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Spending more on an amp then headphones

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cspirou:
At what point does spending more on an amp then on headphones make sense? If you have $500 to spend it seems pretty obvious to buy an HD600 + FIIO instead of a Lyr2 + Apple earphone. However as you scale up, the amps easily outpace headphones on price. TOTL amps from Headamp, Woo and TTVJ basically have 1 or 2 headphones that come close in price.

Yet what I constantly read is that most of your money should go into headphones and then consider an amp afterwards. Is this advice only for beginners?

Solderdude:
There are also people spending more on their headphone cables then the actual headphones themselves.

Yes, the advice works quite well for lower budgets IMO.

It also depends on the gear itself.
Buy a crappy headphone and no amp will be able to make it shine regardless how much money you throw at it.

You should audition headphones (if possible) with familiar music and buy the best sounding one to YOUR ears is comfortable to YOU and is within your budget.
Then buy a Magni and you're set.

After a while you get the 'upgrade fever' or read that X is sooo much better than what you have and you're done for...  :-\

Good sound doesn't have to be expensive.... then the law of diminshing returns kicks in depending on the budget.

Eric_C:
As what Solderdude said, it depends on the gear.
The rule of thumb for spending less on an amp than headphones is just that--a rule. As with any rule, there's exceptions, and the HD600 you happened to use as an example is one such exception, because it's widely acknowledged as a headphone that scales very well with upstream gear.
Besides, you might have a $500 budget now, so you buy a good headphone that scales + a passable amp now. But in the future, won't you have more disposable income, not less? And what if you acquire more headphones that have different amp requirements (e.g. planars and dynamics); won't you need an amp that is capable of driving all these different loads well?

zerodeefex:
Find the right transducer for you. Then start building a system around it.

Hands:
Go to a meet if you can and listen to various headphones on various setups.

Buy a headphone. Build system around headphone. You may need to run the headphone from a less ideal setup for a while until you can get what you really want.

Some headphones don't cost a whole lot relatively, like the HD600/650, but will keep scaling the better food you feed them. It's not their fault they're a good deal and like nice amps that tend to cost more money.

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