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One of my own design that combines National Semiconductor's LM4562 with a high speed buffer.
Judging from the response to last week's poll, <I>Stereophile</I> readers love headphones. Do you use dedicated headphone amplification?
I use a HeadRoom Total Airhead to pump a set of Shure E2G IEMs. My source is a 4GB flash iAudio U3, which lets me source Ogg and FLAC files. This forms a killer portable system that rides on my upper arm while I hike in my local national park.
For the casual listener, a plug in headphone jack suffices. For the serious headphone enthusiast, dedicated headphone amplification is the way to go. Having said that, headphones or in-the-ear phones gives what is commonly known as "binaural" sound and not exactly stereo sound. Sound appears to come from the center of the head between both left and right ears of the listener. Whether one likes it or not is a matter of choice and preference.
I used to listen to my over-the-ear headphones often when I plugged them into the Sony STR-V55 receiver I used to use. It must have had pretty decent amplification to the headphone jack as the sound was very good. Then I replaced the Sony receiver with a Yamaha separate preamp and amp. The sound that comes out of the phone jack on the Yamaha preamp is not nearly as good as it was from the Sony receiver. I need to purchase a decent dedicated headphone amp but just have never gotten around to doing that. Where I live there are not a lot of places where you can actually listen to and purchase them and ordering direct from a manufacture kind of concerns if the purchase does not work out.
I use an amp that Ah! (the firm that made a popular modded Marantz CD-player) made for a short time. It works just fine with my Sennheiser HD590. It has a tape loop, which makes it easy to install between my md-deck and "big amp."