Hi! Yes old thread but advice never gets old! I kept the HD650's and am extremely happy with them and the bass, sounds more realistic, less boomy which is what I was used to with the HD 25 ii's. A substantial improvement on the HD25 ii's (though they are still excellent for portable use) and...

Not sure? it was quite loud but not deafening, using Senn HD650's, maybe that's why, hard to drive (though X5ii is driving them very well :)

Ooops! All is fine...nothing to see here   (thanks)

I only had my X5ii for half a day and now the volume isn't working, the volume doesn't go up or down despite the GUI showing it changing, and changing from High to Low gain now makes no difference. Balance / pan also is making no difference. Everything was working out of the box this morning now...

Great! Have already pre-ordered from Amazon UK, thanks!

Hi,   are Fiio still on for the 15th June released date? I was hoping to be seeing it on Amazon or other online retailers by now for pre-order? Can you tell us when it will be available in Europe?   Thanks.

@Kjoh, thanks for your useful post.   @AlfredWong, my experience with the Fiio 9 was the opposite, the power dial was turned only halfway on low gain and that was plenty power for the HD650's. Any more and the loudness would have been way too much. The Fiio had enough power to drive far...

@jigsaw   they work perfectly together. There is more than enough power from the RME to drive the HD650's, so I already returned my Fiio E9 amp which was unnecessary (you can set the DSP settings to 0 DB and then increase the volume in TotalMix for even more volume if you ever need it!). The...

@derbigpr my post was about the bass on the HD650's compared to the Senn HD25's - not that there was no bass coming from the HD650's. Of course different songs will give different levels of bass. I think you may be right about them needing more burn in, there's nothing wrong with my source...

@Dubstep and @1974   The RME 9632 does have an onboard headphone amp - that was the point of my original post, would it be good enough and it seems that it is. The RME Babyface also has an onboard headphone amp but since it is USB bus powered it is not surprising that it is too weak to drive...

Quote: Well I would say it is lacking in both bass volume and impact. Example, the beginning to Pet Shop Boys 'West End Girls' (ok, go ahead laugh! - actually I'm more of an orchestral fan but was using more rock and pop songs for testing) has an electronic kick drum during the intro...

Hi,   I recently purchased the HD650's and the bass seems surprisingly weak, at least compared to my previous Senns, the excellent HD25-1 Mk II's which are also supposed to be accurate reference monitor phones. This is slightly confusing as the HD650's are almost double the price of the...

Well I got the Fiio E9 and after an initial few hours the truth is there is absolutely no difference at all in sound quality over just using the RME 9632. If there is any difference it is so slight as to be imperceptible to my ears. It seems the only benefit is that there is a lot more power...

Thanks everyone for all the great advice! You've answered all my questions!   @Tilpo, your post makes a lot of sense, I'm going to take your advice and get the E9 from Amazon - they have a great returns policy and I've got nothing to lose.   Cheers!

@Acix, thanks. I really don't want to go down the road of tube amps and to be honest I don't want to spend too much time and money worrying about climbing a ladder of incremental degrees of audiophile sound and at this point at least I am in no position to spend thousands of pounds on the best...

@Flatnine, I guess around the £150-200 mark?   @Tilpo, so you think the FiiO 9 will give a lot better sound quality over my RME soundcard? As I mention, power through my soundcard is not an issue, there is plenty of volume but if the FiiO would improve the sound quality then I would buy it...

Baka1969, thanks for your reply. It seems that Gilmour amp is no longer in production. Any other recommendations for neutral amps which are not too expensive? I'm scared to go down this road...!!   Acix, sorry I don't understand what you mean by "on the face"?

I recently bought the Senn HD650's and am running them from my RME HDSPe internal pci soundcard (http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_hdsp_9632.php) which has a built in headphone amp. There is certainly enough volume and power to drive the Senn's coming from the card and I can't imagine ever...