[Piffles]

Hey up fellas,

Ultimately, my goal is get a decent pair of speakers for myself. Unfortunately, I neither have the money nor the space necessary to do that at the moment. I've therefore settled on headphones for now.

With that in mind, I'd rather not have to splash out too much dough on my headphone setup but I do realize that the source will need to be amped to get decent sound for them.

Would it be realistic to buy my speaker amp now and use its headphone output for my headphones? Are speaker amps generally any good for headphones or are dedicated headphone amps better?

As an example, my dad has a Rotel 1062. Do you reckon that's sufficient to drive say ... the AKG K501s?

Cheers,
Piffles.

 

[Zorander]

You should be able to get more than decent volume out of the Rotel. I recently tried the K601 on my Cyrus 8 headphone out and was quite pleasantly surprised. It is not as good as my Creek headamp (a clear difference) but it is not half-bad either. Certainly a worthwhile solution if you are not budgeting for a headamp. However keep in mind while I had good results with the AKG and Alessandro, the same cannot be said of the HD-650 (which does indeed need good amplification to sing).

Cheers!

 

[Andrea]

Hmmm. My HD650 sings exquisitely driven by my lowly Pioneer A-209R's headphone out. Seriously! It sounds really beautiful. Pioneer amps are best known for their headphone outs

 

[Frihed89]

It's basically the preamp analogue output signal in an integrated amplifier that is being diverted to your headphone jacks (more or less), not the signal that is fed from the power amp to the speakers, unless you have AKG-1000 headphones! That said, most inexpensive and many not-so-inexpensive integrated amps have minimalist preamp sections and the sound you get will more often than not be on a par with a low-priced headphone amp.

Here's what I suggest. In the long-run, think about having a seperate preamp and power amp. Then buy a pre-amp that is designed as both a pre-amp and a head amp. Later, by the power amp(s). I know a Canadian mfr that sells such a preamp and makes excellent products by reputation: Mcallister Audio. They sell the PL10 Custom Triode Line/Headphone Amp for $600.

Mapletree Audio used to sell such a preamp-headamp combo, but it seems to have been discontinued very recently. However, you might be able to twist the owners arm, Dr. Lloyd Peppard, to make one for you. Both are small, but well-run, companies.

 

[Andrea]

My Pioneer (which is the equivalent of the famous A-35R btw) is an all-discrete design with a mosfet output stage - and the headphone out is taken from the power output through coupling resistors. There's no dedicated headphone amp stage. In my knowledge, this is true of the majority of normal integrated amps, especially japanese (and I'm not saying A/V receivers).


P.S. and this lowly integrated easily rivals all of my portable amps including the Portaphile.