I have never used the McIntosh headphone output and the P5s have mainly been used as “mobile headphones” straight via iPad/iPhone when in hotel or holiday etc…
I have no idea as to how good the headphones are for listening compared to others or how much to invest to seriously improve on SQ, nor do I know how good the headphone section in the C52 is (yes - I´ll test myself).
First problem that comes to my mind is, even if the C52s integrated section were decent, its about 4 meters short of any listening position - so I would need a long cable. Also Im not sure whether to have the headphone listening spot in the stereo room (as here I would probably play via speaker most of the time anyways).
If I were to place it in the living room - I can not use the McIntosh - thus a separate amp would be needed.
So basically the first questions would be fixed or mobile setup and the which components and how to build it up…
… any experience and/or suggestions are happily taken
I would check over on Head-Fi for headphone meets in your area or for CANJAM. I’m headed to CANJAM @ RMAF in Denver on October 5-7th. They have global CANJAMs now slso.
You can use a Raspberry Pi with a DAC HAT, install RoPieee and use a Meridian Explorer² or Pro-Ject Pre Box S2 Digital DAC if you care for MQA.
There are inexpensive plug and play solutions like the BOSS Player.
These RPi based solutions work fine over WiFi and RoPieee is install once and forget.
A few thoughts that might help you get started. This is all based on my budget, but for any component I have you can swap out for something that does the same thing but is 10x cheaper, or 10x more expensive.
My first step when I started properly using my headphones again was just getting an extension cable (I got a Grado one) to run from my main pre-amp. This is obviously a cheap option, no fuss, works perfectly, and solves the problem for a specific area.
For years I had a Roland UA-25 USB soundcard hooked up on my desk, driving active monitors or headphones when I needed to be quiet. The monitor outs started playing up, so I bought a Schiit Fulla 2. This is a great semi-portable solution. It mostly lives on my desk, but I’ll occasionally take it with me to the kitchen if I’m working in there. I’m also now travelling with it (literally right now it’s sitting in front of me on a plane!). There’s plenty of portable USB headphone amp/dac combos, so this works brilliantly if you have a Roon endpoint to plug it in to (usually my laptop), and maybe want some portability.
That old UA-25 got a second life down the back of the house, next to a nice chair I’ll have a coffee in each morning. Tucked away in a drawer is a Raspberry Pi acting as a Roon endpoint, and the UA-25 is plugged in to that via USB. I wouldn’t want to be constantly unplugging a Pi and moving it around - so this sort of setup works well if you want to have a specific listening spot (and especially works well if you want to hide everything away).
I’m now looking in to getting a Dragonfly Red and some IEM’s. The Schiit is great, but it doesn’t run off an iPhone/iPad without extra power, and it’s also not as ‘stick in your pocket’ portable as the Dragonfly. The idea here is that if I’m heading out to a cafe to do some work, or just going for a walk and want some quality listening, I can easily grab it and go. So this works well if you want super-portability and mobile/tablet simplicity.
Hopefully that helps with some options. Less about actual gear, more about use cases.
… of course the best solution for mobility would be if Roon were to integrate a mobile version/app
Getting an extension cable sounds like a good and small invest to get things started and use the headphone section of the amp… I always thought 3-4 meters would have a negative effect on SQ - seems not though… so that‘s actually great!!!
I went to a Roon get together in Los Angeles a couple of years ago where Rob Darling was present. He said Roon to Go was forthcoming, but said it would take some time to fully develop Roon 2.0.
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