justhavingfun
500+ Head-Fier
My previous experience with the portable amps are Headroom's Total Airhead and Cosmic amp few years back as well as some Cmoy type varieties of amps. I haven't heard their new amps. I initally bought the Cosmic amp for portable rig and the sound was wonderful but it was little too bulky for truely portable and thus ended up buying Total Airhead instead. My Total Airhead has been with me just about everywhere I go including recent Iraq War (OIF) mated with Ety ER4S. Those military cargo plane (C130) ride can be very brutal for several hours at a time but with the Ety ER4S and Total Airhead, it was almost pleasure? to have a long cargo plane ride. So when I was looking for my next upgrade in headphone amp, I looked long and hard which include Headroom's new lines of portable amp along with many other candidates.
After couple months of reading and searching the internet, I ended up purchasing Lambda amp not for my own use but for a gift to my friend who spent many of his hours in the air travel as well. Of course when it arrived, I gave it a listen to the Lambda amp. WOW, what a sound it produced with my Etymotic ER4S and Sennheiser HD580. The highs are crisp and clear, midranges are silky smooth and very robust bass. I have listened to countless time of Yo-Yo Ma's Bach
relude, Cello Suite No. 1 and I have never heard the way Lambda was able to produce. I can almost feel the vibrations of the cello strings emanating on low bass notes and highs were not harsh at all. Although this Lambda only cost $170, I will not look for any more expensive amp at all for awhile. I was about to drop the serious amount of money (well, at least to me anyway) for one of those super expensive Headroom's amp but no longer. I was completely surprised how good this Lambda sounded.Compare to Cosmic amp which cost over $700, Lambda was held up on its own and some instance sounded better. However, I do like what Headroom did with their processor. The only thing that I wished for this Lambda to have was AC line input which I found out later that I could have installed this additional feature by Ty Morris (designer) just by asking. Some of other users of Lambda was having little hiss when music wasn't playing but my unit is dead silent. I can't recommend this Lambda high enough for its excellent sound quality.
The only quirk I have with the Lambda amp was its difficulty with installing two 9v batteries. I have to use screwdriver to loosen at least four screws to install. I ended up unscrew all eight screws, pull out the PCB board completely out and installed the batteries. Yes it is little inconvenient to install the batteries but this did not deter me from enjoying this beauty. It sounded that good to me. And also it is little bit bigger than other tiny palm size portable amp but the sound quality that I get from this unit is more than enough to convince me to carry this unit everywhere I go from now on. To me it is nice compromise of its size to get much better sound than other competitors of smaller sizes or other much bigger sizes to bring up the sound quality. And beside, it has beautiful solid aluminum case to protect the inside electronics. I can't wait what other home headphone amps that Ty Morris has up in his sleeves coming days. Thanks for the great amp design. BTW even though I purchased this unit for my friend, I ended up keeping this Lambda for myself since he wanted little more portability vs. sound quality. So I ended up buying him much smaller sized amp and he is happy now.
