I’m sorry I can’t find the original thread, but this is a new question anyway. I was reading a thread yesterday that mentioned headphone amplifiers. Now I have a nice pair of Sennheiser HD600 phones. Good sound. Better than my speakers. But to get any volume, I have to turn my amp up at least half way, which isn’t good for my general purpose amplifier (really what we audiophiles call a receiver).
So can anyone here tell me what the heck a headphone amplifier is? I looked at the link provided, and it didn’t distinguish it from a general purpose amp. I’ve been an audiophile for 25 years, and until yesterday had never heard of a headphone amplifier.
Does it boost the signal from the regular amp to the headphones? What are the inputs and outputs?
A headphone amplifier amplifies the output signal from a source much like a stereo amplifier.
Portable headphone amplifiers have a standard mini-stereo input jack that connects to the headphone output from a source that already has a headphone output (such as a portable CD player or MP3 player). It takes that signal, amplifies it, and then sends it to the headphones
The reason for portable headphone amplifiers is because the headphone output from portable sources usually is not sufficient to power any decently “sized” headphones (e.g., Senn HD600s). You can also use a portable headphone amp off a regular source (one with RCA outputs) using stereo-to-RCA interconnects.
Non-portable headphone amps usually have your standard RCA inputs in the back and a headphone stereo output on the front. My headphone amp in particular has two headphone outputs: one optimized for 120ohm headphones and the other that’s labelled as 0 ohm. Also, unlike portable headphone amps, which use batteries, they are connected to a AC jack (110V in North America) and generally sound better.
The reason for non-portable amps is because hifi equipment rarely have headphone outputs. Even if they do, they are almost always last on the list of priorities, making it pointless to spend thousands of dollars on a CD player only to hear it through a crappy headphone output that probably cost $5 to implement. On a similar note, they usually cannot power high-resistance headphones to decent listening levels.
Thank you Ian. My receiver is a do it all that clearly was engineered to power small Walkman style headphones, my phones are bigger and I need to really crank the volume to get it to a decent level.
There used to be a company called Southwest Technical that made power amp kits and also sold one for a headphone amplifier. It was a “Class A” amplifier as opposed to the more widely used “Class B” amplifiers at the time. It provided a lower distortion signal but didn’t have much power. As I recall it was something like 2 watts.
Sparticus is this the thread? I posted in there about amps for 'phones.
Yes. Hamsters ate an earlier post thanking you and I didn’t check back till now.