I'm not a hardcore audiophile. (He said bravely, clutching desperately to whatever shreds of delusion yet remained.) That is to say, I haven't bankrupted myself acquiring a rig so high-priced as to buy a nice house in many parts of the country; I don't get into online screaming matches with other (middle-aged) guys about the sonic qualities of Lithuanian fuses versus Kievan tubes; I remain skeptical about cables and power cords. On the other hand, I'm definitely partial to great sound and am willing to devote a fair amount of my income in the search for audio happiness.
I became aware of just how far I've travelled down that path when I decided to add private (i.e., headphone) listening capabilities to my newly-renovated "snuggery" room, a sweet little inside room that I have fixed up as a media-storage room and hideaway. I had nearly everything I needed right at hand—a good-quality CD player, a spare laptop computer to use for streaming stuff from my home network, several good pairs of headphones that have been sitting around for a while once I acquired a pair of lordly Sennheiser HD 800s. So it was mostly a matter of plugging it all in and voilà: one private listening area all set up and ready to go in my Snuggery.
Except for one problem. The setup required listening to my old Sennheiser HD 600s through the headphone jack of the CD player. The Senn 600s are charming headphones, but I realized I wasn't going to be able to tolerate hearing them through the low-quality, low-power, low-bling output of that CD player. I know what they can do, and that just wasn't it. I tried using a little portable FiFo headphone amp that I keep around for use with iPods and the like, but that portable amp just didn't have the juice for the Senn 600s. Or the panache.
So I realized there was nothing for it but acquisition, so I picked up the HeadRoom Desktop Ultra headphone amplifier—a marvelous product that comes with a very spiffy DAC as well. Great sound, lots of connections, and can even take an analog input if you have something along those lines that you want to amplify. In my case, the HeadRoom rescued my suffering ears from the CD player's mediocre DAC and headphone amp, and more to the point, allowed for the Senn 600s to ring forth in all their considerable glory. I even tried using my Senn 800s with the HeadRoom, and it drove them almost as well as does the gorgeous Luxman P-1u headphone amplifier in my main rig. (Almost—there is no headphone amp on earth that match Luxman's stellar P-1u, but to come even close is a high accomplishment indeed.) Clarity, richness, lots of bloom, and an ability to deal with difficult sounds such as singing voices, violins, and small chamber ensembles—that last always the ultimate test for a stereo rig, if you know where and how to listen. The secret: listen to the area around the instruments; airspace is very tough to resolve, but fine audio equipment can do it. Cheaper stuff winds up making the environment cottony and thick. But the HeadRoom keeps the environment clean as a whistle. Ditto dealing with sibilants—those can turn into hissy horrors with lesser stuff. But again the HeadRoom handled them beautifully. The Luxman gets deeper into the bloom of the sound, and by whatever magic alchemy that can exist between electronic components, the Luxman/Sennheiser 800 combo is a match made in heaven. The HeadRoom also shines with Senns, either the 600s or the 800s.
But here's the thing: I have crossed one particular audiophile Rubicon, in that it wasn't a matter of whether or not I was going to be able to learn to tolerate the sub-par signal coming out of the headphone jack of that CD player. There was never a question: I was not going to tolerate it. The only question was how much of a change I was going to make. As it turns out, the change required putting a reasonably deep dent into my bank account.
It's a sign of my audiophile-dom that I didn't consider it to be much of a dent, all things considered.
Recommendation: the HeadRoom Desktop Ultra comes within a gnat's eyelash of performing as well as my main desktop combo of a Bryston BDA-1 digital-to-analog converter feeding its output into a Luxman P-1u headphone amp. But it costs about a third of the price as that stellar combo. Bravo!