All in one unit for headphones- help me decide


This is a follow up to a previous thread. I am looking for an all in one unit to run headphones (Sennheiser HD800S) at a newly acquired vacation home. I am looking for a Dac, headphone amp, streamer, ability to play files from a SSD (internal or external) and self contained software/app. Based upon my spending time at Axpona, I have the following 4 candidates:

Auralic Altair (g1.1 or 2.1)

Naim Atom headphone edition

Hifi Rose (250 or ?)

Cambridge eVO (150 or 75)

I can easily review the features ( so limit your comments), but I am interested if anyone has experience with the relative sonic performance through headphones of these units. I am not interested in the performance through speakers and their amp output, only headphones. I have a suspicion that since the HIFI rose and Cambridge focus more on display and bells and whistles, their sonic performance is a bit below the other two.

meiatflask

Showing 1 response by ghdprentice

@v-fi  +1

 

Very few integrated components with speaker outputs have quality headphone outputs… even on $10K units. I have heard some people say there are some. But I have never heard one.

So I would definitely nick the two bottom ones.