Well damn, it really does make a difference!
I bought this FiiO K5Pro ESS Headphone amplifier Amplifier a year ago to more easily control the volume on a pair of powered speakers I was using at my desk. I didn’t really think too much of the sound quality one way or another, and when I swapped out those speakers with a different pair some months later it was a superfluous piece of equipment that was boxed back up and put in storage.
Well, since getting my Sennheisers a couple months ago, driving them to an acceptable volume on either my MiniDisc or CD walkman players has been problematic without cranking everything up to one step short of max. The two players I have that will drive the Sennheisers—despite their absolutely awesome sound—won’t play every CD I put in them. So there’s that.
I remembered I had the FiiO in storage, so I pulled it out and hooked it to one of the CD Walkmans I have a dedicated optical LINE OUT jack via a SPDIF cable. After a few days I still wasn’t aware of any improvement in sound, but it certainly did provide the power the Sennheisers needed. The FiiO is a headphone amp, after all.
It was only after I connected the headphone jack directly to the CD player and then reconnected it back to the FiiO did I realize how much better evrerthing sounded. More crisp, more alive. Punchy bass. In other words, my reaction was “Wow!”
So what am I listening to?
“Baby Let Me Kiss You”
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