On Sat, 2005-10-01 at 21:44 -0400, Jacob Potter wrote: > The obvious thing is to get a proper headphone amp; from what I've > seen on Headwize, the "Apheared 47" design is ideal for Grados (it's a > bit higher-end than the standard CMOY, but nothing too fancy). But > here on the SB2 list, the most popular upgrade seems to be an improved > power supply.
I would recommend you be careful making judgements based on how popular mods are. First, upgrading the power supply is easy and fairly cheap, so even if it doesn't do much for most listeners. Second, I think most of the folks on this list have mid-level or higher speakers, so they are not likely to think of headphone amps. I know I haven't used headphones for serious listening in at least thirty years. > Would a simple AC wall-wart -> rectifier -> 7805 -> bunch-o'-caps be a > worthwhile improvement over the stock supply? I am not a circuit designer, but I have a hard time imagining that this would do anything good. The best you can say is that it would be cheap. The reason everything uses cheap switching power supplies is that they deliver a lot of bang for the buck. By setting the switching circuit frequency over 20kHz, you don't have to worry about noise in the circuit, your approach is sure to have some 60hz noise flowing thru. Clearly you could use lots-o-bunches-o caps but that is not elegant and stops improving pretty quickly. Why not just stick a bunch-o-caps on the current power supply? I think that if I was living on headphones only, I'd look for some electrostatic headphones first, and then look for a really good tube headphone amp. But what you really need are some Quads :-) -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
