Over the past year, my dad has done a great job of treating me well when it comes to listening to music at work. Early last year, he bought me a pair of Grado SR60s headphones, and this Christmas he got me a HeadRoom Total BitHead headphone amp. The BitHead not only serves as an amp, but it also serves as a USB audio device, meaning that you can bypass that crappy on-board chipset and run it through a decent sounding sound processing chip. It runs a Burr-Brown PCM2902E DAC, and seems to be really well supported across a variety of OS platforms, seeing that it was picked right up by linux distro when I plugged it in.
So far, the combination of headphone and amp has been killer. Last year I started the arduous process of replacing all the mp3 files that I have with lossless FLAC copies. While it may not have been friendly to my available disk space, it has made music listening at work a much more pleasant experience. Without any equalizer tweaking I've gotten great results. All of the FLAC files have a superb, rich sound. The sound stage is really wide and airy. All the instruments are really distinct sounding and are not lost in some muddy musical haze. But, what really impresses me most about this setup is bass presence. Typical big box headphones have no low frequency presence, and sound completely washed out and tinny. When you hook this up and start playing songs, you'll swear somewhere replaced all of your music. The bass is ridiculously melodic, silky and omnipresent, but not overpowering. You can feel it in your head, but in a very satisfying "this is what music is supposed to sound like" way.
There are a few recordings that really stand out too. Kylie Minogue's Give it to Me from her Fever album sounds so completely different on this setup than on normal headphones. The song has a kicking, driving bass, and the tinny sound that lesser headphones produce is totally missing, replaced by real sounding music. Willie Nelson's voice on Crazy from his Milk Cow Blues album is front and center, oh so clear, and he sounds like he's sitting in the cube across from you singing. The Flaming Lips It Overtakes Me... from their At War with the Mystics is superb sounding too. The bass pumps but is entirely distinctive, not intruding on any other instrument, the vocals are smooth, the acoustic guitar towards the end of the song is crystal clear and sweet sounding.
The pair also does a decent job on 128+ bit mp3 files, although if you listen, you can hear the difference between the mp3 and FLAC files. The mp3 files don't have the same breadth to the sound stage--they seem a little more confined. They also lack the whole feeling sound of the FLAC files. The music seems a little more muted and not as rich feeling.
If you listen to tons of music at work, and are not one of the millions of mindless "I just use music as background noise iPod clones" (sorry Larry), then I'd definitely recommend looking into spending ~$200 and adding a whole new pleasent taste to your work life.
