Can I uses a 6v6gt/8802 for headphones?

[pHEnomIC]

I just won two auctions for a magnavox 6v6gt and a 9302 6bq5 variety.

I hear the 6v6 puts out up to 12 watts and the 9302 does up to 15 give or take on both of them.

I am going to use the 9302 for my klipsch forte's.

Can I modify the 6v6gt one for use with headphones, possibly my denon ah-d5000s? Ive been under the impression that headphones can take 5watts plus or minus. Is this even true?

If its too much power, any way I can limit it?

 

[cademan]

Don't have the specs off the top of my head, but most headphone jacks have limiting resistors to prevent headphone damage. :yes:

If you know any pair of headphones that can take 5 watts, I hope your head is still intact and not splattered liked a popped balloon.

EDIT: Looked at a couple of schematics and resistors between 100Ω-300Ω 3 watts is what you need to start with, wired in series with the outputs.

 

[jrsh92]

Remember that most tube amps need a given load on the output, and can suffer serious damage if there is nothing connected to the output. The 50+ ohm load presented by most headphones is already way too high to safely operate a tube amp into, and with resistors in series to keep your headphones safe this gets even worse. You will need to have a dummy load of the appropriate impedance and size running in parallel with this headphone circuit at all times so that the amp sees its expected load (most commonly either 4, 8, or 16 ohms) and doesn't know that it's driving headphones, because their impedance is so high that it's negligible when added to your dummy load.

Headphones require a tiny amount of power... 5 watts would destroy most headphones and if it didn't it would be painfully loud.
It is possible what you heard was that headphones could be connected to a 5 watt amplifier. An amplifier putting 5 watts into 4 ohm speakers would run just under 5 VRMS, and if you were to hook this to high impedance headphones, say 300 ohms, and you'd be putting just under 0.1 watts into those headphones. This would already be unreasonably loud, but if you'e looking for lots of dynamic headroom it might be a good amount of power to have available.

Again, tube amps need to be working into a speaker load to produce the voltage swing you'd expect them to, and may be damaged without a proper load. Don't overlook this!

 

[battradio]

Wire 300 ohms 2 watts in series with the headphones and 300 ohm 5 watts directly across the output of the transformers for each channel .This will limit the power to the headphones and keep the amps from oscilating .

Mark

 

[cademan]

Jut some FYI, my Scott LK-48 has the headphone jack in the front panel, and it uses two 250Ω 2 watt resistors, but no dummy load at the output, so a dummy load isn't really necessary and the amp won't go into oscillations.

With certain types of tube amps its possible, but I wouldn't worry about the magnavox amps. Those things are bullet proof.

 

[gadget73]

12 watts is a whole lot of horsepower for a set of cans. An SE amp would probably be a better candidate.

 

[Patrice B]

I use a lot my Heathkit AA-32 as an headphone amp. I've built an external switchbox (with 1/4 jack) with dummy load resistors inside (47 ohms@25w). There is 330 ohms ohms resistors in series with the jack also.

It works good BTW.

It works well