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I am somewhat of a wanna-be audiophile, and a few months back I decided it was time to invest in a fairly nice set of a headphones. I settled on the Sennheiser HD-595s which have received great reviews and are at a relatively low price point compared to a really high end set of headphones.
Upon getting them I immediately plugged them into my iPod for a test drive. Oh no! The highs and mids sounded extremely clear, however the lows were nonexistent compared to my Sennheiser earbuds which sound wonderful for the price, with nice highs and mids, along with rich, full bass. It's amazing what kind of sound can be pushed through speakers so tiny!
I knew this couldn't be right so I did some research and I came across some articles that talked about using "headphone amps". I'd never heard of these, and frankly, using an amp with a pair of headphones sounded absurd. I continued reading about them and found that you can build you own if you're into that kind of thing, which I am, but I'm more into instant gratification at this point.
Eventually I ran across some affordable headphone amps from Headroom that got great reviews. Getting over my angst about buying something as absurd sounding as a "headphone amp", I thought I'd give a Total AirHead amp a try. I chose this one because it can be connected to an external power adapter so it doesn't have to rely on it's batteries or a USB connection as the Total BitHead does for power.
WOW! What a difference this little amp made! The low frequencies that were missing before were there in full force now, and everything sounded great across the spectrum. This bit of hardware really makes these headphones shine. I totally recommend checking out these amps if you've got a nice set of headphones, it'll be worth it.
An added benefit that I discovered about this amp is that it has two audio output jacks. So if you'd like to, you can connect two sets of headphones at the same time, however this isn't how I use it. Late last year I moved away from my desktop Linux machine and bought a MacBook Pro to use as my main computer (Love it!). The issue is that my Klipsch ProMedia set of speakers have two mini-jack connectors that plugged into my sound card. One for the front speakers, and one for the rear speakers. The MacBook Pro only has one audio output, so I could only plug in my front speakers, rendering my rear speakers useless.
Total AirHead amp to the rescue! With it's two audio outputs, I can connect the audio out from my MacBook Pro to the Audio in of the amp, and then connect the two jacks from my speakers to the audio outs of the amp! Voila! All four speakers work, albeit not in surround mode. I believe I'll be buying a second amp to leave permanently connected to my speakers. W00t!
The moral of this story is that if you've got nice headphones and love great audio, or need to connect speakers with two mini-jacks to a source with only one output, you need one of these amps....or perhaps two.
Posted by Casey Williams on September 6, 2007 12:46 PM | Permalink
This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on September 6, 2007 12:46 PM.
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