What would be a good portable Dac/Amp to use with my HD6xx and Sony Xperia 1 V cell phone?
I am new to this hobby. I purchased a HD6XX and plan to use it with my Sony Xperia 1 V cell phone, that has a 3.5mm jack. I was wondering if I needed a portable dac/amp or just a portable amp and if so what would one recommend? Any assistance one could provide, would be greatly appreciated. Kind regards, Haz
Mar 7, 2024
Personally, I use a 5.2.2 setup for watching movies/gaming but when playing music I always go into Pure Direct mode for 2ch stereo. Mind you, this is in a larger room with loudspeakers at a distance of ~10ft from the seating position and roughly 8 feet between them angled at roughly 30 degrees from center. Despite being in stereo, it's very holographic and can fill a room easily with sound. However, every now and then, I do run 2ch with presence speakers and that does add an interesting bit of height but it's very track/genre specific. Really the only time I even use 7ch stereo is when listening to classical and usually have an appropriate hall-effect DSP to add in some reverb, delay, echo, etc.
Here's a diagram with placements and angles to give you a better idea:
Honestly, it may be wise to invest in a budget AVR as these days they have microphones that can dial in the sound for wiring, distance, and various speaker layouts to suit a room. They're not 100% but they do get damn close and you can always dial-it in yourself and EQ as necessary. Even if you wanted to forego a traditional surround setup (5.1), you could always run a "front surround" setup and it would virtualize the rears to the front channels. I have a similar setup in my smaller office that is technically a 5.1 setup but all from the front. You could also forego the rears and run a 3.1 setup to achieve most of the effect since the rear channels would be routed to the fronts and processed accordingly by the AVR. I only recommend the latter if your room is on the smaller size but it would do a fairly good job of giving you a "surround sound" despite not having read speakers.
My goal isn't surround sound in the sense of having 4 separate channels. I knew all along this would still be 2 channel audio going to 4 speakers. I was just going for the "surrounded by sound" albeit it stereo.
The goal is to have stereo L/R sound coming from around me not at me. So that if you closed your eyes you'd almost feel like you were wearing a pair of headphones. It may be silly but its probably something I'll end up trying.
Being a desktop setup I don't really have room for an AVR, and if I wanted true surround sound I'd move the LSR's to a living room setup with an AVR. As is I have been thinking about replacing them for my desktop setup for something with a forward facing bass port due to them being about 4-6" from walls. I have the low frequencies bumped down on them because of the addition of the subwoofer as isbut I'm not sure how much the walls are affecting the sound. I personally think they sound great, and so has everyone that has heard them...however I'm newer to the 'audiophile' scene so I'm sure some people would hate them lol.
Since you're on a desktop, a quality 2.1 or even 3.1 (center speaker) setup would give you better sound and staging especially if you could widen and angle where your fronts are. That alone would make a bigger difference than trying to run rears especially if you don't have some sort of DSP to compensate for mixing to those channels. With the fronts angled and placed correctly , if they're bouncing off the rear wall behind you, they should still generate a good amount of "surround effect." This is similar to what soundbars do with VSS and other tricks.
Also, rule of thumb is any loudspeaker that's closer to a wall will generate more bass and sound "boomier." This is even more so when placed in a corner.