Hegel Super Headphone Amp Headphone amplifier
It's not easy to transform a computer into a musical source of high level. This will require either expensive professional sound card, better external, or a perfect digital convertor with USB output and HD-Audio support. However, the Norwegian company "Hegel", specializing in the production of audio components, has found a simple and elegant way to winkle a maximal sound quality out of PC in any form - digital or analog.
Actually the name of the device doesn't very correspond to the tasks it solves. What do you think of when you firstly see the box smaller than a pack of cigarettes that says "Super Headphone Amp"? Any normal music lover will decide that here is a compact phone amplifier for portable technics and obviously not cheap, judging by the heavy integral body made of aluminum alloy. And what a surprise will be when you find neither auto power system, nor volume control and analog input for the connection to some player- in a word, nothing that would classify it as an amplifier in its traditional sense. Actually Super Headphone Amp is more functional and useful device than just an amplifier for headphones. In fact, this is a miniature USB DAC with analog phone output, which a digital signal of S/PDIF standard also goes to.
You will need only USB (MicroUSB) cable for the connection to PC and nothing else - no drivers or any programs. Converter gets the power supply directly by USB bus and consumption current is relatively low - at first I didn't even notice that the laptop together with SHA discharges a bit faster than usually. And PC recognizes the connected device as TE7022. And this in turn indicates that one of USB 2.0 controllers of Tenor series by Taiwanese company "GFEC" is used in the device. It receives asynchronous audio stream and converts it for the transfer through S/PDIF or AES/EBU protocols. However, Hegel says nothing about converter, to which the signal goes then, as well as about output cascades. You can't see by yourself - the case is dead. And you can understand that the filling is not cheap here only by indirect signs. Judge for yourself: signal-to-noise ratio is 140 dB by passport and internal resistance is only 1 Ohm by analog output. In addition, special technical measures for the suppression of internal noise and computer interference and also for thorough optimization of terminal stages for the work with any load are mentioned in the documentation.
Super Headphone Amp has other interesting features too. According to technical documentation, the device supports streams up to 96 kHz/24 bit. However, at the specified frequency and bit depth we couldn't get this conjunction at work with Apple Macbook Air. Surely, you can listen to 24- or 32-bit audios with the original discretization of 88,2, 176,4, 192 or 384 kHz only in resampling variant that, of course, will not add the quality of playing.
For the same reason I would prefer to see a separate gain control on the box with the lock of computer audio mixer.Well, I am miles away. In this case, the device won't be so simple in design, affordable and handy as it is now.
Now about the main thing. Having tried all the available stereo headphones with different resistance and sensitivity I came to the conclusion that the capacity at the phone output is almost always enough and in some cases - with great abundance.
Apparently, Super Headphone Amp likes classical open dynamic models. Reputable, editorial 300-Ohm Sennheiser HD580 Precision began to sing suddenly freely, in super details and weighty. More modern 50-Ohm Sennheiser HD595 suddenly showed miracles of linearity and width of the range. And with 30-Ohm Philips Fidelio X1 music began to sound almost as expressively and generously as with a serious phone amplifier. And it was enough to switch any of the mentioned models into phone output of PC when desire to listen to music immediately disappeared because of poor voices, blurred details and weakened dynamics. The difference is just dramatic!
But not always the benefit from inclusion of Super is so obvious in the quality of Headphone Amp. EarbudsEarPods, witch iPhones are now equipped with, increased in dynamics of playing and the clarity of bass, but problems with a slight coloring of sound in mid and high registers, on the contrary, were emphasized even more. Everything is logical - an audio path of the device is clearly designed for the headphones of much higher class and any disadvantages of budget in-ear headphones immediately rise to the surface.
However, there was the incident with single-way TDK TH-ECBA700, which can't be related to budget ones - bass disappeared, middle extruded, top sounded tougher, the playing was radically increased in dynamics but at the same time lost clarity on the microdynamic level. So, the oversensitivity of the Japanese "700th" turned out badly.
In the final I examined a miniature Hegel DAC in the home system too, using its output as a linear. The device completed work on a solid "B". "Infra" is slightly clamped, a small coloring on HF is caught, and images in the stage sometimes need more focus. But there are a scaled and deep space, a confident dynamics, an accurate tonal bass, and even successful attempts to pass both subtle details and emotions. I think that the result is quite worthy for a small aluminum box, which turns any computer into quite a good musical source anywhere. Super Headphone Amp is certainly the best of known variants from workarounds.
