[jTizMLG]

what is a balanced price setup? what i mean is are your headphones suppost to be worth more then your amp and dac combined? or should they all be around the same price? or should your dac cost more then your amp or should your amp cost more then both your headphone and dac? etc. etc.

 

[earerror]

It depends...sometimes you get expensive headphones and you find amps for a good price, or cheaper. 
 
In my case, the amp i have is slightly expensive than my 650's. ($200 bucks more)

 

[ArmAndHammer]

My Grados run about $300 but my amp is around $100. They have a really good synergy so at this point, for my Grados, I feel no need to get a more expensive amp so I am the opposite of earerror's situation.

 

[dallan]

That is when you have your girlfriends set up on opposite days perfectly and you can balance your time between them without them finding out.

  It is unbalanced when they find out

, that is trouble.  Then one of them breaks your headphones, unbalanced is not as good as balanced.

 

[earthpeople]

Quote:

That is when you have your girlfriends set up on opposite days perfectly and you can balance your time between them without them finding out.

  It is unbalanced when they find out

, that is trouble.  Then one of them breaks your headphones, unbalanced is not as good as balanced.

 
Ah! I understand now.

 

[ArmAndHammer]

I've been doing it all wrong...I have always tried setting it up so we could all "hangout" together at the same time but it never seemed to workout.
 
 
Quote:

That is when you have your girlfriends set up on opposite days perfectly and you can balance your time between them without them finding out.

  It is unbalanced when they find out

, that is trouble.  Then one of them breaks your headphones, unbalanced is not as good as balanced.

 

[dallan]

Quote:

I've been doing it all wrong...I have always tried setting it up so we could all "hangout" together at the same time but it never seemed to workout.
 
 
Quote:

That is when you have your girlfriends set up on opposite days perfectly and you can balance your time between them without them finding out.

  It is unbalanced when they find out

, that is trouble.  Then one of them breaks your headphones, unbalanced is not as good as balanced.

 

If you could swing that that would be the best set up of all.

 

[jTizMLG]

Quote:

That is when you have your girlfriends set up on opposite days perfectly and you can balance your time between them without them finding out.

  It is unbalanced when they find out

, that is trouble.  Then one of them breaks your headphones, unbalanced is not as good as balanced.

please be serious . you look like an experience  audiophile , i can really use some advise. i hear in terms of price it is suppost to be 50% headphone 30% amp and 20% dac. is this true?

 

[jTizMLG]

bump

 

[Uncle Erik]

Just forget the prices and percentages. There is no correlation whatsoever between the price of an amp and headphones.

If you look at materials and labor, there is a substantial difference between headphones and amps. Headphones, generally, are mass-produced items with few parts. They can be knocked out quickly with little skill or expense.

Amps have many more parts, the parts are more expensive, there is plenty of labor and skill needed to build one, and the types vary widely. If you want good output transformers, you're looking at $200-700 just for those alone in terms of raw cost. That does not include anything else. A nice power transformer for tubes might run $150. There is no relationship between spending $800 on transformers and $800 on headphones. It's like saying that it is 80 degrees out because I drank a glass of water this morning. No connection at all.

You have to look at headphones in terms of quality and amps in terms of quality. The price tag tells you very little about quality. There are excellent inexpensive products and high-priced crap. Caveat emptor.

There's a chorus of voices about how balanced is "better." But is it? How do you even know if something is truly balanced? Just so you know, there is a bunch of single-ended gear with XLR jacks and a much higher pricetag. And what is the benefit, really? You can get good noise rejection, but what if noise isn't a problem to begin with? There are lots of other issues, as well.

I've decided to stay single-ended. I don't see much benefit from the added expense. Truly balanced amps are really two amps. Do I want to double the cost and double the complexity and points of failure?

Do your homework. Is this something you really want, or might you be better off with an equal amount spent on a great single-ended setup?

 

[dallan]

Quote:

Quote:

That is when you have your girlfriends set up on opposite days perfectly and you can balance your time between them without them finding out.

  It is unbalanced when they find out

, that is trouble.  Then one of them breaks your headphones, unbalanced is not as good as balanced.

please be serious . you look like an experience  audiophile , i can really use some advise. i hear in terms of price it is suppost to be 50% headphone 30% amp and 20% dac. is this true?

Okay, here goes.  Balances sounds different, maybe better in some cases but both can sound good.  Sometimes balanced have sounded better to me at a meet but then on later listening the sound is not as real, kind of like upsampling from 96-192 on a dac.  You can get an artificial effect.  The other problem is if you go balanced you are limited and all your headphones you have or will ever buy go up in price to recable.   I choose not to balance but respect those who do as well.  
 
As far as set ups go, I say find a pair of headphones you like or want and then try to match it with the best amp and source that fits it.  That is how i played it.  My main set up is basically HD800s and i had the Zana Deux amp which feeds high impedance phones well from when i owned the HD650s.  So the amp matches the phones.  My source is a highly modified PSaudio Digital Link.  So lets see for percentages, the dac including mods was well over $2000, the amp was something like $2200. or so, the phones were around $1400.  So i didn't really go by the playbook.
 
My other setup which i now use more due to my wife's noise with her computer stuff is closed phones.  It is more on that route, same dac of course but the amp(different amp) i use is a bit less than half the cost of the headphones-Edition 8 LE.  So 40/40/20.  
 
Source is important with higher end headphones because you can hear everything-good and bad.  You also half to have a good enough amp to drive them, hopefully transparently and with low noise level.
 
Now if i had to balance it all, that would be real money.

 

[jTizMLG]

by 'balanced' i did not mean where you alter the sound with a different cabling. i meant balanced pricing in a setup meaning i don't bottleneck. sorry if the way i typed it confused you guys.

 

[fenixdown110]

No matter what route you go, balanced or unbalanced setups will cost more than the headphones you're driving. That's if you want a good sonic experience. Balanced setups will cost roughly 4 times or more than unbalanced setups. But like Uncle Erik pointed out, decide for yourself whether you deem the upgrade to unbalanced to be worth it. The law of diminishing returns is in great effect.

 

[jTizMLG]

read my post right above yours.....

 

[sphinxvc]

Quote:

what is a balanced price setup? what i mean is are your headphones suppost to be worth more then your amp and dac combined? or should they all be around the same price? or should your dac cost more then your amp or should your amp cost more then both your headphone and dac? etc. etc.

 
 
There are no golden rules or absolutes or percentages when it comes to buying headphones/amps/dacs.  It's all a matter of synergy at times.  As Uncle Erik pointed out, some crap gear can be expensive, while some under-appreciated gear is priced pretty low.  Price really does not always dictate value and definitely does not dictate synergy.  Normally headphones will affect your SQ most (as far as I know under a certain price) so that's where most people begin...again it has nothing to do with price.
 
 
 
Wait, you'll love this:
 
http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/516090/how-much-have-you-spent-percentages