Improving Headphone Sound

Thanks everyone for your very helpful responses. I have now registered at Head-Fi and am beginning to discover how little I really know about Headphone listening. Thanks Finthen for the heads-up about "Iron_Dreamer"'s review(s), they'll take some time to digest but initially are truly impressive & valuable.

Kublakhan, I'm not sure what "She Who Must Be Obeyed" has decided that my budget will be, but would guess in the $2,500-$3,500 range.

Again, thanks everyone and I'm off to do my homework.

Regards,

Bob

Is She Who Must Be Obeyed possibly going to be listening with you? In that case you should keep an eye out for amps with two jacks...although even with an external headphone amp connected to your DAC1 you can listen from the DAC1 and from the headphone amp at the same time (which, btw, is a great way to decide whether the amp is better than your dac1 jacks.)

If you budget is that high I can recommend w/o hesitation the Stax Omega II system for around $3k new. Very satisfying for audiophiles relegated to cans.

If you haven't already invested in power conditioning then this is a must. I've used various devices which all had some good results. The cheapest was a Brickwall audiophile surge suppressor ($240). I wasn't expecting much power conditioning since I bought it because I lived near the top of a mountain in North Carolina and wanted to leave my equipment on all the time since this improves performance significantly. The Brickwall was pretty good at cleaning the noise from the power supply.
Better was a PS-Audio Ultimate Outlet (about $200). Unfortunately the two outlets on it are not isolated from each other so often digital gear will put noise back into the power line which can feed into your amplifier.
Other options which are still not too expensive include power strips built by Bolder Cable which include Bybee Quantum Purifiers to isolate some of the outlets from each other while at the same time as filtering the power as it comes into the strip by the use of the Bybees. I'm currently using separate power cables which have Bybees on both sides of the line.
The first time I used the Ultimate Outlet I was stunned with the increased clarity cause by cleaning up the power.

I agree that the DAC-1 is a better DAC than a headphone amplifier. And I found the Grace Design m902 a better headphone amplifier than a DAC. So I run the DAC-1's XLR output to the m902's balanced input with a pair of PS Audio Xstream Statement cables, and the results are better than either of them used alone. BTW I use Audio Technica ATH-W1000 Sovereign headphones. Cheers!