Somebody please clarify the purpose of a headphone amp to me

M

Monkey_feces

Gawd
Joined
Jun 27, 2006
Messages
702
Is a headphone amp designed to make your headphones go louder without hissing? Do people really pay $200 just to lose their hearing faster? Personally, I would pay $1 for q-tips at save on and jam them violently into my ear canal.
 
A dedicated headphone amp generally uses better components to amplify the signal than what's used on a sound card, receiver, etc. They also (generally) produce more power which is advantageous for high-impedance headphones like the K601s, HD600s and so on, and is still advantageous for low-impedance cans regardless of the level at which you're pushing them.

Most speakers you'll come across are generally fine with five to ten watts of continuous power. Some manage quite well with as few as two or three watts. You never really need a lot of wattage to produce ear-shattering sound pressure levels, it's just that having that 'capacity' in reserve has its advantages, thus most 'audiophile' solid state speaker amps pushing a hundred watts per channel or more. The same concept applies to headphones and headphone amps, though it's a little different as headphones don't waste as much energy in crossover networks and such. You'll rarely want to push electronic components to their absolute limits, especially if what you're essentially doing is listening to their output.
 
some headphones need them to sound proper- the higher the impedance the more power that is needed
 
phide said:
A dedicated headphone amp generally uses better components to amplify the signal than what's used on a sound card, receiver, etc. They also (generally) produce more power which is advantageous for high-impedance headphones like the K601s, HD600s and so on, and is still advantageous for low-impedance cans regardless of the level at which you're pushing them.
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^^^ This.

Some of it also is just the usual e-peen thing with amps. If Amp A costs 10x more than Amp B, then it must sound at least 10 times more better! Don't forget to recable your headphones with cryo-treated non-oxygen druid-blessed fairy-dust coated hyperspace wire, and put the ion-stabilizing sack of rocks on top of the amp so it doesn't introduce jitter like those cheap $1,000 amps.

People really get weird with audio. But yes, getting into hearing damaging levels of sound also seems to be in vogue these days. Louder is subjectively better, unfortunately.
 
IMHO, a lot of the time headphone amps are redundant. Assuming your sound card has adequate analog output quality and enough power to drive your headphones at the desired listening volume without you having to max the volume, of course. I am not really an audiophile so take my opinion for what ever value you wish to assign it.
 
Monkey_feces said:
Is a headphone amp designed to make your headphones go louder without hissing? Do people really pay $200 just to lose their hearing faster? Personally, I would pay $1 for q-tips at save on and jam them violently into my ear canal.
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Is there a real question here or are you just trolling?
 
Headphone amps are to properly drive headphones. Most speakers and mp3 players have inadequete built-in amps, so this is just the equivilent of replacing a 50hp 1.0L engine in a large SUV with something more suitable.
 
Anything that drives headphones has an amp. You home stereos headphone jack is driven by a built in amp. Your sound cards headphone jack... driven by an amp onboard the sound card. Having a seperate high quality headphone amp simply bypasses those "built-in" amps, which are usually not that good, resulting in a better quality sound.

Once you actually listen to a pair of quality headphones driven by a quality amp (and a quality source) you'll understand the reason people use headphone amps. It's not about volume, it's about audio quality.
 
It's pretty hard to convince people about the importance of a headphone amp. Until they actually hear the difference, they're going to think you're the dumbest sucker they've ever met. In this case, hearing is believing.
 
CountChoculaBot said:
It's pretty hard to convince people about the importance of a headphone amp. Until they actually hear the difference, they're going to think you're the dumbest sucker they've ever met. In this case, hearing is believing.
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Spoken like a fellow, broke head-fi'er.

Run Monkey, ignorance is bliss...once you try some of this high end gear, you just can't go back.....says I, 12 month in.....8 pairs of headphones....and 4 amps later.....
 
I'm sorry, no...
That amp has one purpose... to make it louder, so it can provide reasonable throughput when using a splitter.
The HD280's are designed to be pretty easy to drive, and the x-fi should do a pretty decent job of driving them.

If you really want to try an amp, you should start off with a cmoy, at the very least. the de facto standard for entry-level headphone amps. Pre-made cmoys can be found on ebay, or you can build it yourself if you have a soldering iron.
 
Q tips are actually pretty horrible for your ears. It may seem like you're removing wax, but you're just ramming it further back into your ear canal. It can become impacted and then you need to get it removed by a doctor. It's kinda painful when they spray water to irrigate it. You're really messing with the body's natural ability to clean itself.

Moral of the story.... Save your $1 for a decent headphone amp! :D
 
Xyrax said:
Anything that drives headphones has an amp. You home stereos headphone jack is driven by a built in amp. Your sound cards headphone jack... driven by an amp onboard the sound card. Having a seperate high quality headphone amp simply bypasses those "built-in" amps, which are usually not that good, resulting in a better quality sound.

Once you actually listen to a pair of quality headphones driven by a quality amp (and a quality source) you'll understand the reason people use headphone amps. It's not about volume, it's about audio quality.
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Only if you use S/PDIF to your own DAC and then your own amp. Hooking an amp up to an analog output does NOT bypass anything and will WORSEN the distortion figures, though you can potentially get more output power if your external amp is more powerful.

Many soundcards use op amps as good or better than headphone amps use. If you get a sound card with LM4562 or AD8599 (the former being more common), you have the best available. OPA627, OPA[2]134, AD8620 are almost as good. Don't get an amp if you have any of those (unless your soundcard is noisy from bad power or RF interference or something, in which case you'll need a digital out)
 
plinko said:
It can become impacted and then you need to get it removed by a doctor.
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Syringes are actually pretty dangerous to boot. There are some Australian studies that have shown that numerous patients have actually suffered drum rupture due to the process, and that's not an easy fix. The best method is the ear pick -- basically a little ear wax spoon an audiologist or ENT can use to remove just the wax that must be removed, as problems can result due to excessive wax removal too.

The ears have their own mechanism for expelling excess wax, so it's generally best to let them do their thing. Quite frankly, I've never understood why people run around jamming Q-tips in their ears all the time.
 
Xyrax said:
It's not about volume, it's about audio quality.
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Unfortunately I think it's the other way around. When I got my first mobo with the new HD onboard audio, I thought, "Wow, this is really good stuff, it sounds better than my usual deck." Then I realized, oh, it's just LOUDER. Of course it sounds better louder, everything does. (It didn't help it was an mp3 source either... heh.)

This is true with Creative's Crystalizer also. It makes the sound LOUDER, but doesn't seem to do much else of worth outside the usual 'happy face' EQ.

So... does a headphone amp really make the sound better, or does it just make it louder (and thus, subjectively seem better)? Certainly in some cases it does make an improvement where the original amp is broken, badly designed, or underpowered. But I still believe that for 70% of people out there, it sounds better only because it is louder (which includes cases where the existing amp is insufficient to power the headphones properly). I really don't think there are many people at all that can even tell the difference between DACs, let alone hear a night and day difference. But almost 100% of people who don't have major hearing damage will hear a night and day difference when you turn up the volume, even a little.

And even when you do have your $10,000 special audio set-up (probably more than that if I tallied the cost of my own gear), the percentage of audio that you can buy that actually will utilize all the resolving power of that setup has to be in the 2% or less category of all available music. There are big reasons why lossy compression is in such wide-spread use, and very few people care.
 
Depends on the amp, and the headphones. In the case of high impedance phones, it is probably mostly just making it louder. Opamps operate more towards their ideal specs the higher impedance a device they are presented with. Now while even high impedance phones are real high impedance (for example a very high impedance phone would be like 600ohms, a line input could be like 33,000ohms) they are still much less stressful on the opamp. So the main improvement may indeed by volume, especially with a cheaper amp.

Now that isn't worthless. I had a pair of Sennheiser 580s at one time and most normal devices just couldn't drive them to be at all loud. My laptop was only capable of getting them to what could be described as a nice quiet listening level. Perfectly audible, but not even approaching loud. As such an amp is quite useful on phones like that to boots volume up to more normal levels.

Now on low impedance phones, the amp very well can improve quality. When you start stressing opamps, especially cheap one, with a low impedance load you'll find they don't perform as well. Their frequency response gets worse, there may be noise, etc. So, a properly designed headphone amp will be able to handle the current that the low impedance phones want and thus sound better.

Also, a good headphone amp may be set up such that it can exert a lot of control over the drivers in the headphones. As anything mechanical, they aren't perfect and will overshoot where they are supposed to go. Well if you have an amp with negative feedback going on, the amp will work to correct that.

So it depends a lot on the kind of headphones you have and what it is that you are amplifying. If your source has an output well suited to your phones, it may not do anything to hook up a headphone amp, even a pretty good one. However if your source is ill suited to headphones, especially if it is really designed for line level output, then you may indeed find that a headphone amp improves sound quality a good bit.

Some of our students played around with this at work one time. They built a simple buffer. Basically it was a unity gain circuit capable of a great deal of current output. It presented a high impedance input to the source and a low impedance output to the headphones. Didn't change the voltage levels at all. It did a rather good job helping the output of cheap soundcards, especially in the bass. The soundcards weren't really designed for headphones so they were having trouble pumping out the current they wanted. When it was offloaded to this buffer, they did a better job.
 
wildfire99 said:
Unfortunately I think it's the other way around. When I got my first mobo with the new HD onboard audio, I thought, "Wow, this is really good stuff, it sounds better than my usual deck." Then I realized, oh, it's just LOUDER. Of course it sounds better louder, everything does. (It didn't help it was an mp3 source either... heh.)
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My ipod nano drives my headphones twice or three times as loud as my on-board.
I'll be happy to trade it for any 'not-so-loud' component of your $10,000 setup =)

Seriously though, I thought my ipod was broken after I upgraded from my ibuds. Muddy as all hell, bloated, and no dynamic range.. would start to describe it..
My on-board sound on the other hand - I need to crank everything all the way up to hear acoustic & classical pieces.. distorts slightly.. but much much more tolerable than the nano.
I honestly have a really hard time telling the difference between a 128kbps encoded mp3 vs a lossless flac, but the sound on my nano vs onboard was great enough to motivate my wallet to upgrade to a prelude, which is getting to me next week.
 
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