[kamenal]

Dear friends! I am going to start a good headphone rig with Jolida jd 100 cd player and Senn 650 'phones. Will it play well without the amp, at least initially? I am planning to add the amp later (?which).
Any other ideas? I listen to classical music only.

Thank you for your advice.

Sincerely,
Alex

 

[Puddleglum]

I've read that the output from the Jolida is of decent quality, so I'd imagine that you could use it until you got the money for an amp.

 

[elnero]

You might also look at the Eastern Electric MiniMax CD player. It apparently also has internal headamp of quite good quality and from the reading I've done may be a step up from the Jolida in all respects as well.

 

[stryker]

Go ahead and use it. When you get an amp, it will just sound so much better. A solid state amp may pair with this the best. There's a lot of possibilities, but my personal tastes would err on the side of a more detailed-sounding amp with this source, unless you have it modified.

 

[mojoman]

I have the JD-100 and used the headphone out of the player with the 650s for a while. The sound is ok but you have to crank the volumn of the head amp on the Jolida to get acceptable sound levels. The amp is a MOS-FET design and bypasses the tube output of the player so tube rolling will do nothing for the headphone output.

A couple of things about this player, it will benefit from some vibration control. I use a set of vibrapods under mine. Damping the inside of the cover and the chassis with something like Dynamat will help tighten the bass of the player a little more. These are easy tweaks and the don't cost very much.

The stock tubes aren't very good and rolling some NOS tubes will help a lot when using the output jacks to an amplifier. You can use either the 12ax7 or 5751 with the Jolida. I've had good luck with Mullard 12ax7 and Sylvania 5751s. New production tubes I've tried and liked are Svetlana 12ax7s and Groove Tubes 12ax7-M, which is supposed to be a Mullard replica tube, hencd the M. I can't say it sounds exactly like the Mullard but it's a good tube IMO.

You'll want to add an amp but I got buy with just the player's headphone out for about 3 or 4 months before I added a headphone amp for the 650s.