Hi all, Several years ago, I purchased a pair of AKG Q701 headphones for use with a home stereo. These are, in my opinion, outstanding phones, especially considering the price is around $200 or a bit more on Amazon.They are wonderfully comfortable to wear for extended periods of time, more so than any other phones I've seen, bar none. Recent reviews indicate some dissatisfaction, since these are now apparently being made in China, rather than Austria, the home country of AKG. But that's not the point of this message.
I have tried my Q701 with the headphone output of my iPhone and find the output of the phone isn't sufficient to drive the Qs well. So I looked into the possibility of a portable headphone amp, such as the fiio e12, which has pretty decent reviews on Amazon. It is not clear to me, however, how you get the signal from the lightning port on the phone to the little amp, as it doesn't seem to come with a cable. You can purchase a separate LOD from fiio, but it has the old style 30-pin connector. You could then purchase an official Apple lightning adapter at some ridiculously inflated price, of course, and then I suppose the set up would work, although I don't think this amp has a DAC, and I'm not sure if you'd need one of those anyway. So, the question. What are folks doing who have head phones which are not driven adequately by the crummy output stages found in portable devices like phones etc? Mary
