Most of my collection is CD quality FLAC. I don’t believe there is a meaningful benefit to going beyond that. But at this point audio just doesn’t make a big dent in my storage requirements so I usually just download the highest quality.

That’s kinda the Hifiman house sound. Try listening to it until you get used to it I guess.

They are reasonably sensitive headphones don’t need anything special amp wise.

Can you try them with a different source?

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.

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.

The “amplifier requirement for a regular consumer” is dramatically overblown in general, but yes it’s a very solid headphone jack.

Assuming you’re hearing something real, I’m guessing the mobo and included dongle have higher output impedance, which will tend to give you a bit of a bass boost with dynamic driver headphones. Most dedicated headphone gear will be closer to the Apple dongle in that respect.

Examples of what I mean. Amplification types that have an associated sound: OPAMP’s, NFCA’s, Tube amp’s, discrete topology amp’s, Forward Feedback amp’s, THX, non-negative feedback amp’s, Class A amp’s, Class A/B amp’s, Class D amps, current mode amps (Questyle), etc. Amp differences are easiest to spot based on the shape of the soundstage and how well sounds/effect/instruments are separated and layered. Amp performance is reasonably easy to gauge on an audition.

Just because a low-level implementation detail differs doesn’t mean it has a “sound”. Your AAC audio doesn’t sound different depending on whether it was encoded by an ARM or x86 processor.

…not this shit again

Is there an Amp out there that’ll run both headphones to their maximum potential

The Magni 3 :)

Lowest gain is usually good for IEMs. DAC filters… try and see if you even notice a difference? The default is fine.

Usb-c and being able to run my Qudelix 5K wired was one of the things that motivated me to upgrade to an iPhone 15.

Though really the iPhone’s AAC is perfectly fine too.

Usb-c and being able to run my Qudelix 5K wired was one of the things that motivated me to upgrade to an iPhone 15.

Though really the iPhone’s AAC is perfectly fine too.

Does anyone have measurements or experience comparing the R2R Himalaya DAC to the Modi

https://headphones.com/blogs/reviews/hifiman-ef400-review-measurements

The measurements are ok for the most part, but unusually, there’s a pretty bad case of phase misalignment between channels, which is likely audible.

Also the headphone output impedance is pretty high for a modern SS headphone amp, though I don’t think that has much effect on planars.

The 2.5mm connector is for the balanced output, which may be useful for hard-to-drive headphones, but probably not the HD560s.

I don’t use Android or Samsung phones but it’s possible they have some DSP audio enhancements turned on that you like the sound of? iOS doesn’t really do anything like that.

If the Samsung’s headphone jack has high output impedance, it’ll give the Sennheisers a bit of a bass bump, which many people like. EQ (unfortunately not many options for that on iOS, besides an outboard device like the Qudelix5K) or an impedance adapter between the dongle and headphones can produce the same effect.

That FiiO is a pretty decent amp, if it’s loud enough for you I would not expect any real difference with typical solid-state gear.

I feel like people always feel attacked when you point out that a difference probably isn’t real. But I think we need to stop saying you don’t hear it. Human hearing is clearly not merely the process of tranducing sound pressure. You cannot separate objective “sound pressure at the ear drum over time” from whatever other post-processing happens in your brain, and the latter has been repeatedly established to be a significant factor, which you can test for yourself easily enough if you doubt it. This makes it easy to make the attribution error that something is producing a different sound wave, rather than merely changing the cognitive aspect of “hearing”.

Here’s to enjoying the gear you’ve already got.

Well, I bought a KiwiEars Cadenza after I junked my shitty Moondrops, and a couple of fresh Apple dongles to replace them as I inevitably lose them, but IEMs are not something I use very often, so not too exciting for me.