Hello Dr Cornelius,
You have a point. I could simply stay with the Element. In the end, I may end up doing just that. However, as I had mentioned, I want to like the Jot+DAC. At the moment, the Jot+DAC is situated in my home office. And the Element has become a part of my real office listening setup
With respect to the SRH-840, although its label mentions 48ohms, it seems to require more power still to overcome this impedance. In fact, I have had a love/hate relationship with my Shure SRH-840. It is uncomfortable and heavy. The way it clamps to my head is like very short chopsticks trying to pick up a large ice cube. So the pressure is not clamping the cans into my ears, it's more squeezing the corners of my skull and it just so happens that the cans touch my head. So when I put them on, the top part of the circumference of the cans have greater pressure than the part at the bottom of my ears. In short, the cans are uneven and therefore uncomfortable. But if you put it on right, it becomes okay.
The sound of it too was horrible at first. It was at this point that I got a clue about its power requirements. Plugged in directly to my Macbook Pro, it sounded exasperated. Imagine you're out of breath and you are trying to belt out a high note on stage. You have to be loud enough to be heard in the back of the auditorium, but you have to keep the song composed. This was how the SRH-840 sounded at first. It had almost no bass too. But I had paid $199 for it. And I had read the reviews for it; I wanted to reconcile the rave reviews with my experiences. That many people can't be wrong about same headphones I have which appear to have no physical defects. And then I realized, I have the Bose Companion 5. I had completely forgotten about it until that moment, that it had a built-in DAC/Amp. I plugged in the SRH-840 and suddenly, it was a completely different set of headphones. It was exactly the rave reviews I had been reading. It sounded exactly like what seemed it was meant to sound like. Full and confident -- with still plenty of air in the diaphragm. The bass began to show up. The bass was perfect, not boomy like the Sony MDR-7506. It was a very surgical bass; it was there when it was needed, nothing more and nothing less. It was satisfyingly just right.
Then I wondered if this was unique to the Bose. I looked around and after some research, I gifted myself the JDS Labs Element. The Bose DAC/Amp and the Element brought out the hidden gem within my SRH-840. So, I have modest choices when it comes to DAC/Amps. And then I read about the Schiit Jotunheim and then continue on to my original assessment of the Jot. At the moment, the DAC appears to be **** more than Schiit, but the amp is fantastic.
While I could stay with the Element and the Bose Companion 5, I have become a kind of a collector without meaning to. Now, I want to make this work. Also, I have the AKG K7xx and Sennheiser HD6xx arriving soon from Massdrop. They are both greater than 48ohms impedances. While I am sure the Bose and the Element will sufficiently drive them, I don't want to say goodbye to the Jot+DAC just yet. Maybe there is a hidden gem there too much like my discovery with the SRH-840. Maybe it just needs more exercise before it can sound like some of the fantastic reviews I have read here.
Peter