Hey guys,
I bought headphones today and someone asked me to post in here.
I bought the Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro in a local hifi shop.
I'm an audiophile extraordinaire, but never really looked into headphones. Guy who lives next to me showed me his new Sennheiser HD515, and I thought that they were quite enjoyable but had some problems. I read on the internet that the HD555 was better in a couple of ways and only a little more expensive. The store didn't have many Sennheisers but he did have various Beyers. I listened to a 531, which had a balancing problem, then I listened to a 331 which sounded pretty well rounded. Then he gave me the 990 which blew me away and I insta-bought it. The 990 lived up to the standards of my regular system so it made complete sense to forget about cheaper stuff.
This is my regular setup in my old room:
http://my.hifi.nl/index.php?user=1088
Amp
http://www.customanalogue.com/jlti_mark_2.htm
Similar design and sound as the 47 Labs Gaincard, if that means anything to you guys. Essentially worldclass amplifier which has the same quality of sound as sick 300B tube amps but is has a slightly different colouring (I've compared them).
DAC
Non-oversampling DIY dac. Again, the main design comes from 47 Labs but has been 'borrowed' by the DIY community and improved over the years.
Speakers
Supravox 215 Signature Bicone in an openbaffle casing. These drivers are medium high efficiency, full range, great directionality for use in rooms, and have a large linear excursion; all of which makes them excellent for use in open baffle and to equalize them, which I do with a digital equalizer (Behringer 8024). It equalizes in the digital domain. So it's: computer spdif (Emu 0404) -> Behringer -> DAC -> Amp.
Tuning the equalizer is very tough and took me a long time to get a good understanding of it.
The Amp is in for repair atm and my current room is too small for the setup so this is why a good headphone seemed a good idea. (I'm looking to move to a house with other pokerplayers soon so I can set the whole thing up again)
Right now the setup is: spdif -> dac -> computer speakers headphone output -> headphone; which is obviously not great, but the sound is damn impressive still. I've found that a good dac is more critical than a good amp in the case of headphones. But anyway, I'm looking for a better option for it. My JLTi amp has a pre-amp output on which I could hookup a headphone amplifier. I saw some in this thread and I'll have to investige on that.
If you think my system is ugly and thus can't sound good, then imagine it looks like this:
http://sakurasystems.com/show/ckeating.html . That system probably sounds very much like mine btw.
If any of you have ever heard of Bert Doppenberg or the Oris horns (
http://bd-design.nl/ ). He's from Holland and we've known each other for quite some years.