Yep, vali has good synergy with bright headphones like q701 and dt880. Never heard the pairing myself, but I've read lots of positive impressions on the head-fi vali thread.
The vali has been said to do great things with the Q701. One thing to be sure is that your sound card has a low noise line-level output. Please use the line-out if you have it available. The Vali's noise floor is not very low, and this works well with low sensitivity headphones and orthos. The Q701's sensitivity is not high enough to notice the noise, but it does not help anything to have a noisy DAC/line level signal.
Hope this helps
I'm using the Q701 with the Magni right now as we speak and it sounds amazing. It would sound great with the Vali too because these are very cold sounding headphones in my opinion.
Thanks for all the opinions. I had already been poring over the Vali thread at headfi for the past week, and was more or less set on getting it eventually, but thought it would be good check in here with you experts at geekhack
One of the main things that I was hesitant about was that the essence is said to be a great soundcard for headphone usage, and wondered if getting a seperate amp was worth it. Still, the Vali is affordable enough to just give it a whirl, so I'd probably put in an order.
@Binge,
I'm looking at the spec sheet of the soundcard, and it seems like it doesn't have a line level output? I was planning to run a connection using the headphone out to the vali, since the rcas are already being used by my speakers; is this a major concern, or just a small niggle that could probably be ignored? As I understand it (which is based on the cursory reading of a layman), the headphone out on the essence has a pretty low SNR, though the RCA connections would understandably have a cleaner signal.
But it looks like I won't be able to leave both speakers and headphones connected at the same time if I use the RCA connectors > Amp, unless I shell out for something like the Asgard 2/Lyr, or give up on the Schiit and go for the Bravo Ocean (not particularly keen on that).
Copied from the site page.
Analog Output
1 x 6.3 mm jack (1/4") Headphone out
2 x RCA (Un-Balanced)
Analog Input
1 x 6.3 mm jack (1/4") (Line-in/ Mic-in combo)
Digital
1 x S/PDIF out (1 x Optical / Coaxial combo)
1 x Front-Panel Header
1 x Aux in (4-pin header)