Headphone Amp

I'm looking to buy my first headphone amp now.
The pricerange that i'm looking for is around 65£/100$/75€

I'll mainly be using my RE-Zero IEMs to listen with.

One of the amps im currently looking into are the FiiO E7 since they're sold for 65£ on Amazon.

I'm also on the look for a good program to rip cds to FLAC quality.

I hope you can help me

 

Really no need to amp IEM's but the DAC portion of the E7 can help with quality over onboard.

I use a NuForce uDAC-2 and really like how it sounds and works, more so than the E7 but the uDAC-2 is known for some people to have a slight noise with sensitive IEM's so if your using it for IEM mostly I guess the E7 may be the better call.

 

For CD archiving look into EAC.

 

Been using my RE0 with Fiio E5 for a while now and it's great. Not sure how the E7 will be, but I'm sure it will also be a great addition to your RE0. I mainly use this on the go with my Sansa Fuze v2 (Rockboxed) but I did use these with the laptop in my sig until recently when I got my Alessandro MS1i headphones.

 

You didn't list your laptop.

 

The laptop would be an Acer 3820tg

 

That'll be a Realtek hi-def codec in that case. Unless you're getting hissing and interference when you're listening, I'm not convinced a low-cost headphone amp will make that much difference.

I mean, yes in any case you will feel it sounds better because you've bought this external box, but unless there's actually something wrong with the sound (absolutely possible) I might say save your money.

Are you getting hissing / interference?

 

I have the Berhinger HA400 and absolutely love it. I get no distortion of any kind, nice clean sound and a decent volume boost, plus it can output to 4 headphones.

 

You will get a slight hiss from most sources if your IEM's are sensitive enough.

If you think your internal sound card sounds worse compared to other sources (say your phone) then grab yourself a DAC or a USB/xpresscard sound card, which ever is cheaper.

 

If you don't believe the voodoo BS they peddle at head-fi, then I'll say that I'm super happy with the Asus Xonar U1.

PROS:
It's USB, so no EMF. SPDIF connection if you're totally OCD.
It has its own DAC.
It has a built in headphone amp. Plenty loud for Sennheiser HD-650, Beyerdynamic 770,880,990, Denon AH-D2000, D5000, etc.
It has Dolby Headphone and Dolby Speaker. Awesome. And you can't get that in software.
Having two soundcards means one can be on speaker, and one can be on headphone. No fuddling with jacks constantly.
It is discontinued, but got it for around $60 on ebay.

CONS
Downside is that you can only use it for PC. If you're going mobile, you'll need something else. Though, I have a FiiO E5 and it works fine for that.

I think they used to work with Macs, but don't work with SnowLeopard, but not sure on this.

CDs to FLAC, dBPoweramp works well.

 

I too am looking for a decent and cheapish (if those two co-exist) DAC / Headphone amp for my laptop too. I have read about the FiiO E7, and it gets good reviews. If your in the UK (which Im guessing as you mentioned £ sterling, then in the next edition of What HiFi magazine there doing a DAC round up / Group Test starting from £35. The magazine will be out from 11th April (thats what standing in the local supermaket flicking through magazines does!). Dont think What HiFi will have a 'digitial' link to this group test, so may have to have a flick thorugh the magazine when it comes out.

Boz

 

One things that I think any buyer should bear in mind these days is that it's not the quality of amplification that's a big issue anymore.

A lot of these built-in (and cheap outboard) codecs have excellent amplification performance, presuming they offer enough power for the ear/headphone you're trying to power. The key to higher-quality outboard amplification these days is the quality of attenuation. And you are not getting anything that's genuinely superior to an onboard codec in that respect for anything significantly less than perhaps $200 (even if it's Chinese in origin).

The other big problem with some IEM's is impedance mismatch which causes hissing with some codecs, but it's not really possible for anyone to say whether you'll come up against the issue unless they're familiar with the specific circuit arrangement in use.

OP, where are you? It would help to narrow down what might be a good deal depending on where you are.

 

Currently i don't have any hissing / interference from my IEM's.
I was merely considering buying a cheap amp like this - because i had to decided to generally improve the quality of the music i was listening to.
And to do that i had already bought a pair of fairly decent IEM's and more or less changed my music library from mp3's to FLAC.
And after that i thought the next place to put ~100$ or so would be an amp.

But it might be better to save those money for upgrading a pair of headphones later, since the performance/money ratio is so much lower on amps compared to headphones?