Xenophon
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2013
- Posts
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- 92
+1 at the bold..
IMO "no" headphone amp is when using the HE-6. But just concentrating on the HE-6 is not a really good idea for headphone amp makers. The headphone amp should as flexible as possible to work with a wide range on headphones - which I'm sure the Master 9 is.
That's an interesting statement. I didn't realise you tried them all and hence came to this amazing and imo utterly unfounded conclusion. I drive my HE-6 from a headphone amp that delivers 2750 mW into 50 Ohm and it sounds great. Not only that, I also drive it from a dual mono OTL tube amp (which was designed to drive the K-1000) and it also sounds great. I'm not disputing that speaker amps also work if you consider raw power but for completeness' sake, add the following bit which come straight from the HE-6 manual booklet:
- HifiMan recommends an amp that can deliver 2 W
- They say that a HE-6 can also be driven from a speaker amp but specifically mention that it should not deliver more than 70 W into 8 Ohm AND they remark that the HE-6 doesn't play nice (due to load mismatch or whatever) with all speaker amps, which I've personally witnessed to be true (hum, hiss, distortion).
I have nothing against speaker amps but please.....