one of my CD's I've ripped digitally to my computer and stored in FLAC losless format.
I have a 300GB hard drive nearly full with over 25,000 songs, and it's duplicated at work.

This way I can listen at work with my headphones and at home on my computer with my computer speakers.
I can also stream the files at home to my 6.1 home theatre system which has a SqueezeBox2 attached.

I also coded a Winamp plugin that reports whenever I play a song to an internet server I own.
I can then go to a website and rate each song I listen to.
So far I've rated about half my songs, and this means I can create playlists of only songs I like.

With all this I can also burn CD mixes of my music for listening in my car on long drives.
I can also copy to a portable music player if I so desire.


Anyways, so when I read that if I get SA-CD that I'd need to invest in a $200+ player that can't
copy the music digitally to computer system, I decided against getting one.


The thread you gave me just put the final nail in the coffin, and I'll simply stick with regular CD's