Hi dude. I don't have friend and headphone store with AKG stuff to try it out. And they certainly doesn't have o2...
And like i said, i say it very kindly, you are part of the people who say "go try it and see". But i can't have a straight answere with specs comparaisons to prove it
Because it's still a max 450 euros investement for a O2(150 all gift) plus the headphone (330 for me). I can't buy o2 from amazon so if i buy directly on mayflowers or JBL, i will pay return package like 20euros or more to get a refund...
I think more and more to just forget about all of this. Wait like max 5 years and replace my pc with a very high end motherboard that will certainly kill every 250 dollars DAC/AMP ore more here
I say certainly because high end motherboard today may already does it (i asked a guy with the lastest msi card on the 1151 market and he said it was exactly like the o2/odac stuff, very clean and powerfull). It would be maybe better to save up for this. Better investment than investing in an industry product that is going down (motherboard will kill progressivly music store concerning the dac/amp stuff).
Only the Headphone industry will be bigger
Hi Pocahontas. I wanted an 1150 chipset when I bought my new computer, but I settled for the ALC 892 chipset to save some money. That said, My chipset came with "premium ELNA" caps and boasts a SNR of over 90 dB at all outputs (DAC and headphones - the threshold, I thought, for "inaudibility"). It has no dedicated TI Headphone amp, which in every case I have checked, has a very high output impedance of 10 Ohms. Hence, it should work best with headphones with an impedance of 80 ohms or more. Like with other computer chipsets, I don't know how it is typically implemented, or what power it can put out at difference impedances. I have no idea what the distortion profile looks like (because, measuring distortion at one frequency does not give you the whole picture, and never will. Lots of amps are "clean" at 1 khz but "noisy" at 5-20 khz, critical treble areas).
Based on specs alone, the 892 should output 1V to an amp (a little low but adequate for all my gear). It claims 1.1V RMS @ 32 Ohms for headphone output, with an output impedance of 2 Ohms, making it suitable, in theory, for 16 ohm or higher headphones. With 5 mA of current,it may put out 5 milliwatts or so. 10-100 mWs would be a lot better in terms of working for more headphones, but even 5 is technically "a lot".
Does that beat the ODAC, or the O2? The short answer is, no it does not. There is audible "hiss" in my chipset, compared to the "black" background of my O2/ODAC. DAC-to-DAC, IMO, the Realtek sounds great, but softer or less "detailed" than the Sabre chip in the ODAC. Everytime I go back to the ODAC, I am getting a better listening experience. Is that just because 2V is greater than 1V? Is it because the SNR of the ODAC is higher than the ALC 892? Probably, but also the Sabre probably just has better filters (e.g. is a better design). Do the Intel Core i3 and Core i7s perform the same, clock for clock? No. Do you need an i7?
On the amp side, while 1 mW can get you 90-100+ decibels on a lot of headphones, in reality and so far, the Realtek fails to make the headphones I use regularly sound their best. My HE-400s (~90 dB sensitivity, 50 Ohms) and my Sennheiser HD595s (50 Ohm impedance with big 200 Ohm swings) sound a lot better on the O2 than on any other headphone jack I have (my Yamaha AV receiver included). Only my PSBs (30 ohm-ish) seem to sound very similar whether powered by my computer or my O2/ODAC. They are very efficient, and have a very flat impedance measurement, suggesting they are quite easy to drive so power is not the critical limiting factor. The HE-400s have a flat impedance curve, and should be easy to drive, but clearly having more power brought out the best in them (something I wouldn't have noticed based on specs alone). You may hate me saying it, but, yes, it was "dat bass" that was most clearly extending deeper and punching harder.
Oh by the way, some of my music sounds horrible, because the quality of the recording is horrible. No DAC or Amp can change that.
You can dismiss my thoughts because I do not have the 1150, and indeed if I did the comparison would likely be harder to make. In my opinion, until computer chipsets combine very good DAC performance WITH very good amp performance (e.g. near 0 output impedance, low distortion power of about a half-watt or so), they will not replace my O2 / ODAC. As a pure signal pass-on, the Realtek is good nuff' and I use the optical digital like to feed my receiver, a role it does perfectly. I use the ODAC to feed a small 2 channel amp (which, again, sounds better than the Realtek). But the ODAC doesn't do 192 khz audio, and can't pass on a 5.1 surround signal etc. which makes me glad to have a computer chipset that handles all that stuff natively.
IF you have to go all the way to an 1150/1151 chipset to get O2/ODAC quality, and so are buying "overclocking" gaming motherboards for $150-$200 bucks or whatever to get that chipset, and don't plan to overclock / game etc., then you are still wasting your money.
I paid like $70 bucks for my mobo, passed on all the high-end nonsense and overclocking features and dumped the savings into an amp that is almost guaranteed to rock whatever headphones I want, not just the ones that spec right. So there!
I would be the first to recommend that you listen to your headphones on your computer and if you like it, good, great, nothing to see here, save your money. I used my HD595s for 3 years on a laptop and a desktop, always finding them "good, not great". They I bought better headphones. Then I NEEDED an amp. Then, after all that, I realized the HD595s sounded almost like a different headphone on the O2. IMO DACs are "10%" of the performance you buy. Headphones are 70-80%. An amp, speaker depending, can be very high value or very low value.
