Haonan
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@haonan
the panam is currently powered by a wall adapter. ALO sells additional components for power conditioning but I've tried the passport (battery pack) and I just don't hear any differences. thus I'm not a believer of power conditioning. how much are those that you mentioned.. should be quite costly right?
im curious how a usb powered dac/amp can provide enough juice for th600
Silly me. U're right its only natural for the ALO PanAm to support wall AC input, cause of its built-in amp. Even though the A3 also got built-in amp as well, from my knowledge Fostex made efforts and built this more as a transportable DAC wise with the amp section an an afterthought.
But I can assure you its amp section is definitely not weak, it's not based on discrete design unlike some other higher-end boutique amps, then again for its pricing it's not meant to compete with those 800 to 1K amplifier rigs, this is only a 38K yen small DAC/amp when initially announced back in 2010, and only costs 25k yen odd right now in JP (approx. 320SGD)
When you are using a separate USB-conditioner/isolator device, you are actually already feeding dedicated clean power from separate AC mains liao, only using the USB cable input for signal feeding from yr PC/laptop. My RAL-EXTPW01 from Ratoc is not really that expensive, costed me ard 280SGD after conversion frm JP. The Buspower Pro by Aurorasound retails for abt 10,500 yen, and there are also more expensive ones such as Acoustic Revive RUI-1 which is ard 44k yen.
Rem there was a pretty long comparison thread comparing Woo Audio's WA7 vs ALO The PanAm together, seemed to recall there were some owners of the WA7 inside who owns the Aurorasound USB-isolator as well and reported significant improvements to the overall SQ. So together with what I had experienced with my Ratoc Labs USB-isolator when paired with the A3, I would say its true it will still yield an improvement. But as for how big is the improvement prolly will vary from individual to individual, afterall u're not new to this hobby yrself and each of us tends to hear stuff differently.
Does the TH600 require alot of amping power by itself? As far as I can recall from my demo trys at Jaben last time, it's not leh. Planar Magnetics hps from HifiMan is a different story though, and someone alrdy mentioned before HE500 is just chicken feet for the A3 in one of those Head-fi threads liaos.
