Fiio E5

[Camsung]

I have asked around the forum and it seems like the best way to improve the volume and sound quality of my smartphone's audio is by purchasing a portable headphone amp. I have settled on the FiiO E5 based on all the positive reviews, but i will unfortunately not be able to try it out personally before purchasing it. Does anyone here own a FiiO E5? How much will it affect the sound coming from my phone into my headphones? And are there any other alternatives?

[Camsung]

The headphones I'm using have an impedance of 40 Ohms by the way

[NannerBeans]

Edit: Nevermind. Did not read that this is a smartphone.

 

Before buying the E5 I would say download the poweramp trial and see if that helps. I don't think an amp would help if the volume is already loud enough. Perhaps the problem is software related and not hardware. 

[h264]

what smartphone are you using?

 

EDIT: Check this out:

 

http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/03/fiio-e5-headphone-amp.html

[Camsung]

How much will the E5 boost my volume by?

[ShearMe]

It says in that article linked above:

 

MAXIMUM GAIN & OUTPUT: Here’s the E5 with its volume at maximum. I raised the input voltage until it was close, but not yet clipping. Here, even with 1.27 volts of output into 15 ohms—over 100 mW of output and the THD is still under 0.02%! This is very impressive. And 100 mW is a very impressive output level. This is about twice what the NuForce uDAC-2 could manage into the same load. Note also, this is referenced to the input voltage. So the maximum gain of the E5 is 8.5 dB in one channel and 4.6 dB in the other. I didn’t bother testing into a higher impedance load, because with the 0.7 output impedance it makes little difference. It always starts clipping around 1.3 volts RMS.