"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message


In article ,
Dave xxxxx wrote:

Most decent headphone amps are an upgrade on the internal one in
amplifiers

That's a bit of a broad statement - some headphone outlets are simply
an attenuated version of the main one.

That's part of the problem. The attenuator generally increases the source
impedance to the headphone, which alters the headphone's effective frequency
response for the many (but not all) headphones that have highly non-uniform
impedance curves. Some headphones are sensitive to this, others are not.

However, if you're bypassing the main amp completely, a good class A
headphone amp might well be better than the main amp...

A headphone amp can also provide gain and/or an extension of peak voltage
output that may be audibly advantageous.