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I just listened to the Muddy Waters song and just love it.
Rearranged the connections on my system and now am feeding a solid state phono stage into my tube preamp and taking the outputs into a solid state headphone amplifier and just love the sound.
So, evidently, the unbuffered tape-out to the headphone amplifier does not compare favorably to just running the output to a headphone amplifier and having two volume controls to deal with.
Just wondering what you guys think about this? Are there tube preamplifiers that buffer the tape outs effectively? Seems to me that having a separate solid state headphone is an upgrade to what is offered in most tube preamplifiers, no? Do integrated tube amplifiers take the headphone signal from the pre-amp stage or from the amplifier stage?
Follow Ups:
There are freely available tube type headphone amplifier schematics available that do not require an output transformer. However, rather than drive the headphones with a tube directly, a far superior method is to use a MOSFET in source-follower configuration (a buffer). Buffers add no tonal qualities. Circuits which add gain can and do affect sound quality. A buffer does not. Using the MOSFET means the circuit driving it does not get loaded down at all, and there is plenty of current available to drive the cans, whether they be low impedance or high.
Most solid state amps for phones don't come close to a good tube amp. Everyone who uses headphones should have a dedicated tube headphone amplifier with its own high-quality volume control and OPTs. Not cheap to implement, but well worth it.
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Buy Chinese. Bury freedom.
Because of the high input Z of most headphones, I don't see why you need no stinkin' output transformer. Futterman once made such a product. Transcendent and Berning may make them now. (Which on this Asylum means that one could build one.)
I've heard the Futterman headphone amplifier, and it was astonishingly good.
I'm glad you said most. The Sheldon Stokes headphone amp does not sound like "typical sand". Surprise ( not ), the "finals" are FETs.
Eli D.
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