i don’t think it makes a huge difference, i listen to a ton of different sources and headphones and speakers and amps need the juice to drive the speakers/headphones. I usually EQ anything to taste though.

DACs are more snake oily, but I don’t try a lot of DACs so who knows. Apple makes an $8 DAC (the iphone 1/8 adapter dongle) that doesn’t seem to do anything to the sound of any of my headphones I use it on.

I would strongly urge you to take this energy about Amps and DACs and redirect it into researching new kinds of music. Listening to music instead of your amp/dac combo is a hell of a lot more fun.

The Fucked Jam by Ween until my 5 minutes runs out. Then I’ll leave it on for the next guy to wonder what the hell I was listening to, and why

https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

Take that. 128kbps are supposedly dogshit tier, unlistenable encodings if you believe the bozos around here. How many can you pick out with your setup?

I’d bet 80% of the bozos here who like to think they have golden ears couldn’t pick the wav for any of these without getting lucky.