HRT Headstreamer

[colinB]

Just bought one of these after reading good reviews. I listen direct from the laptop these days because of house sharing and i wanted something that cleans up the sound and drives my Grado 125s ( 32 ohms).
I was going to buy the Fiio e10, a similar DAC headphone amp but the output readings on the HRT were higher so i thought there would be less problems with headroom.
Unlike the Fiio its async and handles 24bt and various sample rates, all a bit lost on me to be honest as i only play cd rips and spotify. Ive just started using jriver and according to that my cd rips are only 128kbps :scratch: so i imagine i havent heard it at its best but it sounds good.
Just finished listening to tour de france Kraftwerk. Never done serious headphone listening and i really enjoyed it. No nasty hash or distortion and a great soundstage. Still sounds a bit digital though so i went be selling my turntable yet but a neat little device.

[realysm42]

Rip your music at a higher bit rate for a better sound, generally speaking, the higher the better.

I had all of my cd's at 320kbps and then upgraded my whole stereo, ripped a cd in a lossless format (WAV at 1411kbps) and could hear the difference. Cue me having to rerip everything :doh:

Can't complain though as everything is more enjoyable. My Grado's (got the 225s) are a lot happier for it too :cool:

[colinB]

Thanks , good to know. Im sure jriver supports WAV so i will give it a go. To my ears spotify is sounding better than the cds . I think the premium account is 320kbps these days.

[realysm42]

Yeah, what you're essentially saying is that 320 kbps (spootify) sounds better than 128kbps (if you're strictly using ripped CD's at that resolution), which stands to reason!

[Alex_UK]

To my ears spotify is sounding better than the cds . I think the premium account is 320kbps these days.

Hi Colin - yes, 320kbps on Premium, so no wonder it sounds better than your ripped music at 128kbps - what format did you use, MP3?


Im sure jriver supports WAV so i will give it a go.

You might want to take some of Welder's advice here (http://theartofsound.net/forum/showthread.php?t=8238), before doing too much re-ripping of your CDs... Probably best not to get into a conversation in this thread, but you're probably better off with FLAC if you want the convenience of tagging and album art etc., without loss of CD quality.

[colinB]

Cheers Alex. If in the future i was to go back to itunes ( if a iphone 5 ever comes my way) will it recognize flac?