I just bought a pair of Sennheiser HD 600 they're great but I think a headphone amp would be the greatest improvement. Any recomendations in this direction it would be nice to have something I could hook up in places where I dont have a decent system or even right off a cd player. The Grado RA-1 look interesting but $300 is the question while it might not be a lot of money in the whole equipment area it is a lot for me right now, but maybe I should go for it.
Hi Floyd, Congrats on the Senns. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do mine. I am using a Musical Fidelity Xcans tube headphone amp which works very well. They has upgraded the Xcans to Xcans2. Supposedly sounds even better. The best source for info is this website: Head-Fi
thanks Joseph the site looks good I'll have to spend some time on it. On a former thread someone mentioned that they hook there headphones to the speaker output (at least it sounded like that) how would one do that without a headphone amp?
This technique is for headphones such as Stax that come with a connection box designed to tap into the amp directly. Don't try it with your Senns headphones!
I'm using a KRELL headphones amp... great sound! I always can recommend external amps for your headphones.
I can´t see what´s wrong with that... The usual headphone output of any hi-fi amp is connected parallel to the speaker output, possibly with a resistor in between, maybe 8 Ohms or something. I would leave that out. Just connect the headphone to the speaker output. If your amp doesn´t have a dedicated headphone output, just buy an insulated 6.3 mm jack, solder some cables to it and connect that to the amp output! One caveat: if you have a tube power amp, and it is an ultralinear push-pull configuration, then you must have a significant load on the output of the amp, otherwise high voltages will build up in the output tubes and ultimately damage the tubes and output transformer. This kind of tube amp must not be operated without a load, and your headphone might not be anough load. You can provide that load with a resistor of a couple watt and maybe 15 Ohm, and then connect it to the 4 Ohm output instead of a speaker.
These connection boxes are usually sold WITH the headphones. Although it is technically possible to use with other headphones it does require some technical ability (as you point out above). It also requires the sound to the speakers to go through the headphone box which may affect the sound quality at the speaker (an extra set of connections). With the availablity of excellent headphone amps this potential deterioration is avoided. Most headphone amps can easily be connected through a tape out.
