Hello everyone, it's been years... (for anyone that remembers me anyway)
I am researching what amp best suits my somewhat bespoke needs, and thought there might be some useful opinions here, especially since I've been rather out of it for ages.
To cut a long story short, about one year ago I suffered an accident that damaged my ears, the result being that I have severely reduced dynamic range in my hearing. Though my sensitivity is normal and frequency response is good (i.e. little to no hearing loss), my pain and distortion threshold has been lowered to around 80dB. This means that for real music listening (classical in my case), I can manage with a level that sets absolute peaks at around 85dB.
In order to maximise what I can get out of my remaining dynamic range, I find myself using IEM's (Ety 4XR currently) to cut background noise to a minimum. So I'm currently looking for an amp that would have vanishingly low distortion and noise into this kind of setup. Maximising transparency (of the 'straight wire with gain' kind, not 'extra detail' or anything described with a fancy sounding adjective), through minimum distortion, noise etc. are top priorities, whereas output power is relatively irrelevant for such low listening levels even with much more demanding headphones. In fact, with those kinds of levels I don't even need a gain stage per se, as a gain of 1x is usually too much to get into most volume pots' optimal range. In a way, I guess I'm looking for a maximally transparent headphone buffer, if such a design exists out there on the market.
I don't care about the power scheme either - battery only, rechargeable, A/C only, it's all the same to me. I just want to get the absolute maximum from the music that what's left of my ears will allow...
Any ideas?