[Erieg]

The Bottlehead Crack looks pretty cool but as I stated before, my abilities do not include anything that requires soldering.. or gardening or peaceful coexistence with my in-laws.
 
I would like to ask a question born in complete ignorance. The MKIII has preamp outputs. I saw solid state amp for sale at a reasonable price and I am wondering if I can connect it to the preamp out on the MKIII.

 

[kramer5150]

Quote:

The Bottlehead Crack looks pretty cool but as I stated before, my abilities do not include anything that requires soldering.. or gardening or peaceful coexistence with my in-laws.
 
I would like to ask a question born in complete ignorance. The MKIII has preamp outputs. I saw solid state amp for sale at a reasonable price and I am wondering if I can connect it to the preamp out on the MKIII.

 
This will definitely work, not sure if it will give you the desired results though.  I send the preamp out from my darkvoice 337 to a Larocco PPA.  The discrete buffer PPA does a better job with low impedance loads (Grados etc).  The darkvoice=>PPA has noticeably deeper bass response than just the DV headphone out by itself.  Thats to be expected though being that the 337 is a capacitor coupled OTL, and for some crazy reason they chose 51mfd output cap.  That combined with the 32 ohm impedance results in a 6th order high pass filter well within the audible spectrum.  I am scoping out capacitor mods to try and get away from this amp=>amp arrangement.  Although I might just leave it as-is... its not all together terrible sounding.  The PPA is a "dry" sounding amp, pretty much vacates center stage with more ambient cans like the HD580 and K701.  The 337 preamp adds some even order harmonics to the mix, and pulls in a stronger canter stage image than just the PPA by itself.
 
it should be noted though that my results above are limited to my cans and amps.  Its questionable if your HD650 + amp chain would have similar results.

 

[Erieg]

Deep thought: Maybe I just listen to crap music and there is a higher force telling me to stop it.

 

[Erieg]

Quick and final update. Well I stopped using my cIEMs and also didn't use the tube amp/hd650s at work. When I started using the tube amp and 650s again the sound was so, so, so much better.
 
I have to assume I was so conditioned by the cIEMs and Headstage arrow that I expected everything to sound like them. I am enjoying the he.. out of my new setup now.