[future_jack]

Hi,
I have just received these two items "Senns & 1814" in the last week or so. The are both in the process of being broken in. 10+ hours on the Sennheisers and 2+ on the 1814.

I do not have a cable upgrade as of yet for the Sennheisers and have no headphone amp.

I use a standard Dell laptop (Latitude D830) normally as my source for playing CD's and MP3's. When I plug the Sennheisers into the front headphone ports on the 1814 I surprisingly did'nt hear any difference between the 1814 and standard Dell soundcard. I'm actually quite baffled!

Should I have expected a difference?

 

[pompon]

You just have 2 low quality sources ...

get a external dac good quality.
Look pico or predator, they seem have good feelings from peaple.


Quote:

Originally Posted by future_jack /img/forum/go_quote.gif Hi, I have just received these two items "Senns & 1814" in the last week or so. The Should I have expected a difference?

 

[future_jack]

Is a firwire 1814 low quality? I would have thought it would be decent at at least. It's worth about 400 dollars.

 

[brainsalad]

Quote:

Originally Posted by future_jack /img/forum/go_quote.gif Is a firwire 1814 low quality? I would have thought it would be decent at at least. It's worth about 400 dollars.

Dell has been working on improving their sound cards in their laptops. I use the 1720 and it has the Audigy sound card built in and uses Microsoft's HD Drivers so the sound quality will be wag 75/85% of the way there. It's the squeezing the rest out is what takes the products and $$$.

What's your source material?

 

[future_jack]

Quote:

Originally Posted by brainsalad /img/forum/go_quote.gif Dell has been working on improving their sound cards in their laptops. I use the 1720 and it has the Audigy sound card built in and uses Microsoft's HD Drivers so the sound quality will be wag 75/85% of the way there. It's the squeezing the rest out is what takes the products and $$$. What's your source material?

Hmmm, I would have thought a decent pc soundcard would have cost at least €300 (USD445). Even more for a laptop. And dell laptops are what.... €500 new.

I'm quite annoyed about this soundcard fiasco. I hang out quite abit on a music production forum who said it was absolutely essential I upgrade my soundcard. They recommened this under the belief that I was going to plug Mackie HR824's into it so I needed the 1/4" plugs anyway but...they still led me to believe that there would be a great difference in sound quality. There was nothing.

I'm going to try thing a bit more this weekend now that the headphones have about 60hrs burn-in time.

I'm new here but when you say source material >>>
I'm using the standard cd drive on the laptop paying audio cd's in WAV format. Is that the info your looking for?

Best regards.

 

[billyboy]

My guess is that there are two components to the problem:
(i) digital to analogue conversion (DAC) ... what your sound card does
(ii) amplification ... to drive the headphones correctly

Unless I am mistaken, your sound card may be poor at doing (ii). In that case, you have two choices:
(a) buy Predator or Pico (both have DAC and amplification and take USB input)
(b) buy Hornet (or similar) that has only amplification (use the analogue output from your computer sound card, via the headphone mini-jack)

 

[Assorted]

My former HD650s didn't sound much different from Bose QC2s, nevermind the difference between sources, when hooking them up to a $600 receiver and an iPod.

It would be unwise to expect much out of them in the first place. If you use a $300-400 desktop amplifier which are potentially 5x better than anything portable I've tried (except something like a PRII/HR Desktop portable), then you might notice something.

Should you want better quality sound, is another question. So no, there's no reason that you shouldn't be baffled by spending that much money to gain little.

 

[Senn20]

A headphone amp to properly drive the Sennheiser HD 650's would make a bigger difference than a soundcard upgrade or an external DAC.

Once properly driven then you will hear differences in sources. Sennheiser's high end phones are power hungry.