I'm hoping someone can give a good account of the pros and cons of this approach. Specifically, I've heard of people putting 10 ohm resistors across their speaker terminals, or whatever the appropriate values, to hook their headphones directly up to the speaker terminals and allow the amplifier to "see" a load of just 8 ohms.
Is this as good as a dedicated headphone amplifier? Could it be better? Does the resistor degrade the sound relative to an amplifier designed just for headphones? Does it matter if you do this on a high powered amp (e.g. 100 wpc) or a low powered amp (e.g. 2 or 5 wpc)? Don't some amplifier manufacturers with good reputations for headphone outputs (e.g. Cary) use such an approach, taking the signal from the same tubes as would normally drive the speakers.
If this approach is viable and/or advantageous, does anybody make a high quality switch box that can be attached to an amps speaker terminals, that can be used to switch b/t speaker and a resistor attenuated HP output?
Thanks for any insight in this matter.
