Whazzzup
Headphoneus Supremus
well getting there not bad either, the bigger question, does one know that they are there
source would be how you're sending files to your DAC....computer, server, streamer, CD transport, etc....By source I meant dac. I edited the post to avoid misunderstanding. I was using "source" and "dac" interchangeably, as dac acts as a source for the rest of the chain.
I'll just comment here (mainly for future adventurers trying to fix the same problem) that switching from Qutest to Holo May changed everything. Now that my dac has a big stage, the amp just needs to pass it though. I much prefer this over a dac with small stage and trying to fix staging with an amp. Also now it feels crazy to choose headphones based on their staging.
This experience taught me that the importance of the dac is not understood properly or at least I heard people saying something like "the detail retrieval doesn't get any better after Qutest". Maybe true, but dac has a BIG role in staging. Right now I would say that one should buy something like Spring 3 before one would start buying TOTL headphones and definitely before TOTL amps. A good dac will put every system to another level and one will probably switch headphones/amps much more often than dac. A good dac will serve one for a long time. Also a poor dac will make sure that people's judgement on their headphones/amps along the way will be misguided. For example when I first time tried Utopia from some mediocre setup and compared that to HD800S, my reaction was "meh". But when I tried the two from Dave, the difference blew my mind. Now I feel like it's not headphones that sound good, but instead good headphones reveal the dac and the better they are, the further they can reveal the dac. But if the dac is mediocre, there is nothing to reveal and they don't sound much different.
I have spoken.