[Muffinhead]

I'm moving toward putting together a basic open back headphone setup and am wondering what I should use as my music source. I have most of my music on cds, although some is on my computer. I also have an iPod, which is essentially works the same as the computer. I would like to know which of these sources will give the best audio quality. If I buy a relatively decent CD player ($300), will that be better than investing more of that money into the amp or DAC? 

 

[fabian005]

Hello muffinhead. I too am very new to the community and have with quite a thrist for audio knowledge been trying to take in as much as i can as i have considered myself a music enthusiast for quite a while till I arrived here at headfi and realized that many of my older beliefs were mostly mainstream beliefs with not alot of backstory to them that word of mouth leads us to believe. I am fabian005 and i hope the following helps slightly in your endeavors.For starters in my recent experience an easy way to increase your already outstanding music sources' quality would be if resources have availability transfer your CDs to a laptop/desktop put them on itunes or music organizer of choice then make sure the folders in which you placed the music are easily accessible. After this proceed to download a product download called dbpoweramp which is essentially a music converter, with which you can convert your regular CD quality into either 320kb/s which is highest mp3 quality but doesn't make the size of the track much bigger or you could convert to FLAC (personal favorite) makes your track huge but at pleasing effect that if you have the head gear available music you own will sound incredible. If you choose to start investing lots of money into head gear items as recommendations have gone FLAC is the way to go in order to hear all the amazingness

 

[Muffinhead]

Thanks for replying fabian. I've already converted all my CD files into lossless files (ALAC) and put them on iTunes, and space is of no concern so I have kept them in this format.

 

[fabian005]

Ah very well I probably misunderstood the acronyms then and I am pretty new to this whole community but trying to delve further faster so maybe you can enlighten me on the extension pf the acros.

 

[cel4145]

Thanks for replying fabian. I've already converted all my CD files into lossless files (ALAC) and put them on iTunes, and space is of no concern so I have kept them in this format.

You are all set then. You could get a very good DAC and headphone amp setup for $300 (instead of a CD player) and use your iTunes library. As long as your rips are good, a CD player won't offer any advantage.

 

[PurpleAngel]

Quote:

I'm moving toward putting together a basic open back headphone setup and am wondering what I should use as my music source. I have most of my music on cds, although some is on my computer. I also have an iPod, which is essentially works the same as the computer. I would like to know which of these sources will give the best audio quality. If I buy a relatively decent CD player ($300), will that be better than investing more of that money into the amp or DAC? 

What headphones will you be using?
Technically, your iPod (because of low impedance) is better at driving headphones then your computer's built in audio.
So if you use the computer for headphone audio, you might think of investing into a sound card or external DAC/Head amp, $100 should get you something decent enough.
Just about any computer DVD player ($25) should be fine for playing audio CD's.

 

[Muffinhead]

Thanks again guys. I'm planning to buy a DAC/amp/headphone setup, which from the advice above sounds like it will be a good start