[lorriman]

Brethren,

Despite my vows to the Community of Headphone, I've been having an affair with my girlfriend. This has caused great angst and tribulation since she requires a quiet volume and I need more, much more. For a while we survived by plugging a simple Belkin splitter in to the laptop; one end feeding my amp and the other her headphones. She would adjust the laptop volume and then I would adjust the amp's volume and peace reigned.

...but that meant bypassing the amp's dac, which was most unsatisfactory in consideration of my vows. Looking about me, I saw this cheap splitter with independent volume controls. It claims to have no effect on the audio. considering its small size this seemed unlikely. However, I've used it with my etymotics and though I don't trust my ears, it does seem to do the job splendidly.

Pic here :



It's not perfect: one of the two volume controls is slightly recessed; though it still works.

It's been so useful (my GF and I use it for long rail journeys) and cheap that I'm probably going to get a second in case the build quality is as bad as it might be. We'll see.

 

[lorriman]

Seems like an update is due.

I've been using the splitter for a while now. No real issues. I haven't treated it roughly, mind you. It can get a tad warm sometimes, if the amp is turned up on high gain and I use the iLuv for volume control. Maybe an issue for really high power, low impedance phones which I don't have.

In the meantime I've been really enjoying the freedom it has given me to listen to movies with my friends at high volume without disturbing the rest of the house. We had an excellent Predator evening (the original) plugged in to 3 Superlux HD681's and with the iLuv we can all listen to the movie at our preferred volume which varies a lot, as it happens. 4 Headphones are also possible, though may be too much for the amp, I don;t know. I had two belkin splitters which would allow different volumes for all of us even though there's only one iLuv, but I have to forgo the DAC on my amp to do that, as you can see:



I'm getting a second iLuv, so I'll be using the DAC in future, though the audio on my Dell D430 is shockingly good, surprisingly; I have trouble hearing any difference between it and my AMP/DAC.

I don't think this scheme is going to work too well with 4 LCD2s.

Otherwise, one thing I intend to do is test it for output impedance changes with my multimeter. I do use the iLuv for my etymotics, as I mentioned, and they are very output impedance sensitive (a high output impedance causes a paradoxical bass boost at 80Hz and roll-off of deep bass simultaneously, also treble attenuation). However, such changes are not always easy to detect by ear since our audio memory is so very short that A/B comparisons of less-than-huge changes are only really possible with instant switch-over (for example via a bypass switch which the iLuv doesn't have). I'll be back someday when I've tried that out. the output impedance on my laptop is .5 which perhaps speaks for the quality of the audio Dell used; but why they would give a small business laptop such good audio is beyond me. I've used another business Dell of the same era that had devastatingly bad audio.