Holy shit.
I’ve gone down a rabbit hole in regards to higher quality audio. I don’t have much in my life, but I have an intense love of music. I have a FiiO Q2 DAC that I used with an older iPhone (it has a USB-micro to Lightning cable) which I enjoyed.
I recently purchased 24-bit 192. kHz sources for some of my favorite music with the intention of supporting its playback while I work. So my FiiO DAC could work for my Shure IEM, but I needed a micro USB to USB-C cable to use the FiiO. Got it. My Shire 215s sound pretty decent – but I missed the feel of headphones. I have an old pair of Blue Microphone Mo-Fi (suggested to me by BT himself MANY years ago),. The DAC couldn’t seem to drive them properly evenrhougth they have their own onboard AMP. And they sounded like shit.
So I started looking at cans with a 4.4mm plug. Why? More power. Less noise. No other reason. Oh. And because I ordered a FiiO K11 2R2 DAC that only supports 4.4mm and 6mm balanced outputs for headphones. I am not going to be driving speakers. Yet.
Sennheiser 6xx, 490 Pro, etc. Rabbit hole. And they are not cheap. I was doing a lot of research. However, I have a ton of Bose headphones laying around. WAY more than pictured above. I remembered I had a 3.5m,m double-male cable I could use for some of them – to use BT headphones but in wired mode which I would need to listen to higher quality audio source.
I tried my trusty QC35s and 45s. Pretty good but not great.
Then my least favorite, the NC700s. Much better. Now, I wouldn’t need to turn them on because the DAC (Q2) has an amp. But I turned the NC7090s on to engage ANC – and the sound signature changed and picked up some more bass and smoothed it out. Silky smooth. I cranked the volume on the DAC and I was BLOWN AWAY by some BT source I acquired. It was like brand new music.
Holy shit.
I tried some regular source (no lossless or lossless hi-resolution) and it still sounded awesome. On a 3.5mm jack that was unbalanced.
U have a 4.4mm cable coming to use for my Shure IEMs to see if they sound any better, but probably not.
So the combination right now (my FiiO K11 2R2 hasn’t arrived yet) is:
- Bose NC 700s using 3.5mm headphone cable from headphones to DAC
- A FiiO Q2 Dac (with FiiO micro USB to USB-C cable for iPhone 15 Pro)
That’s it. I saved a ton of money not buy a new set of headphones, the NC700s will work for this setup and also the incoming desktop K11 2R2. I am not worried about 4.4mm from the NC700s to that DAC – I won’t need extra power from the DAC and I am not worried about noise. I’l; just use a 4.4m,m to 3.5mm adapter when using the NC700s with the K11 2R2. I already know they sound amazing with the Q2 – they should sound the same or even better using the K11 2R2 (going to use high gain, filter 1 or 6, and probably upsampling to 384 kHz (is that the rate?)).
It’s a fun rabbit hold to escape into.