Start your addiction

So you listen to music on your phone with the headphones that came with the phone or you plug those same headphones direct into the headphone socket on your computer......well for not a lot of investment, you can upgrade your quality of sound by quite a large margin.

STEP ONE: Good Budget Headphones

WIRED -- Koss KSC75 Clip-On Stereo Headphones (Under £25)

KOSS have performed miracles with these budget cans, they clip on your ears and you do look a little strange, but the sound is brilliant. Not great in noisy environments like a tube train, they also leak sound all over the place but they offer a punchy crisp clear sound profile which is vastly superior over the headphones that are give always with a new device. Brilliant choice for holidays by the pool given the low cost.

WIRELESS BLUETOOTH --  TaoTronics SoundSurge 46 (£70)

OK so you want noise cancelling headphones so you can block all the chatty morons on your daily commute on the tube/overland rail. However Sennhieser / BOSE / SONY want £350 for very swish Bluetooth Noise Cancellation headphones with top of the range HIFI sound. Well if you want some compromises on true HIFI sound, there is a GREAT set of Noise Canceller cans on a budget. They sound BIG with a nice bass/low end profile, but Sony and Bose will blow them away on PURE musical performance but these cans are SEVENTY QUID yes £70. which means the TaoTronics SoundSurge 46 is £280 CHEAPER than the SONY/BOSE models. The NC functions are great, you can use them wired and Bluetooth too. Highly pleasing NC Bluetooth cans at the lowest price you can imagine. BTW i prosper in no way from this, purely my opinion and my willingness to help people make the right music-tech choices.

Step 2 : An entry level step to REALLY great sound quality

 
A DAC and a Set of Entry Level Headphones is first step to audio satisfaction, i would say most people should just stop here as the sound produced by this combination i am providing here is totally excellent and will blow away most peoples expectations, deep controlled bass, nice detailed sound in the mid range and sparkling high frequencies.

A DAC converts digital signals from your phone/device/PC/MAC and converts the digital stream to analog sound waves in your headphones. This the better the DAC, the better the reproduction of sound from the original recording. Your device will ALREADY have a DAC built in, that's how you hear the sound currently, here we are upgrading to a external DAC that does several things a lot better than the built in DAC.

• Better conversion from digital to analog, a better sound.
• Better isolation from interference which degrade a digital signal
• Better power consitioning, which means more music and less electro magnetic interference.

These entry level devices are small USB DAC's that you connect via USB to your device and then plug in your headphones, there in my opinion is one leading supplier here, AUDIOQUEST.

They have three models that ascend in price and performance, i have tested and owned all of these deices.

Dragonfly BLACK (£70) / Dragonfly RED (£160) / Dragonfly COBALT (£300)

I would recommend the RED and BLACK as first step, they have excellent performance, being musically superior due to the built in technology on the devices. The models differ in several ways but the most important being that the RED sounds more detailed and has a wider soundtage due to its superior DAC chip, resulting in a very enjoyable listen given it's ability to reproduce the music with a real authority. The RED has a more powerful headphone output and will drive well 95% of headphones.

These devices use DAC technology from ESS, the ESS 9010 DAC chip in Black and the higher-performance 9016 chip in Red employ minimum-phase filtering for naturally detailed sound. 


Also if you are going to connect these devices to a phone or tablet buy an appropriate connector from Audioquest known as the DragonTail at (£15), see below



The trick now is to pair these DAC's with some headphones that are easy to drive and provide a performance worthy of the superior sound the Audioquest DAC's provide. My choice here would be the 1More Triple Driver over ear headphones at (£160)  this set of headphones for the price are truely amazing, they have some great technology like THREE DRIVERS a 40 mm graphene dynamic driver + ceramic tweeter + bass reflector. The result is a sound signature with great highs, precise mids, and deep bass, which match the Draonfly perfectly......



in fact typing this review i have been using the DRAGONFLY RED and 1More cans with SPOTIFY and enjoying every random track......great starter system in being addicted to HI-FI