Thanks for the great reply.
The question Isn't about taking advantages in the first round, right now I just want som proper headset so I dont have to bother my apartment neighbours after 11 o'clock, I dont care about hifi that much, it's the music im interested in.
As for my DIY-skills, they are nonexistent, I'm no practical person at all.
But why not use
http://hifiman.com/Products/?pid=104 why is there such an reluctancy against it here? Would not buy it? And the HE-300 to test or will it not work at all in theory?
*Overwelmed*
Heya,
You can get that adapter if you want. It will work. It's just that it costs about $50 more than it should cost honestly.
The HE-300 is efficient. It will be pretty loud, probably too loud, on a speaker amp without a resistor in place. Again, it will work, but you're plugging a very efficient headphone into a speaker amp; this HE300 is not like the HE4, HE6, HE500, that are inefficient and can take speaker amps, the HE300 barely needs an amp as it is, so feeding it a 10 watt amp could result in very hissy hummy sound due to gain if it doesn't melt the voice coils.
Problem number 2: The adapter you linked has XLR output only. The headphones you buy will all have TRS. So you have to buy an adapter that is a 4 pin XLR (male) to female 1/4th inch TRS. More money to spend. Also, finding a 4 pin XLR to TRS isn't really going to happen (TRS is 3 pin, one ground) so they don't even match up. This means you need a new cable, or you have to reterminate the existing cable to XLR. That costs even more. This takes us back to my original post explaining the need to recable or reterminate to XLR. Even going this route you need it. You can buy a cable from hifiman that is already terminated to XLR, but if you look at their prices, you'll see why I suggest someone do it for you elsewhere. That adapter from Hifiman has some minor resistors in-line, but they're small load and still not enough to protect the HE300. Treat the HE300 like any normal headphone. It's not even a planar magnetic, it's a dynamic. It's not like the HE500/HE4/HE6 which are basically little speakers.
This is the kind of cable you would need, to use that adapter. This is why I suggested you had it done by a 3rd party professional for less, if you really want to go this route.
The reluctancy around here is because we are trying to help you make this work in your budget, but it takes a lot of know-how and a lot of experience and understanding of how these work, we don't want you to spend $300+ on an efficient headphone, an adapter, and a cable mod, and then plug it all into a speaker amp, turn it on, and it blows your headphones and melts the voice coils and then you wonder why we did you so dirty. It's not clicking, in these posts at least, so we're saying it all over again.
In the past, using a speaker amp with a headphone is what people had, they didn't have fancy headphone amps. They had dummy load adapters. Basically a little box that a headphone could plug into, that had speaker taps, that had some resistors in line to bring up the load and reduce current throughput. To use an efficient headphone like the HE300 or any other efficient headphone, you need to do something similar--use resistors. This requires you buy something already made, or have it made.
Overall, if you're buying an efficient headphone, you don't need an amplifier anyways. No need to get extravagant with this. At your budget and without knowing this stuff well enough to be safe, I really just recommend you keep it simple and get an efficient headphone and if you need a little source to plug into, get something simple and inexpensive. Like you said, you don't care about hi-fi, so there's no sense in getting $300+ headphones anyways.... right?
Possible last ditch solution:
** Warning ** This is an old method, not audiophile standard, and might sound like dookage. But it's an easy way to get a headphone out, inline with a speaker amp.
If you want another method to get the ability to use a headphone inline with a speaker amp, look into a phono pre-amp. You can get them inexpensive ($50~75). It will basically take RCA input that normally is going to your amp anyways, have RCA output, so you continue on to your amp, but this way it provides you a resistor inline stereo phono jack where you can "monitor" or just listen via headphones. Look on amazon for a "phono pre-amp" and just look at the inputs, outputs and looks for a 1/4th TRS (stereo phono) and you're likely good to go with that. Use a relatively efficient headphone and you're set.
Example. Another example. This will work with an efficient headphone, but understand, it's not meant for audiophile level listening, it's just meant for monitoring (usually to see how a vinyl is sounding). It will let a headphone listen in to what's going on. It may not sound very good.
Very best,
