[prescient]

I apologize up front if this is not the appropriate place fo this post.
So i picked up a pair of e2c's mainly for work (keep my noisy coworkers from bugging me) and the gym. And here is my problem, when i first attached them to my pc i was picking up a great deal of interference (you could hear system noise when i moved my mouse and such). So, i went out and bought an Xmod from creative, which is pretty much silent when no tracks are playing (maybe not the best option, but having no admin privelages it works out well.) So the system interference noise is gone, but i still have background noise when a track kicks on. My next guess was that maybe the MP3s i was using weren't up to snuff so i upped the bit rate to 320, background hiss is still there. Next thing i did was switch to FLAC w/ some high quality recordings (stereophile test stuff). Hiss is still there, and its on there w/ some other stuff such as philip glass classical that was just recentley recorded and ripped to flac. I have now tried three different programs (vlc, songbird, foobar) for playback but i cant seem to shake the hiss.

I guess the question is, are the headphons defective or is this just a problem that I am not going to be able to sort out because of my source?

 

[mchang]

Sounds like a bum pair. I have no hiss with my E2c out of my iPod, laptop, desktop or headphone amp. And I'm feeding it anything from Apple lossless to 128 MP3s. Good luck.

 

[Mayhs]

yeah...like a faulty connection or something...it happens to me if i dont insert the headphones in fully

 

[gloco]

I don't think their defective. IEM's are known for the hissing due to their low impedence. Mine hiss a little with various sources.

 

[sgrossklass]

Not defective x2. At 16 ohms with 105 dB / 1mW (123 dB /1Vrms), E2Cs are quite sensitive, so you will invariably pick up interference (onboard sound implementations usually do not excel in terms of shielding signals or power buffering) or plain ol' amp hiss - apparently the Xmod only turns on the amp when actually playing something. And E2s aren't the most sensitive IEMs by far - poor UM2 owners (135 dB/1Vrms, 27 ohms). (Since I already have problems with amp hiss on my 125 dB/1Vrms K26Ps which are on their last leg, I have been looking at Ety's ER-6 to replace them. 48 ohms, 116 dB/1Vrms.) A low-impedance voltage divider to drop the level (such as j-curve's "hissbuster") seems the most economic way to cope with this kind of problem, but one needs to be sufficiently handy to make one.