rlisin
Quad 4 life
Actually a lot depends on your headphones. With modern low impedance, easy-to-drive headphones like Grado SR-60 (32 ohms) you can get away with modern gear and op-amp based headphone out. With more demanding modern headphones like Sennheiser HD 555, all high impedance headphones and pretty much all vintage headphones you are better off with vintage amps that take headphone out from main amp via resistors, as stated above. Actually, some modern amps do too, but with vintage amps it's common.
I use a hybrid solution. I have a Yamaha AP-U70 CAVIT, which is an external sound card, DAC and 20 WPC integrated amp in one box. Looks like this:
The Yamaha is extremely versatile (USB, digital and analog inputs, 96/24 DAC, analog and digital out, amp, subwoofer out, even DSP which I don't use), but of course it has crappy headphone out that can't drive my Sennheiser HD 555 cans. So I connected this speaker switcher to speaker terminals of the Yamaha:
It is a simple passive speaker selector with additional headphone out running via resistors, just like in vintage amps. This way the Yamaha drives my headphones perfectly from its main amp. Sounds great, the difference between this and Yamaha's headphone out is night and day.
I use a hybrid solution. I have a Yamaha AP-U70 CAVIT, which is an external sound card, DAC and 20 WPC integrated amp in one box. Looks like this:
The Yamaha is extremely versatile (USB, digital and analog inputs, 96/24 DAC, analog and digital out, amp, subwoofer out, even DSP which I don't use), but of course it has crappy headphone out that can't drive my Sennheiser HD 555 cans. So I connected this speaker switcher to speaker terminals of the Yamaha:
It is a simple passive speaker selector with additional headphone out running via resistors, just like in vintage amps. This way the Yamaha drives my headphones perfectly from its main amp. Sounds great, the difference between this and Yamaha's headphone out is night and day.
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