I curse Dan. 4 weeks ago I had nothing. Now I have this:
- Sophia Baby tube amp with 8 ohm 10W resistors used to create a headphone jack. Crude but it works
- Beyerdynamic DT770 250 ohm headphones
- Little Dot I+ hybrid headphone amplifier
- Grado 325i
I used think my UE super.fi 5EB were great headphones. They're good but the Grados are much better. I tried the DT770's but didn't really like them. In fact, they'll go up for sale soon.
I've changed out the tubes on the Little Dot to Sylvania Gold 408A's and swapped the cheaper ON Semi op amp for a Linear Tech LT1364. I would've thought that the tubes were going to be the big upgrade from the stock Chinese tubes. I noticed a subtle change but not a huge one. However, the opamp roll was a HUGE improvement which was a nice surprise. Simply put, everything got bigger: soundstage, bottom end, detail, separation, highs, mids, etc.
I'm really impressed with the Grado/Little Dot combo. In fact, the LD easily beats the Rotel's output. And I'm loving the Grados more and more. They sound FANTASTIC out of my iPod 5.5G. Surprisingly enough, the same music sounds better on the iPhone 3G, not sure if the headphone output is supposed to be better. Not what I would've expected but nice.
