The Hifiman HE1000se are my daily drivers and known for not being too power hungry. I have two chains in which I listen to them:
- Living Room: Marantz DAC-1 -> Schiit Asgard2
- Desk: Schiit Bifrost2 -> Schiit Lyr3
I wonder whether the HE1000se benefit much from better amps, and if so, what price range we are talking about… Are amps like the Feliks Audio Euforia or the Flux Labs Volot a complete overkill? Is there something worthwhile in between? Or is even the DAC the better component to tackle here?
If your view of amps is that they should transparently reproduce the input, the state-of-the-art here starts at less than $200. There’s no obvious way from an electrical engineering point of view for an amp to be meaningfully better at this than the last few generations of the Schiit Magni, for example. The huge wrinkle here is that human hearing is really bad at hearing that two things sound the same if there’s any volume difference or bias.
Not all amps are designed to be transparent of course. There’s evidence people like small amounts of certain kinds of distortion.
Totally disagree…haven’t heard a good amp under 300. Have heard magni and it sounds like shit. It’s very congested sonically. Even half deaf person would hear a difference between magni in somethingthing like Holo Audio Bliss. But I I would say you don’t need to spend fortune - mojo 2 is great DAC and amp combo and for an amp Aune s17 Pro is something to beat under 1k.
Half this industry is built on people overestimating the objectivity of their hearing and underestimating their imagination. I’ve done enough blind testing to put infinitely more trust in extremely sensitive lab instruments than casual, uncontrolled listening tests.
You’re right as there is no audible difference between magni and my MacBook Pro 14" 3.5mm output, lol.