So, you are saying that you prefer the Ember to the headphone jack of the McIntosh 2120 ? Can you say some more about that comparison ? Thanks.
Yeah pretty much, though it has been a couple of months since I listened to it. I have no idea what the power was out of that though. I am pretty sure it was under powering what were my mad dogs at the time. I know we had to set the gain dials at max along with cranking the volume pretty high. Its honestly really hard to compare the two. I can not do a direct comparison either, as the 2120 disconnects the headphone jack when you plug in speakers. The way my dad has it set up, its very hard to get at to fiddle around with it, and is just not worth it.
From what I recall though the 2120 had nearly the exact same characteristics of my DX100 (crisp and clean with good details) as I remember them being very close in sound. Except that the 2120 had a smoother sound to it along with better sound staging (a quality that tends to show when you get closer or above optimal power) which leads me to believe the power output being somewhere between the DX100 and Ember. I just do not remember it doing details any better than what my DX100 can, and my Ember with the Telefunken 12AT7 really can pick up some fine details that the DX100 just does not. The ember also sounds livelier, smoother, and has better sound stage. At the time of testing the 2120 I definitely remember thinking "wow my dx100 matches up quite nicely with this, of course the 2120 beats it out in certain ways but its nothing that I can live without". It actually made me question if buying a desktop amp would ever be truly worth it.
So the extra power I believe you are getting out of the Ember plus being able to get good details from what I recall makes it better than the 2120. At least it would be with the alphas, but I am unsure with any other headphones that it could actually drive to full potential.
While this is probably pretty obvious the 2120 is a horrible headphone amp functionality wise. I know a lot of good stuff can come from mixing headphones plus full size stereo equipment, but this is not the case. For one thing the 2120 makes an excellent speaker amp, but it only makes for an ok headphone amp as it is not optimized. There is very little you can adjust for headphones in comparison to the ember where you can bypass input caps, change gain, change resistance, change tubes (well this comes with any tube/hybrid amp), and more. Plus the 2120 is huge, and weighs in at 57 lbs, while the ember weighs a couple pounds at most (which makes this easy to transfer from room to room). On top of that its expensive because its a good somewhat rare speaker amp, but that value just does not transfer to the headphone portion. Also like stated above connecting the speaker disconnects the headphone jack, which means for any practical set up you would have to have it set up as either a headphone or speaker amp by itself.
I guess I have gone well beyond your question by now, but I see using the 2120 as a headphone amp being like using a porsche for a dirt/snow/sand rally. It does a hell of a job on the road, but it is not going to do crap for rally. A headphone amp is just going to be much more optimized toward headphones in this situation.
This is also gonna be my first desktop amp as well. I am pretty excited to try it out!
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