[jigaroo]

OK - am new here but been lurking in the corners for a while looking for info on players and cans. I wanted a top notch player, never having owned the ubiquitous i*od or any other mp3 player but an MP10 some years back. I bought the 16g Cowon i9 paired with Denon ACH750's for portability. Wow - what can I say. To be fair it took 2 weeks before I finally got the buds to sit right, and even bought Complys to help with a bad fit (back with the denon originals now). I unded up superglueing the leads back against the casing on the buds with them firing torpedo like into the ear. They don't come loose now and are a joy to wear and hear. Ok so sound perfect. Tons of tight, full and transparent bas, sweet mid, and crystal clear highs.Amazing soundstage, tracks like Eden House 'Sin' with its multi layer bass, guitar, drum and sublime vocal make an amazing listen. But I want more, the perfection has me wishing I could crank it up higher (its set for US so no sound limit).
 
So Ive been researching headphone amps and decided to custom build one using the best of everything. Now I bought a GoVibe - basically for a benchmark 'basic' of how a portable sounds.Well, even fine tuning the volumes between player and amp output displays a bad case of overload, I'm guessing on the amps not being able to handle that dynamic a range with too high an input, (I know my bus only require low gain for the amp)  being basically overdriven. However no way could I find a solution, as the level of obvious veiling and constriction in sound stage was obvious throughout and even if I had managed to squeeze a few more dbs out of it I couldn't sacrifice the purity of the i9 and Denons.
 
I'm gonna build my own using the best pot, decent power supply etc and see if some of that transparency comes back, along with a few more pounds of muscle.