Cheesebaron

To quickly sum up my findings of this DAC/AMP the top and the bottom is a bit rounded. The highs tend to be slightly elastic sounding and the punch in the bottom is a bit less than my Audio-gd 10.2. However the 10.2 is out of the Aune's league by far. The Aune is really enjoyable, especially with acoustic music and vocals. However everything else I have thrown at it, it is very capable of playing with great pleasure, it is only if you are going to listen to the music very analytically you will notice the differences. It is great. Around 200 USD you wont find many great DAC/AMP alternatives that sound this good.

I am currently borrowing the Aune T1. Pretty OK little tube DAC/AMP you get a lot of value for the money in this one.

Don't worry :) Just make sure when you choose a tube amplifier you choose the right one for the application. So if you intend to drive low impedance headphones choose an amp with OT and if you intend to drive high impedance headphones pick one without OT. There is of course some overlap in the middle ground where you might be able to run 250-300 Ohm headphones on either, depending on the sensitivity.

Notice the OTL I wrote. OTL = Output Transformer Less, these tube amps, just like the name implies, do not have any Output Transformers, which make them excellent for High Impedance headphones. There are amplifiers with OT, which are a lot better for headphones with low to medium Impedance. So I am not saying that tube amps in general are bad with sensitive headphones, just those without OT's.

So you say you want to run a OTL tube amplifier with sensitive in ear monitors? Good luck with that :D OTL amps are designed to drive high impedance headphones as they output more voltage and have a big voltage swing with increased "load", that is just how it is. Increasing gain is fine however it adds noise and grain to the sound, which is not desirable. So a tube amp will work with the Q701 and it will play loud, but they probably will sound less good than on a better matching amp. EOD.

I am not saying it won't drive the headphones, but will it drive them well? My best bet is to try to see if you can borrow some different headphone amps or read up on head amps on Head-fi, there are loads of people having tried various combos with AKG headphones.

Afaik the AKG Q701 are better with Solid State or hybrid amps because they are low impedance headphones. This post on Head-fi explains it pretty well.

Had the Little Dot MK IV SE as a loaner for a while when I also had my HD650, pretty good synergy those two have. A couple of pictures :D

Something like a HRT Microstreamer, AudioEngine D1 or O2 and upgrade with an ODac later

You would get a much better experience getting a DAC/AMP or a sound card with a built in amp section. Just upgrading your sound card won't give you that much.

Which headphones or headset are you going to use it with?

The Zx would be a fine choice, however what are you going to use them for?

dBpoweramp is also pretty awesome, you should check it out :)

Digital to Analog Converter

You are right, however they are simply passing on a digital signal, so nothing to worry about here as long as it does not corrupt the bits which would mean sound would be garbage in the decoder. It is the same digital signal as travels in HDMI and is nothing special really.

Any reason as to why you chose those sound cards? Have you looked into alternatives such as Asus Xonar STX or ST? They have better Signal to Noise ratio, better recording quality, ASIO and Dolby.

At home I use: Asus Xonar D2x as TOSLink transport Audio-gd 10.2 (link to manufacturer) (10.32 has an upgraded USB module) HiFiMan HE-300 w/ fully balanced Cryo OCC cable (due to an upgrade soon, looking at HE-500) or AudioEngine A5 monitors on Sinn7 acoustic foam stands. At work: NuForce uDac-2 Audio-Technica ATH-ESW9 (Germania modded, this mod includes dampening of the cups and a low impedance cable) I also have a Pioneer PL-518X turntable w/ Audio-Technica ATH-95E and Cambridge Audio 640p RIAA which I use from time to time.

The HD598 aren't a bad choice at all. They also scale well with better equipment. Next time you want to upgrade something, do look into a dedicated headphone amplifier or combined DAC/AMP, which will give you a nice quality boost.

"Guiding" is exactly the same as Team Orders to me. I didn't like Hamilton when he drove for McLaren, but I see him differently driving for Mercedes for some reason. He seems to have matured a lot and not the same spoiled brat as he was.

I don't rage when I game, however I have a friend, who rages quite a lot, but luckily does not game much anymore. However we have played a lot of games and he is the main reason to my nick. Back in the good old times when Medal of Honor was a popular shooter, he some times raged so much and bashed his hands into his keyboard. Funny thing I think that the keyboard miraculously managed to survive most of the impacts. I also hear a lot of young people raging when playing Planetside 2 nowadays, pretty fun stuff :D

Gotta love this season, so many drivers fighting for the 1st place. Nothing like a couple of years ago when Red Bull dominated the whole season. I'd personally like to see Räikkönen, Hamilton and Perez on the podium much more. Also would like FIA to ban team orders so we can see some more action. But what I really am looking forward to is Turbo's coming back to F1.

Logitech G110 keyboard. Gives BSODs because of the crummy USB implementation which does not follow specs. Keys are super squishy and annoying to type on. XFX HD5870, wanted to replace the cooler, but the stock cooler's paint had molten onto a coil, and I ended up ripping it off the PCB. XFX obviously did not want to replace anything or take any responsibility. Managed to source a new coil from the coil manufacturer which does samples for their stuff. Also got a Toshiba Satellite laptop in a trade. It died on me 3 times. All three times the motherboard was replaced. The third time was kind of my own fault, however it was because the repair center forgot to put on the plastic cap that normally sits in a USB plug, so I accidentally put the power plug into it as the USB connector was located nearby the one for power.

Is it only Flash content?

GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) is a Bootloader. Why you booted into a Bootloader, hard to tell, but you might have installed some software, or left a USB drive with a Linux distribution or some other tool on it, which boots into it.

Either 1. Battery is not calibrated (let it go to 0% turn off computer and charge to 100%). 2. Power adapter is broken 3. Battery is borked.