Headphone Amps

[Haggisman14]

Hello everyone, I'm new on the board, and wanted to find out some more info on portable, or wired head/earphone amps. How necessary they are, and how much they really clean up the signal/sound.

I've had a pair of Etymotic ER*4P's for the past 2 years, and have always just listened to them by plugging into my mac, or my iPod for tunes.

Any help towards articles or other posts would be greatly appreciated.

Marc

[Haggisman14]

Any suggestions?

[nightflier]

Those Etymotics are pretty sensitive, so you may not get much improvement from an outboard amp. But to be perfectly honest, it depends more on what you have on that ipod/mac. If you're listening to mostly iTunes files (192Kbs, I believe), then even the best gear in the world will still not help you out much.

[Haggisman14]

I've got a good amount of tunes in the 320Kbs range, but some of my stuff is all over the place. I don't have the quality libraries that most of you here have, but that being said over any of the old headphones I had been using, the Etymotics are a HUGE improvement (obviously), but wasnt' sure if there is something I can do to make it even better.

Also any good places to get some good info about portable amps for head/earphones?

Marc

[jcmanic]

www.head-fi.org

[soapn]

what price range are you looking at? headphone amps come in all varieties of budgets. like the previous poster said, the er4p has a low impedance rating of 27 ohms, so it may not make a huge difference. Maybe the sound will become a little more transparent or the deep would be a little deeper, but it usually depends on your ears to notice any sort of difference sometimes. The cheapest portable amp you can get that is pretty decent is the cmoy amps that you can find on ebay.