Desktop Headphone Amplifier: anyone have one?

[lazydays]

Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression it wasn't a good investment. For myself I require a very nice set of speakers but I find that a $125 set of headphones and my iPod sound adequate for me. I was assuming that the OP was an extremely discerning listener and that there must be some flaw in the built in audio of the mac. I guess I've never listened to the audio output of my mac so I don't know how good or bad it sounds.

[john dough]

I have the NuForce uDAC-2 connected up to my Swans and the sound is wonderful. I don't use it for the headphone amplifier use, just to run the Swans via RCA output. You will forget about the cost after you get one, trust me.

[ka jowct]

I have some decent headphones (that I bought years ago when I had more income), although not wildly expensive: one Sennheiser 545 headset and one Beyer DT 990.

I don't like the sound quality I hear using the Mac's headphone port. I am slowly ripping my large CD collection, much of which is classical. Everything is ripped in AIFF format; I generate an Apple Lossless copy for my iPod. I have some MP3 or AAC files, but they are a minority.

I would have to look up the specs on the headphones; I wouldn't have thought to check that sort of thing, so that's a very good tip. I'll check out the Head-Fi link.

[deckeda]

Also know that for the sake of your hard disk space, there's NO penalty to simply ripping straight to Apple Lossless in the first place. There's no advantage to AIFF here.

If you don't intend to (also) use this as a preamp out to a stereo, Nu-Force makes one that's only got a headphone jack: http://www.amazon.com/NuForce-uDAC2-HP-B...pd_sim_e_5