Recent content by oleg87

narrator: they all sound the same

In the conventional power amp topology the feedback goes to one side of the input differential stage, which has the role of "calculating" the error between input and output. More exotic topologies may use more complicated feedback schemes to eke out more loop gain.

Your intuition is correct, this seemingly anthropomorphic view of amp "power" is not how it works. An amp hitting its limits manifests as distortion and clipping, there is no mechanism by which insufficient power would make it politely decline to reproduce low end while remaining well-behaved...

Rationality in no way protects you from our standard-issue human cognitive biases/perceptual illusions. Placebo effect with audio should not be underestimated, but it's up to you what price tag you want to attach to differences that almost certainly don't exist outside of your head - I also...

So a piece of electronics can only be defective in a way that causes "clicks and artifacts"? I would try exclusive mode output as a sanity check. The DT770s shouldn't be very sensitive to output impedance so some kind of DSP seems like the likeliest culprit for major differences.

I think Midgard uses the same pot as the Jot2 fwiw.

Almost double the power means a little less than 3dB difference in max headroom (on top of what is already more than enough power for the HD800s) - not very meaningful. The nature of how hearing works is that you need exponentially more power for a "linear" increase in perceived volume.

You are asking this on ASR, so you will get one answer to this divisive question. If two dacs/amps have flat frequency response in the audible frequency band, a thorough suite of measurements finds levels of distortion and noise that are inaudible in a typical listening scenario, and there is...

In terms of measured performance, the Midgard is better by pretty much any metric, though the Jot2 edges it out in terms of power by a little bit. But it's just an amp.

I think the Topping L30 II can switch between headphone and pre-outs right? I'd just get that and the matching DAC. I don't see any good reason to spend $900 on basic headphone source gear. At that point I'd rather stretch my budget to the RME ADI-2 DAC FS and get something feature-packed for...

Maybe I'm underestimating how loud people here like listening, but I really can't imagine >120dB peak SPL being insufficient for any reasonable purpose. It's *very* loud even with the highest DR material I've got to the point of being thoroughly unpleasant, to say nothing of hearing health...

103dB/mW sensitivity means that 100mW of clean power into 20 ohms will be enough for physically painful volume levels, and the RME can do that and then some.

As always, the first suspect when people bring out descriptors like this, which are much more easily accounted for by the brain's "signal processing" than a converter's nonlinearities, is simple placebo effect.

Multitone already does this (as well as a bunch of other tones).

Unless you have one of the small handful of headphones that might need the extra power, no. Audibly transparent is audibly transparent.