does anyone have experience using firstwatt F5 to drive headphone?
its distortion is at the lowest on first few watt, so I guess it will be great for headphone, or may be I'm wrong?
The F5 is probably a great amp for headphones, but my concern would be that it has too much power.. It usually takes fractions of a watt to drive your headphones to ear crushing levels, so perhaps an F5 with lower voltage rails?
For something similar, take a look at the "Zen" headphone amp in the library on headwize.com.
The topology is essentially similar to the Jisbos(current feedback with self biasing input JFET pairs) except without a 3rd output stage.
It's possible to power headphones. You should reduce the output stage's MOSFET bias to something lower so you can use smaller heatsinks and reduce the overall size.
from what I read F5 voltage gain is pretty low at 15dB, so I guess it won't be too loud for headphone, or is the extra current going to be bad with headphone?
anyway I'm actually building it for my speaker, I'm considering an output switch if there are good feedbacks from people using this amp for headphone
You can use a great many different power amplifiers with headphones, and pretty much any power amplifier with balanced cabling.
The S5 will do just fine. Use the highest impedance secondary available (this will be clear in the manual, it is either 8 or 16 ohms). Connect the headphone jack ground to the ground of the S5 (either black speaker terminal should do, they should be internally connected together, verify with a meter and add a jumper if you need to)
Next obtain two 150-200 ohm resistors and place one in each channel between the speaker posts and the headphone jack.
Done.
(You probably won't get as much range on the volume control of the S5, but it should work fine)
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