Headphones and the Devialet

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Just wondering: why do you think the (Devialet) DAC is the limiting factor in your current set-up?

The truth is I don’t know if it is or not. I have not tried any other set ups . I was just wondering if a dedicated  DAC would do a better job. Like a dedicated headphone DAC, as my dedicated HP amp was a big improvement over the Devialet .

As you know I love my 200, but will a dedicated HP DAC give a better performance ? A dedicated HP DAC will have been designed to do exactly that. The Devialet was not . If this makes sense

I won't pretend to understand how Devialet has implemented the DAC, but what you get with the recommended setup using line outs for headphones did not sound nearly as good as I was expecting to would/should.   For me, separate DAC/amp sounds better.  I've been using an iFi Micro iDSD DAC/amp for portability and ease of use, and it sounds quite good.   But there are plenty of more expensive DAC/headphone amps that likely sound far better.   If/when I listen more via headphones, I'll likely go down that rabbit hole.

The reason I asked is that the differences in sound-quality between well-designed, accurate DACs are likely to be much less than you heard when changing from driving the headphones directly from the Devialet pre-amp outputs to driving them from a dedicated headphone amp.

That's because, as @Jean-Marie alluded to, the pre-amp outputs are not really designed to drive headphones: they may work OK with easy-to-drive (high impedance) headphones but not so well with low-impedance headphones which are harder to drive.  A dedicated headphone amp is always likely to be a better choice as its input will be a good match for the pre-amp outputs and its output will presumably be designed specifically for driving headphones.

That said, there may be other benefits of having a separate, dedicated DAC to drive your headphone amp apart from sound quality and the last thing I'd want to do is discourage you from experimenting