oh don't give up glad you got your board working but a little investment in the proper tools makes smd a breeze. Next time try using a flux pen and some very thin solder on a chizzle tip makes it very easy to avoid solder bridges and to pull them out with a small piece of solder wick. 

thanks guys I'll have some time to think it over as I'm building a dac kit this week 

I think people compare this headphone to the wrong  pair of sennheisers not the 650's but the 600s. I bought the 1440s  4 days ago and I'm using a profire 2626. With both headphone outs calibrated to the same volume level the perceived frequency response is near identical. What is different to...

what would a good true tube headphone amp project be that has a layout, kit or something. I've built a few hybrid amps but the most I've done is 12 volt supplies. I'd like to move away from that and make a desktop amp with more serious plate voltage.    thanks

I'll share what I can. I bought the pcb from ebay for 10 bucks it's a 12au7 into a cmoy. It's a very simple circuit using a lm317 for the current like the typical 12au7 mosfet setups. I'll add a schematic soon. The power supply is a 15v 1 amp unregulated supply, then I added some filter caps...

hi my name is Will and I'm new to head-fi. I'm a 32 year old electronics tech that's pretty much here for the diy stuff hope to meet some cool people and check out some interesting circuits. This was my last headphone amp I built.   ...