Thinking of moving to a Headphone system, thoughts

You will miss speakers at some point, even if it's just when a friend is over?

Here's what I did to make my office system more reasonable: Dumped my classe 30 and multiple amps for a music hall trio (pre/cd/tuner/amp). It has nice headphone outs for my 701's. However, if you want to go with stax, it has pre-amp outs also to run a nice little headphone amp. Video in/out and stereo in/out for the dvd player in 2 channel. Instead of keeping my CAL Alpha DAC, I had my unit modded by Partsconnexion. The cd sound is now the best I've heard.

So, dump all of the gear for a tiny cd receiver? It works for me and sound great. Yes, I still have a nice external amp and speakers which I'm glad I kept. For cd's, the unit sounds better than my denon 2200 also. The arcam solo and Linn were my other choices. Shanling seemed like a joke at 3 watts but that's enough for headphones or little klipsh?

Elevick, I think you just touched on the root of the problem...I will miss having speakers if I decide to go this route...I know for sure that I enjoy "feeling" the music, and the 3d soundstage much better than one that is created in my head...I hear and have read today that some of the highest fidelity systems, Stax 404II, AKG K1000, Stax Omega, actually begin to get the soundstage outside of your head. I would be very interested to hear some of these headphones and make my own opinion, but all are too expensive to justify purchasing new.

The new Sennheiser HD800 would probably fit the bill nicely, but they are expensive.

I think the best budget system would be Computer/Laptop-->Asynchronous USB DAC-->Headphone Amp-->Sennheiser HD650 or HD 800.

Some headphones have physical sound "crosstalk" between channels to provide 3d imaging. In normal speaker reproduction sound gets from right speaker to your left ear with delay. There are computer sound cards drivers that can imitate this delay creating 3d image. It also can be done in hardware but I don't know of commercial units available.

I have owned a few nice top end headphones, and my favorite was the Grado gs-1000, but even with a great amp they can't touch a speaker system in so many areas. If I were in your shoes I would go for some monitors and a subwoofer and listen at lower levels, and get some headphones for when you want to turn it up a bit.