Do you need? Of course not… food, water, you need. Audio equipment you want. Is the amount of money you are talking about going to have a material impact on your kids? Let’s see, average tuition $35K + per year per kid. What will be the effect on your happiness looking back twenty years from now? You paid .001% more for your kids education or more enjoyable sound system. Will you use this while working… might you be happier while working and eventually earn more money. The question really has nothing to do with audio. Your equipment can be nearly infinitely upgraded to sound better.
Do I actually need a dedicated amp/DAC for my setup?
Hello World!
The obvious answer to the question is "Duh!*" with the asterisk being a caveat for like 0.5% of the time.
Well, I might be in that 0.5% of the time and, being right brain not left brain, I might be in a situation where my lust for the Ferrum Erco Gen2 is really unwarranted.
Current setup:
- Monitor / Destinations:
- Miniot Black turntable for vinyl (yeah, yeah, jokes aside) which has an admirable internal pre-amp
- Naim Atom HD for streaming
- Audiolab 6000 for CDs (for which obviously I’d need a dac/amp)
- Setups:
- A) home hifi station: Phonitor XE / Bifrost 2 / Lokius
- B) at-home work station: JDS Labs Element 3
- C) home personal computer: SMSL M500 Mk3
- D) Remote office work station: Atom stack
So the question: do I really need a better amp/dac in my hifi station if I’m only using it for the CD transport & the Phonitor isn't up to par for my flagship headphones? Is using the turntable pre-amp straight to headphones good enough given that it pumps out great volume?
I’m lusting after the Ferrum Erco G2 DAC/amp, thinking of selling the Phonitor/Bifrost/Lokius --- but really, do I really need it? I can take the cd transport through the SMSL MK3 just fine. If I can just sell the Phonitor-trio setup, I can use that $ to put towards the scholarship I set up for kids at my old high school, which would be nice.
Anyways, would appreciate your insight.