My Fosgate Signature Tube Headphone Amplifier has recently been sounding better than I thought it could !

Posted by Old SteveA (A) on October 23, 2015 at 16:02:35

I've had this amp for sometime but it never really impressed me that much, that seems to have changed about six or seven weeks ago !

I'm not sure which of the changes I've been making to it might be most responsible for the very nice sound lately as it doesn't seem to exhibiting some of the characteristics I might have wrongly assigning to "Tube Sound". It's no longer highlighting some parts of the music over others & as such all that is happening in the musical picture appears to be scaled correctly in a "You are there" in the acoustic of where the music is being played ! This is the only listening perspective that really works for me in the music I listen to. Someone recently
tried to tell me he didn't really care how well a headphone imaged for him because it would always sound "small" to him in comparison to what he heard from loudspeaker & "the real thing". I think I may have done a "piss poor" job of explaning how listening to music that was
sonically reasonably well "Scaled" can have the effect of delaying the sound of what you hear long enough to give you a sense of dimension. If this type of sound is not what I'm regularly hearing , listening to recorded music becomes something not worth my time. I spend a lot of time listening to music,so I must be getting something right. So on to the Fosgate!

I really don't think using the supplied 12AX7s do that much to dissuade me from caring about the sound characteristics I was hearing from the music. I thought it sounded better using 5751 tubes,while I liked the amp slighty more, but still was sold on the sound. I liked using
NOS tubes of either of these tubes even less . I decided to see if a pair of 12AY7 tubes would be more to my liking ,they were. I'm currently using a pair of Electro Harmonix EH12AY7s that seem to be working exceptionally well for me sitting in a pair of Novib tube sockets from Tubemonger (I don't care for their NOS tubes , but I like the Novib sockets as I
think they might be insuring that tubes don't develop any microphonics to them)

I changed the powercord, interconnects & fuse to cryo-treated ones. This seemed to also add more smoothness & leave less of "another piece of equipment" footprint in the signal path of the music to the headphones (Hardwired with Black Dragon headphone cable & extremely modded Senn HD800s: which now have a slighty "dark" supremely detailed & a not that far removed from having a bass response close to what you can get from a Hfm HE-6 , but more importantly more than sufficient enough to give Orchestral music a sense of "Scale")

I'm thankful that I wasn't on a fixed income when I picked up an Equitech 1.5Q BPT line conditioner & a Metrum Hex DAC (of all the equipment I own I think the Equitech makes whatever good results I get as pleasurable as they are due to the merits of using it). Much of
how good other components are sounding can be attributed to my "Taking Ownership" of them & changing some of the Tech (or at least adjusting it) to suit what works for me!

I really can't full heartedly aggree with the saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it" & unless you have extremely deep pockets most of the equipment you have could be better "technically advantaged" then it is ! (But none of this even matters if you're listening to music that sounds
like "CaCa") (what happens if you press the "Eat me" blue letters on the message board?) (Do you get transfered to the "What"s Best Forum" website?)

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