Headphone amplifier and DAC

Headphone amplifier and DAC

Headphone amplifier and DAC

Why do you need a headphone amplifier?

You’ve probably already faced a problem when you connect your headphones to a phone or other music playback device and you don’t feel enough sound power. This problem is not always caused by the headphones, but often by the player itself. The fact is that a standard player is not able to swing the membrane of headphones, especially high-impedance ones, and therefore gives out too weak a signal. To solve this problem, a dedicated headphone amplifier is used.

The main parameters of the headphones:

Impedance (Ohm) – the higher this parameter is for headphones, the more demanding they are on the power of the amplifier. Low impedance headphones can fully swing from a small, portable amplifier.

Sensitivity (dB) – the lower this parameter is for headphones, the more demanding they are for amplification. Therefore, headphones can have low impedance, but low sensitivity and be more difficult to swing than high-impedance headphones with higher sensitivity.

For example, electrostatic and isodynamic headphones have increased amplification requirements.

And for in-ear headphones, the built-in amplifier in a portable player or a separate portable amplifier is enough. But many high quality in-ear headphones with armature drivers or hybrid designs also require high-quality amplification to function properly.

Types of headphone amplifiers:

Transistor amplifiers tend to sound more technical, cooler, cleaner and more expansive. A good solid-state amplifier produces a transparent, neutral sound without any modification. The sound quality of a transistor amplifier is entirely dependent on the DAC converter and headphones.

Tube amplifiers add warmth, coziness to reproduction and make the sound softer and more weighty. Here a lot depends on the tubes that can be replaced, improving the sound quality.

Balanced and unbalanced amplifiers. Almost all amplifiers have unbalanced headphone connectivity. A balanced amplifier is like two amplifiers in one package, which work on each channel separately. With an unbalanced connection to a balanced amplifier, only half of the device works, and with a balanced connection, the entire device is involved and twice the power is supplied to the headphones.

What is a DAC?

DAC digital-to-analog converter is an interface between digital formats and an analog audio system. Nowadays, music is most often stored in the form of digital files. But to reproduce sound in headphones, an analog signal is needed. A DAC is a device that converts a digital signal to analog.

DAC is present in any device that can play sound: laptop, smartphone, mp3 player, etc. But such devices use a low-level DAC, sufficient for playing mp3 format. The high-quality equipment uses specialized DACs capable of converting high-definition formats like Flac, Waw, DSD, etc.

The quality level of digital recording is characterized by bites (bit), sampling rate (kHz) and bit rate (kbps). The higher these values, the higher the recording quality.

In modern devices are most often used delta-sigma chips ESS Sabra by the American company ESS Technology and AKM by the Japanese company Asahi Kasei.

With a DAC, you get the opportunity to enjoy uncompressed high-quality audio formats that preserve the audio resolution they were originally recorded in. When connected to a computer, the DAC acts as an external sound card and requires the installation of drivers for it to work in Windows.