My office headphone setup - great sound while I work

While my reference level audiophile headphone setup is at my home, I actually do most of my listening at work. Judging from my other audio setups you know I'm not going to settle for little Sony clip-ons at the office. Not only does great sound make the day more pleasant, it actually makes me more productive. My office has lots of open space, so having some music on allows me to drown out the various conversations, phone calls, and other distractions around me, but since my headphones are an open air design (see below) I can still hear people call my name and hear my phone ring. It's the best of both worlds!

As with my home setup, it all starts with the source. I store all my FLAC or JTHZ Lame encoded VBR MP3s on an external drive enclosed in a polished Onyx Black Vantec NexStar 3 enclosure. This connects to the computer via USB 2.0, except my work computer only has USB 1.1 - its slow, but fast enough to stream even full bitrate FLAC no problem.

Once we're in the computer we need a soundcard, so I got the legendary Chaintech AV710 in my machine. Why so legendary? This card costs all of $20, yet it sports a high-end Wolfson WM8728 24/192 DAC that is normally reserved for cards costing $100 or more. To make things even better I modded the output capacitors of the card with super high-end Blackgate NX series capacitors. These low density audiophile grade capacitors help keep the sound clean while adding a tiny bit of bass because of the larger amount of capacitance over the stock caps.

Next I get the sound from the card to my amp using a custom built, fully shielded, teflon insulated, 4x22 awg litz-braided silver-plated copper miniplug to RCA interconnect.

From there I amplify the line signal with a Headsave Classic amp. It's a great little amp with surprisingly good sound quality! I replaced the stock AD8620 opamp with dual AD843 opamps. In case you're wondering, opamps perform the actual amplification of the signal, and these opamps are manufactured by Analog Devices. They are both audiophile grade opamps, much better than you'd find in consumer grade equipment. This amp is powered by an fully regulated Elpac WM080-1950 power supply.

Lastly we need to listen to the sound! For that I have my limited edition Grado HF-1 headphones. These were released to members of the forum Head-Fi only, and less than 500 were made. They are based on the $200 Grado SR-225 headphone, but are modified with a wooden driver housing. Wood is very rare in the headphone world, and it is widely considered the best housing for speaker drivers. Each is individually numbered - I have #83.

Overall it's a much more modest setup than I have at home, but it still produces some very nice sound! There is simply no comparison between this setup and consumer grade equipment. This setup will easily outperform what many would consider hi-fi despite its very reasonable cost.

--Sean