John Willett

Audio Connoisseur Posted by John Willett

12 January 2009

There are a couple of questions that crop up regularly when it comes to the top end headphones.

 

These are: “Do they need running in?” and “Do I need a dedicated headphone amplifier?”.

 

Any Sennheiser headphones will sound good out of the box. However, like all headphones, they improve as they are “run in” and get used. Some users like to do this straight away and leave the headphones running continually at a lowish volume level for a couple of days or so and it is fine to do this.

 

Any headphones are only as good as the signal you are feeding them. Your HD 650s can be plugged into any headphones socket and work perfectly (though please be aware that they are 300-Ohm headphones of middling efficiency and are likely to be quiet if plugged into a battery portable player). But the better quality signal you feed them, the better they will sound, and if you feed them with a poor quality signal you will hear that it’s poor quality (these are headphones that are often used by professional mastering engineers for this very reason). A dedicated headphone amplifier is not necessary, especially if you have good equipment, but a good one will enable you to get the very best out of your headphones.

 

The headphone amp I use myself is the Grace m902. This has an integrated DAC that can cope with signals up to 24-bits / 192kHz sampling and has a switchable X-feed to give a “loudspeaker” feel. A high quality alternative is the Benchmark DAC1 again this includes a high quality DAC. The H1 is Benchmark’s analogue headphone amplifier.

 

Graham Slee headphone amplifiers get good reviews and Sennheiser UK have used these in the past to demonstrate top-end headphones. Graham even does a small battery-powered one to boost the level from your battery portable player.

 

But there are also lots of other good ones at various prices and I may add links to some of these later.

 


Related posts:

  1. Lossless Audio & Digital Audio Formats
  2. World of Audio
  3. Crafted for Perfection
  4. A whole new meaning to Frequency Response
  5. Volume levels

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Headphones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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