I finally bought myself a pair of headphones.

I decided upon the Audio Technica ATH-W1000's, And frankly they sound good both on my X-fi fatal1ty (Crappy OP amp), and my IPOD...

I was wondering if anyone has had any formal experiance with these headphones and can relay to me any information pertaining to your opinions on sound quality as well as general use... I hear they are pretty "Bright" But I like them, There isnt alot of bass, but on headphones Im not really concerned about bass as opposed to reproduction.




They sound good, however, I was considering picking up a $200-300 ranged headphone amplifier, would this be worthwhile?

These headphones are rated at 40ohms, I am wondering if Id notice improved sound quality in anyway shape or form (Bass, clarity, volume isnt so much of an issue, these headphones cap around 100db and I dont want anything louder than that, for more then a few minutes... I usually try and play them pretty low to risk further hearing damage and tinnitus)


Thanks for your input,

Nigel Kristian.

Rather thin sounding. Lacks impact, quite precise but for the money has slight trouble keeping up with the (cheaper) high-end Sennheiser / Beyerdynamic in terms of detail and overall capability. Wide but very collapsed (front/back) soundstage. Not my thing at all. Considered keeping them for early string music where the reedy sound was rather suited, but it's not like I consume baroque every day. Looks considerably better than they sound IMO.


I did hang onto the ATH-W2002 for far longer. More dynamic, much more 3-D although narrower soundstaging, real detail... although unfortunately rather midrange-biased, so tending towards the shouty at times. That's definitely not a worry with the W1000


A cheap amp wouldn't improve things that much as the W1000 is low-impedance and high efficiency. The key is quality amplification, allied to a better source. Aside from that, tubes can ameliorate some of the W1000's bad points, making it sound smoother. The midrange Earmax Pro may be an option... About $800.

How many did you pay for your ATH-W1000? Not many places are selling the W1000 and I found one in here for about 300 bucks. Is this a good deal?

Maybe...

The main point of a headphone amplifier is to... amplify! It can take a line-level signal and amplify it to the higher-voltage, higher-current signal required for headphones. And possibly, it can do this with less noise than you get from your receiver's headphone output.

But, a headphone amp might help with a couple other things.... It might help with the bass... The iPod and the X-Fi probably have an output capacitor (used to filter-out DC voltage).* The output capacitor, together with the impedance of the headphones forms a high-pass filter. Ideally, you want this "filter" to have a low cut-off frequency so that only subsonic frequencies are lost. A higher capacitance value and/or higher impedance load will help lower the cutoff frequency. (i.e. Lower impedance headphones make things worse.) A headphone amp will be designed to drive any headphone over the full frequency range. Here's some more information I found.

Also, it might help with noise... At low listening levels, if you use the amplifier's volume control so that the headphone amp becomes an attenuator (the opposite of an amplifier), you can increase the volume out of the of the iPod (or soundcard). This can give you a better signal-to-noise ratio (bigger signal, same noise). Then, when you attenuate the volume with the headphone amp, you attenuate both the signal and the noise together, for a lower background noise level! Of course, this depends on having a low-noise headphone amp. All amplification stages add some noise, so it's a question of how the various noise sources "add up".

I'm on engineer, but I don't speak "audiophile",** and I don't understand what bhangraman is saying. But, it doesn't cost $800 to build a good headphone amp with low noise, flat frequency response, and plenty of voltage & current to drive a pair of headphones. It's actually a very simple thing to build, and it doesn't require vacuum tubes.


* I don't know anything about the iPod circuit design, or the X-Fi. There may not be an output capacitor...

** I only understand only understand scientific terminology like, decibels, hertz, milliseconds, volts, amps, ohms, etc.

Not sure what a "iPod 5th Gen Mini" is, but all of the iPods I've seen tested should have flat bass performance into 40ohms.

The W1000s are rated at 40 ohms. Based on my own experiments this is typically high enough that any bass rolloff is minor and probably not really audible.

I've got plenty of experience with headphones and headphone amps. The claim that a headphone amplifier can make audible differences are made usually after testing equipment in uncontrolled listening tests. If people were doing blind volume matched tests there would be a lot more people willing to state well designed amplifiers do not change sound. As DVDdoug has pointed out, making a good headphone amp is actually quite easy. All this claims of "low end headphone amp" and "high end headphone amp" are mostly placebo induced rubbish.

Of course, if you are using a very low impedance headphone (e.g. 16 ohms) or a high impedance (e.g. 300 ohms) low sensitivity headphone, there might be a reason to get an amp so you can drive the high impedance headphones without clipping, distortion, etc.

In your case I say easiest and least expensive way to "fix" sound is to just use an EQ on your computer or IPOD. Don't spend money on an amp.

IIRC, the very first iPods were supposed to have had some aspect of the analogue circuitry which could cause loss of bass with certain earphones. The first Shuffle was praised for having a different design, which removed the problem. I've seen graphs which purport to show this. The first Shuffle appeared a long time ago, which shows how long reports (which were only ever true of unusual cases) can persist and sustain myths, like the alleged defects of iPod SQ.