I certainly can do that,...although I'll have to ruffle a few feathers in the process. (ha)
Within the text of
this new thread from yesterday, I wrote the following:
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Humorously, with this extra power, there's something else the [Cayin] C5 can do, which the [FiiO] E12A can't:
exposing the Sennheiser HD 650 headphones as a flimsy paper tiger that goes, "Snap, crackle, pop," like Rice Krispies -- and without the slightest bit of amp clipping!
At the Hi-Fi shop, I sampled the HD 650s they had on display. I set my Rockbox EQ preset to "0 Flat 3 Bass," which boosts 32 Hz and 64 Hz by 9 dB each, coupled with the bass boost switch on the E12A or C5, which boosts the sub-bass by an additional 6 dB or so on top of that. I then tried cranking up the Japanese pop song
"Alright" by Kana Nishino.
These HD 650 "bad boys" were a whopping 300 ohms (as opposed to the mere 32 ohms of my M-100 headphones) and had a 5 dB lower sensitivity in addition to that, so
surely the HD 650s could handle some power, right?
With the E12A, they had no problem with the thumping beat, even though it couldn't play very loud nor hit very hard. If I turned up the volume enough, I started getting amp clipping.
But while cranking up this song with the C5 running these HD 650 headphones, something entirely different happened. Not only was I able to play it significantly louder, but
the headphone drivers started bottoming out with the beat! Snap, crackle, pop,...and no amp clipping! Hahahahahahahaha
(Don't worry; I quickly turned down the volume within one second after hearing that sound, so it wouldn't damage the drivers. And by contrast, I've
never been able to make my M-100s bottom out with the beat -- not even with the C5 maxed out, and in spite of the M-100s being driven with
15 times the equivalent power than the HD 650s: 5 times the amp power from the lower impedance, multiplied by 3 times the power from the higher sensitivity.)
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Of course, this doesn't tell my
entire story about my experience with the HD 650s, as I was primarily writing about those two portable amps and comparing them.
(I sample and get my equipment from a local shop here in Chongqing called
Chongqing Feixiang HiFi Shop, which is an authorized retailer for many big name brands.)
The best feature of the HD 650s, in my opinion, was how well they played classical music without an EQ. They certainly did this splendidly.
However, with
my 2 sets of 193 EQ presets in Rockbox, I can use the "Optimized" category to make my M-100s play classical music
almost as well as the HD 650s. Not perfectly, but almost as well.
But then again, I only listen to classical-style music about 2% of the time, anyway, so this is no big deal to me. I'm especially a huge fan of happy, sappy, bubbly dance-pop music, and also enjoy hard and soft rock, country-pop, lounge music, and a little bit of stuff from other genres.
That's my story with the HD 650s, though. Snap,...crackle,...pop!