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Looking for a good tube amp for my Massdrop x Fostex Thx00 purplehearts

airofu

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Used an STX card with my HD800 and it was very clean and loud, comparable to another SS headphone amp I had....hard to tell them apart really....also tested just the DAC side of the STX and it also was very good.
 

solderdude

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The STX card has a TPA-6120A2 running at ±12V so should have no problems driving most headphones including 300 Ohm headphones.
It probably has a 10 Ohm output R or close to it.
A Topping A30 would give most likely give the same SQ.
 

M00ndancer

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Laptop headphone output in a low impedance headphone usually is around 30mW or so.
The Fulla reaches 300mW which is about 2x as loud.
Perhaps that could be a clue ?
The Asus STX have plenty of power, so unless @Nobunaga use the front headers running thru the PC, I'm a bit baffled.
To be fair I've done a similar "upgrade" from using the front ports of an Asus DGX ($50 soundcard) to an external amp/dac. Mostly for features and convenience. To me (trying to do some blind testing), I even preferred the sound from my old Creative DDTS and the analogue out from my CCA, compared to the DGX. But then again the DGX is a low end card, with really cheap components onboard compared to a STX.
I don't really like the headphone amp on the DGX, not enough power despite being a card with a dedicated amp.
 
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Nobunaga

Nobunaga

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The Asus STX have plenty of power, so unless @Nobunaga use the front headers running thru the PC, I'm a bit baffled.
To be fair I've done a similar "upgrade" from using the front ports of an Asus DGX ($50 soundcard) to an external amp/dac. Mostly for features and convenience. To me (trying to do some blind testing), I even preferred the sound from my old Creative DDTS and the analogue out from my CCA, compared to the DGX. But then again the DGX is a low end card, with really cheap components onboard compared to a STX.
I don't really like the headphone amp on the DGX, not enough power despite being a card with a dedicated amp.

Ofc it was plugged in the rear, rear has a quarter inch jack...

Another thing worth mentioning is that the microphone audio (or w/e you wanna call it) is much worse than onboard. Tested it with 3 different microphones.

The sound is much weaker than onboard and if you turn up volume you can hear interferance.
 

solderdude

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faulty card ?
 

Dogen

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I have and enjoy some tube headphone and speaker amps (as well as solid state). Yes, what they say is true - you’d be introducing distortions to the original signal. No, it won’t be as accurate as solid state. They’re inefficient and take some maintenance. You’ve got to go in knowing this. You are turning your stereo into a musical instrument with its own idiosyncratic harmonic signature, which will be imposed on everything you play. Sometimes you may like that signature very much, other times you may not.

The appeal for me is mainly in keeping vacuum tube technology alive and making music for me. It’s fascinating to me how revolutionary vacuum tubes were, and how much ingenuity and clever engineering went into making them work. It’s like the audio equivalent of Civil War re-enactment. It’s stuck in the past, there’s no toilet paper and things just aren’t as comfortable and easy as they are today. But there’s an interest, to me, in keeping the technology alive.

I can’t justify tubes rationally. But I get an immense amount of enjoyment from listening through tubes, and from their aesthetics, legacy, and learning how they work in a circuit. Unless all that holds some appeal for you, I’d advise not going down that road.
 

Severian

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I have a mixing studio at home.

There are DSP-based plugins that not only emulate tubes, generally, but specific types of tubes (EJ88, EL34, etc.) as well as specific pieces of tube-based equipment.

It's all about a transfer function, and until a tube starts to go bad and act somewhat randomly, it's all very easy to model.

Do you have any recommendations for free/cheap VST plug-ins to emulate tubes?

A couple months ago I saw a post on here talking about how there is some research supporting listener preference for 2nd harmonic distortion similar to what tubes do, and I had the idea of sticking a VST plug-in to that effect in my Equalizer APO chain to hear for myself. However, I was overwhelmed by the choices and didn't really know where to start considering that I have no experience with recording/mixing. I tried one (can't recall which) and it sounded nice but never took it further than that.
 

magicscreen

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The reason for the Technics SE-A900S sounding different is of technical origin.
The output resistance from the HP socket is a whopping 330 Ohm as seen in the specs of the manual

Whoaa, my Marantz PM7005 has a whopping 300 Ohm output resistance from the HP socket. You cannot find this information in the spec. So I had to ask the support for it. First I could not believe this 300 Ohm value but now it seems it is not impossible :)
The sound of the PM7005 is different and has some bass boost indeed.
 

solderdude

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It was quite a usual value back in the days. 220 to 600 Ohm output R.
Most headphones were high impedance back then so the high output R wasn't a big issue.
 
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