Name:
Location: Florida

see interests, AGE 63-2010 CONTACT: kelscientific@hotmail.com

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

THE FIIO E3 HEADPHONE AMP-MARVELOUS




---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you have a set of headphones, they can be used to listen to movies and music privately. I found that my HD-TV's audio while adequate would only reproduce stereo tracks if they were unusually good. This is due to the speaker setup in the unit; they are very oval and while reproducing mono sound very well, stereo imaging is a come see-come saa affair.

On top of that, dialogue was somewhat muffled at times from movies. Making the set louder was not always the answer. The clincher was that I had to contend with my brother's HD-TV in the next room that has no door to close.

I had no room to hook up a receiver that had a headphone jack. I have only one spare unit that works on a remote control and it is buried under two recievers and a NAD amplifier so I am not about to fool around with that and wiring since I am not up to it. The answer to me was some kind of headphone amplifier.

Exploring on e-bay brought up a host of possiblities. One Chinese company is FIIO that makes a model E3 and E5 headphone amplifier. I bought the E3 because even though it had no volume control, my headphones do have vol. controls on each side. In addition, my television's audio output is VARIABLE, meaning it is controlled by the set's volume control so this little thingy was something I thought would work. It actually had good audio specs and runs on 1AAA battery. It is about the size of two matchbooks.

I hooked it up to the variable audio outputs of my HD-TV. I then went channel surfing to see what I would hear.

First the sound quality of this thing is amazing and has a built in bass boost. I listened to come current 5.1 channel movies on some of the pay stations. Of course the movie track is combined into 2.0 stereo. The sound was outrageous, nice bass and stereo imaging and sonic nuances that I would never believe were in these movie soundtracks. As a subsitute for a full 5.1 system this was quite good and rather awesome.

I also hit the Fox movie channel which was showing the 1958 movie,THE FLY. Oh I saw it in 1958 and thought then and today it is a superb horror film. Looking over statistics on IMDB.COM, the movie was recorded in 4 track stereo. At that time(1958) TV had become so overwheminly convenient to watch that the movie studios had farted around with 3-D and stereo sound. Well over my headset, THE FLY sounded great in stereo and was very well recorded for its time. Sounds jumped from one ear to the other and inbetween with great fidelity.

The 2nd oldie I listened to was the last 45 minutes of John Wayne's 1960 THE ALAMO. Though not quite as good as THE FLY, it was way way above any which way I have ever heard this movie. I had listened previously to both movies over the speakers of my HD-TV and I could not tell if there was any stereo imaging or not. I have only tapped what I want to listen to in pure stereo.

If you have an amplifier or receiver, you just plug the audio outputs of your tv set into those two thingies and use a headset that has a plug that fits into a reciever's headphone output though I have to admit the FIIO produces some amazing sound over and above many receivers that I have listened to with headphones over the years.

Labels: , ,

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home