Netbook to USB DAC to Headphone Amp on Batteries

For bang for the buck and maximum portability, I like my iBasso D4 Mamba. It has a very good portable headphone amp, and the USB DAC converts straight to I2S rather than going to SPDIF in between. The DAC sounds quite good. It runs on a 9 volt for about 9 hours, or via USB if you have access to your laptop or desktop. About $240 with shipping to the States from iBasso. Plenty of alternatives as well. Check over at HeadFi.org for more input on this subject. Other favorites there that combine a DAC and amp in one would be iQube which is a bit more expensive here in the U.S., or if you are really going for serious quality in a semi-portable (this one's kind of large) look at the Lisa III by Triad Audio. I just saved you a whole lot of reading over at Headfi. Two others you'll see come up often are Meier Corda amps, as well as Ray Samuels amps. You can throw all kinds of money at this. If you just want to add a standalone DAC to your Grado amp (adding one more little box to your cluster) check out the Pico DAC, which I think also goes straight to I2S.

PS Whoops, sorry, the Lisa III does not include a DAC, it is just a (highly regarded) headphone amp.

More to choose from here than I would have imagined...would love to see the results of a "shoot out" with high resolution headphones.

So a search over at HeadFi.org. There are numerous shootout threads pitting one or two of these against the other. Like here, take everything with a grain of salt...in fact, take it with more salt IMO - it is a different crowd over there, with plenty of crossover. There's a member there, Skylab, who's been doing an ongoing shootout that focuses more on the small headphone amnps, rather than the DAC's.

In general the Pico DAC and the iBasso D4 DAC are two of the most respected in the smaller offerings. I don't use a laptop interface - I simply use an LOD cable out of my iPod (older model or iPhone), into the D4 which is straped together with the iPod. The kit fits neatly with some accessories into a Lowepro Rezo 50 digitial camera bag. You didn't ask about portable headphones, and that's a whole other ball of wax.

The RWA Isabellina HPA is a usb dac with headphone output and it runs on batteries. Right now Im using a laptop run off its batteries into a offramp run on a bpt power supply then into my battery powered Isabellina HPA. Im completly off the grid and it sounds great. Its a very good battery powered usb dac.

I had the great pleasure of hearing Kingstyles1's headphone rig, he's describing here, just recently and can say that this combination sounded remarkably good. Not a trace of typical digital screaming meanies or graininess or stridency, which on headphones will encourage liberal use of Advil. I was mightily impressed at this thoughtful combination of components. It did not speak of digital in any way at all to me. If it weren't for the complete absence of pops and clicks I might of thought I was listening to an LP.