Brent Hutto
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2005
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If I want to drive two headphone amplifiers with the line-level output of my Adcom CD player, do I need some sort of splitter/combiner thingy? From my vague recollection of studying RF electronics (I've never studied up on audio and my RF experience is decades old) it's a big no-no to just splice two wires from the output of one stage to the inputs to parallel following stages. You need something to isolate the inputs from each other. That would seem to apply in this case since I belive there is usually a volume control somewhere around the input to the first stage of amplifaction in a headamp.
I think I'm picturing a little resistor circuit that acts like, for instance, a 6dB attenuator where half the power is wasted, a quarter goes to one input and a quarter goes to the other. Or something like that. To be specific, imagine the output of the CD player is rated 4.5V into 100 ohms and the inputs are those of two Portaphile amplifiers.
So question one is, would something like that work to isolate the CD player output from the effects of the two headamp? If so, what is the tradeoff between isolation and attenuation.
The other question is would, say, 6dB of loss before the headamp input(s) add too much to the noise figure? I think that may be a weak-signal RF problem that doesn't apply to line-level audio.
I think I'm picturing a little resistor circuit that acts like, for instance, a 6dB attenuator where half the power is wasted, a quarter goes to one input and a quarter goes to the other. Or something like that. To be specific, imagine the output of the CD player is rated 4.5V into 100 ohms and the inputs are those of two Portaphile amplifiers.
So question one is, would something like that work to isolate the CD player output from the effects of the two headamp? If so, what is the tradeoff between isolation and attenuation.
The other question is would, say, 6dB of loss before the headamp input(s) add too much to the noise figure? I think that may be a weak-signal RF problem that doesn't apply to line-level audio.