Headphones

[apurv1595]

Hello good people. I am very new to this topic and a noob in home theatres. Recently I planned to move from a 2.1 setup for my TV (Logitech Z-623) to a receiver and separate speaker setup. Currently, I plan to go with the Sony STR-DH790 as my receiver and start off with a 2.0 setup with the ELAC's debut 2.0 b6.2 bookshelf speakers.

My concern is as I never had a receiver before and I mainly used a wireless pair of gaming headphones for my Playstation 4, the Sony Reciever has a "Phones" output on the front and that got me thinking if that would be sufficient for driving the headphones I use with my PC as they are way better headphones. The headphones are the Sennheiser HD650.

Even if it does drive the headphones properly, will the quality be any good? I do own an external desktop amp which is never used as I mainly use the soundcard in my PC which is a Xonar Essence STX to drive the headphones. The external amp I have is a Fiio E09K. If the amplification is not sufficient then can I use the Fiio to power the headphones?

And how will I connect the Amp to the receiver? The amp has an AUX-in, a PRE_OUT and a LINE OUT on the back.

Thanks for any input.

[Derkoli]

3 hours ago, apurv1595 said:

Hello good people. I am very new to this topic and a noob in home theatres. Recently I planned to move from a 2.1 setup for my TV (Logitech Z-623) to a receiver and separate speaker setup. Currently, I plan to go with the Sony STR-DH790 as my receiver and start off with a 2.0 setup with the ELAC's debut 2.0 b6.2 bookshelf speakers.

My concern is as I never had a receiver before and I mainly used a wireless pair of gaming headphones for my Playstation 4, the Sony Reciever has a "Phones" output on the front and that got me thinking if that would be sufficient for driving the headphones I use with my PC as they are way better headphones. The headphones are the Sennheiser HD650.

Even if it does drive the headphones properly, will the quality be any good? I do own an external desktop amp which is never used as I mainly use the soundcard in my PC which is a Xonar Essence STX to drive the headphones. The external amp I have is a Fiio E09K. If the amplification is not sufficient then can I use the Fiio to power the headphones?

And how will I connect the Amp to the receiver? The amp has an AUX-in, a PRE_OUT and a LINE OUT on the back.

Thanks for any input.

It could power them, but might not sound as good as a dedicated amp, as the headphone amplifier stage is usually a second thought on receivers, or the front two channels are passed through resistors to bring the power down from lets say 50 watts to 0.5 watts, and the resistors arent the best sounding things usually. It might be difficult to connect the amplifier to the receiver as it does not have pre outs, however you couldnt connect the DAC to the TV if it has optical out, then connect the dac to the amplifier, but you might have to change the HDMI and plug it into the TV to use the headphones, as you are probably using HDMI ARC to connect to the receiver, But if you are connecting to the receiver via optical, you can get an optical splitter and connect both the receiver and DAC to that, then use the headphones on the amplifier when it is connected to the dac.

[apurv1595]

Okay so here is the situation. I could probably connect the amp to the reciever using maybe a 6.3mm to rca cable (if such a thing exists) or use a 6.3mm to 3.5mm adaptor and then plug the RCA in into the amp into the AUX in ports at the back of the amp. But as far as I can tell from your post, the DAC is gonna be pretty shitty as well and won't sound very good. Let me know if all this is right.

 

Now I do have a fiio e17 which connects on top of the e09k and it essentially becomes a DAC/AMP combo. The problem is that this only works through USB and I don't think the reciever has any USB ports let alone even pass audio through it.

 

So a follow up question, is there no way to connect a DAC/amp combo to the reciever and get audio from it without going through the TV? As that would be a great hasslee everytime some private listening is required.

 

Is there something I could buy that would let me get the audio from the reciever?

 

Thanks for the help. I appreciate it.

 

[apurv1595]

Would something like the massdrop O2 + SDAC DAC/AMP work? It just use a micro USB to USB A for power which the receiver seems to have at the back specifically mentioned for power.

 

 

[Derkoli]

22 hours ago, apurv1595 said:

Would something like the massdrop O2 + SDAC DAC/AMP work? It just use a micro USB to USB A for power which the receiver seems to have at the back specifically mentioned for power.

 

 

Yes that would work.

[apurv1595]

Thanks a lot for the help.