Except I have because I also hooked them up to a 100w speaker amp with and without the adapter. It isn't up for debate because your view on this makes no sense. How is it that a speaker amp helps the sound? Explain it in detail, because there is no reason a speaker amp would help them sound better other than louder.

I can explain why it doesn't help the sound. If you can do the same on why it does, we can have a conversation. If your only argument is "because I heard it," then we don't because I doubt you did proper testing.

>Anyone running pro audio gear in a studio uses power conditioning.

But this is not a pro audio product, it is a consumer product meant to be used by consumers. It is an issue because the competition doesn't have this problem and at no point should a company expect people to know and use power conditioners for their audio when most of the time they aren't needed. They don't advertise or advise consumers to use one.

>It very well still may be the Drop amps, by design.

Definitely possible.

To be fair to OP, most amps you can buy don't need one so that would still be a big flaw with this product if it did.

Speaker terminals are R+, R-, L+, L- so you can connect them directly. You can make your own cable or buy one. There is also the Hifiman adapter you can buy which is pretty much a resistor box to help protect your headphones/amp.

Speaker amps don't really make that much of a difference unless you are listening at stupid high volumes. 50W speaker amp into 4 ohms is 14v. HE-6 is 50 ohms, which means only ~4W of power. That is still a ton of power but there is no guarantee is is clean, and even then, do you really need to listen that loud (114db)?

I had a pair of HE-6se that had a lower sensitivity than the HE6 and I was fine with a 1W amp. The people who think speaker amps do more for the sound are just not testing properly, especially in a planar with a flat impedance curve so it isn't even a tube amp thing where it does change the sound, just not for the reasons people seem to think.

Qobuz and Bandcamp are the way. Some artists I listen to sell FLAC directly like Postmodern Jukebox and some you have to scour the internet for. I have a few tracks not available in my country so I had to use a VPN to buy them.

Here is my YouTube one.

The AES does presentations open to the public and archives them here. There is another by JJ that is going to be added soon on signal bandwidth.

For headphone design principles, you can search for the book "Headphone Fundamentals" by Carl Poldy. Toole's book covers headphones to some degree as well.

I also have a copy of "Loudspeaker and Headphone Handbook: Third Edition" that I managed to get cheap and use as a reference when I need to look something up. It doesn't have everything and I don't quite understand everything but it has a lot of info, lol.

Quick edit: Here is another neat YouTube channel. And two videos on the basic backbone of digital audio: 1 2

And intro to Fourier Transform.

I unironically started with lossless that way. You used to have devices only support some formats so you had to convert and having lossless to start from meant you had the best conversion. After a while, having a ton on FLAC meant I didn't want anything new to not be FLAC, it wouldn't match the rest!

It also came with a remote...

FR is the most important thing for tonal perception which is 99% of headphone sound. If you really get into it, is actually the only thing that matters. Most people say FR to refer to a graph someone posts. That graph that you see can give you an idea of the tonal balance with the conditions it was measured on (hopefully a good seal on an average pinna with a specific acoustic impedance).

In reality, what you hear will be different. Some headphones will interact with your ear better than other headphones, some headphones will have peaks and dips where you would normally hear peaks and dips and that would make the headphone sound wider or more natural than another headphone. The HD800/s have an upper mid dip that makes music sound further away along with excellent pinna interaction. This makes the headphone sound wide and naturally so. Rtings has a measurement for this but it doesn't necessarily tell the whole story every time but I've yet to see a better method.

Your ears alter the FR of everything you listen to. Things in front of you have a dip around 8-10kHz because the high frequency waves bounce off the ridges in your ear and cancel out around that frequency. A headphone that either has a dip where you have or interacts with your ear to make that dip naturally would sound more in front. Image example of what I'm talking about here.

Some headphones also are super hard to seal on anyone's head. If the headphone was measured on a head simulator with a good seal and it seals on your head very poorly, what you hear will be dramatically different from what was measured. Closed back and DCA open back headphones are notorious for this. There are some other headphones, like most Hifiman and the Meze Empyrean that are designed so that they don't have such a big change with a break in the seal, often times getting a small boost follow by roll off below the driver's resonance frequency. Examples: DCA, Meze, Hifiman.

All of these things are FR but not what you see on most FR graphs. Distortion affects FR, soundstage comes from FR, the natural feeling of a headphone comes from FR, it just isn't something you can point to on the usual graph and say "that's soundstage" because it is often different for each person the headphone is put on. You can see how a headphone interacts with the measurement fixture to see if it is just the innate peaks and dips of the headphone making it seem that way to one person or actual interaction with the measurement rig's ears. This requires multiple measurements most of the time and isn't normally shown with a regular FR graph.

Hearing is fairly well understood and is the effect of pressure at certain frequencies on your ear's sensory parts. The measurement of this pressure at a given frequency is what a FR graph is and why it is generally the main important part of a headphone but you have to understand what the graph means, what it can tell you, and what it can't tell you. Often times You pretty much always need much more than just one measurement though.

Why we perceive these things are also fairly well understood and I have a playlist of really nice lectures if you are genuinely interested in learning. It is some really cool stuff.

That indicates a good mix, though a good headphone can play that mix more accurately than a non good one.