Heed Audio CanAmp Headphone Amplifier

Now discontinued/unavailable.

£349.00

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Heed's Can Amp is an award winning headphone amplifier, a no compromise solution at a realistic price. Many amplifiers resort to a simple, cheap PCB for the headphones output, making it impossible for headphones to perform at their best. This is where a dedicated headphone amplifier like this Can Amp can help. 

Headphones are high quality loudspeakers, with a much lower power requirement. For this reason, they have distortion levels an order of magnitude lower than speakers, and are capable of showing up amplifier deficiencies more clearly. What's more, headphones are " one-way systems", with few exceptions, so crossovers do not interfere with sound quality. Consequently, a headphone amplifier will offer the best possible sound quality, even at very low volume levels.

Design

The CanAmp is a two-stage amplifier. While the first - voltage gain - stage is based on an integrated circuit of the highest audio pedigree, the second - power gain - stage is a single-ended, pure Class-A amplifier. It enables the CanAmp to drive virtually any headphones from 32 ohms up to 600 ohms. 

The unit has no internal wiring, and the signal path is kept to a minimum on its PCB. Its high-quality, 1 dB-tolerance Blue Alps volume pot goes through a further selection process during manufacturing to achieve an even tighter, 0.5 dB tolerance.

Connections 

The CanAmp not only has a line-level input but offers a line-level output to boot; it can therefore be connected to the TAPE MONITOR output of an amplifier, leaving the TAPE output free for additional components (MP3, MiniDisc, CDR, etc.). Gold-plated RCA terminals are used, and soldered directly onto the fibreglass PCB.

Review 

'Measured performance is excellent, the bandwidth going far beyond the audio range in both bass and treble, with low distortion into any normal headphone impedance and plentiful output...this amp does all one might expect of it and goes a little further too with a larger scale of music than headpones normally achieve' (Hi-Fi Choice magazine)

Specifications

- Input sensitivity/impedance: 200 mV/10 kOhm
- Power output: 300 mW (100 Ohm)
- Signal-to-noise ratio (unweighted): 85 dB
- Distortion (THD, 1 kHz, 100mW): <0,05%
- Frequency range: 10 Hz-50 kHz (±0,5 dB)