I rarely listen on headphones but on speakers the only experiment I heard which increased the impression of stereo depth was adding a bit of extra noise. We were experimenting with adding the shortcomings of LPs to digital files to see which of their much worse performance than CDs we could hear.That is why i brought up soundstage because for me that is the one thing i have noticed that is the most obvious i can clearly tell the difference especially when wearing headphones the best way that i can describe it is that with one dac it sounds like the sound is being played between my ears inside my head while on another dac a better dac it sounds as if the sound is coming far away from the headphone cups as if i am hearing it through a pair of speakers
But apparently all of this is just my imagination right?
Something i have noticed is that the most noticeable improvement i can hear if i improve the power supply to a dac is the soundstage increasing in size
This is also something i have noticed with headphone amplifiers... if i give a headphone amplifier cleaner power it always improves the soundstage performance
Is there any scientific explanation for this?
For example the Aune x1s i use the
AUNE XP1 External Linear Power Supply
and for me that drastically improves the headphone amplifier
Now i dont use the aune x1s as my dac my setup is as follow
Musicstreamer hd to give it clean power i use a
iDefender3.0 that is connected to an ipower 5 volt psu
When i listen to headphones i use the aune x1s as the headphone amplifier with the xp1
but i mostly listen through my adam audio t7vs which i find to be superior to the jbl 305 which i had in the past
The two most surprising was that adding crosstalk of 35dB was no audibly different to adding none and adding a low level of noise (not directly audible in itself) increased the size of the stereo image, particularly depth.
One of the buzz trends of the moment is "reduced noise" and "black silences" which is amusing since it is usually applied to an LP based system with plenty of inherent noise anyway...