HeadLine

Headphone Tube Amplifier (OTL)

Page 1: November 30, 2006

Headphone?

Last week (Nov 2006) I was having dinner with an old friend in an Amsterdam restaurant. We share the interest in good sounding audio and good looking photo equipment (not to mention cars and women). Anyway, the food was good and over dinner he told me he bought a phono amplifier and since he knows I like the tube sound he mentioned that it was the Misucal Fidelity X-Can V3.

Hmm, I know the previous version of this headphone amp, and I know some people that bought it for its good sound, but who would expect that these days someone would invest in an expensive headphone with a tube amp. After all, today an Apple iPod shuffle would have been a more "logical" choice. Anyway, the new generation of this amp does have better sound and a new enclosure, the can is now a box.

Anyway, I decided that an OTL headphone would be a nice project for the Xmas holidays coming up. The only possible problem might be that I have several unfinished project laying around that need finishing one of these days.

Over the last few weeks I've been looking on the internet for example designs and I came along dozens of commercially available headphone amps that are mostly of Chinese origin.

As can see on the right I bought myself one of these cheap (but goodlooking and goodsounding) Chinese headphone amps. It is the Little Dot version II++, which is used by a lot of head-wise people.

It is a good start but I'll build my own and try to improve on the Chinese "original".

© Maarten&Annemarie, November 2006

last modified 13 March, 2007