Economically leveraging my old Yamaha receiver for better streaming

[btwesq]

I have a system that is used 99% of the time with our television, comprising a Yamaha RX-V485 home theater receiver, Polk speakers: floorstanding, center channel, and a sub. The Yamaha has a Burr Brown dac and I'm using MusicCast to stream Qobuz. So a lot of room for improvement, but I'd like to do it economically. I thought I would put my shopping list here to see if I might be missing something, or am on the wrong track.

Topping DX3pro+
AKG K612 headphones
Wiim Pro

My goal would be to use the Wiim (and its app which has to be miles better than MusicCast), feeding the digital output to the Topping (bypassing the Wiim's dac), and then putting the analog output into one of the Yamaha's RCA inputs.

For around $600 and the new benefit of having headphones, what do you think of my planned upgrade? I know the Yamaha as a headphone jack, but from a quality standpoint, I'm better off using something like the DX3, right?

 

[staticV3]

Hi @btwesq! Welcome to ASR.

If you want to make use of any of your V485's advanced features like YPAO, Cinema DSP, Extra Bass etc, then the best possible sound quality will be achieved via its digital inputs.

Even a top of the line external DAC would still be technically worse as for those features to work, the Yamaha's analog inputs are first converted to digital, then processed, then converted back to analog via the built-in Wolfson DAC.

Inputting digital directly avoids that additional conversion step, and is usually less expensive.

My recommendation therefore would be to buy a WiiM Pro or Pro Plus, connect its Toslink output to the Yamaha for listening via speakers, and connect the WiiM's RCA output to a headphone Amp like the JDS Atom Amp+, Schiit Heretic, Topping L30 II, etc. for headphone listening.

On the headphone side, I would also take a look at the Hifiman HE400se and the Sennheiser HD560s.

 

[btwesq]

Thank you, that’s very helpful. So in your setup, headphones would use the dac in the Wiim, and speakers would use the Wolfson.

 

[staticV3]

Yup!