K.I.S.S.

By Anonymous -

Little Dot 1+ Tube Headphone Amplifier



Smart guys in this audio playback craft tell us that money is best spent first on speakers, as speakers have the potential for adding the most distortion to the eventual sound.

Keep talking to those smart guys and they’ll go on to say that a great speaker is one thing, but the speaker choice must go hand in hand with treatment of the room, and with correct placement of the speakers.

A nice “gumbo of interactive trade-offs,” of which our zany hobby has many.

But how smart is it to spend so much time and money on excellent speakers and room treatments, when the personal audio market is literally brimming with cheap products that sound great. Think of all of the new gadgets Schiit produced in the last 8 years, just to take one company.

Today a plucky little tube headphone amplifier came across my desk, and since it sounds fantastic I thought I’d write about it.

The Little Dot 1+ is a low priced, simple headphone amplifier featuring 6JI tubes on the input and transistors on the output.

The manufacturer recommends using it with low impedance headphones, so I pulled out my trusty Koss Porta Pros and I must say the combination is exceptional.

There’s a little bit of serious magic here. For a complete personal playback system at or under $200, I haven’t heard better.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Diving in deep

By Anonymous -
Image
Vitus Audio RS-100 Stereo Power Amplifier Depth. That’s what you get with a good A/B amp that you just can’t quite touch with even the most excellent Class D. Sorry, it’s the truth. Most Class A/B amps on most loads at most volumes stay in Class A anyway, and there’s no contest. Sure, you can optimize the path of the power to your Class D monoblocks, use isolation bases to minimize vibration, place Shakti Stones or other EMI/RFI filters over the PCBs, put on your voodoo suit and hail the demon gods of audio to deliver Nirvana. Or you can plug in a high quality A/B amp and never look back. That pesky switching frequency and the usual harmonics of Class D just end up getting in the way of the sheer magic that is possible with the world’s best A/Bs. Even if you eliminate the upper harmonics and create a harmonic structure similar to tube amps, as PS Audio does with the Stellar S300 amplifier I use for testing, you can’t quite match the subtle details an A/B brings that
Read more

New heights

By Anonymous -
Image
TAD Evolution One Floorstanding Speakers You never know what a new day will bring, and this one brought me the best speakers I’ve ever heard in my life. No big deal. I’ve heard a lot of great speakers. I’ve listened extensively to PS Audio’s Infinity IRS V system, the Infinity Beta system, and TAD Reference One, and at audio shows I’ve gravitated toward the big speaker rooms and heard Tidals, YGs, massive electrostats like the Martin Logans & Sanders Sound, Focal Grand Utopias and big Wilsons galore. And a whole bunch of others I’m forgetting. I even got a chance to have Arnie Nudell demo his “IRS Killer” speakers for me at his home before his passing. My audio memory of that is brief, so it’s difficult for me to say with 100% certainty that these TAD Evolution One speakers are better than Arnie’s, but the fact that I’m wondering says something about these dynamic speakers from the TAD Lab. Something I’ve noticed here at The Music Room is that many speakers need att
Read more

Home on the (full) range

By Anonymous -
Image
Voxativ AC-4X 8" Full Range Drivers The "Bigger Is Better" (BIB) horn I still remember the day I found the Single Driver Website, which was compiled by James Melhuish a while ago, and of which a remnant still exists on Geocities, here . I was like a pig discovering shit. Something about the science really spoke to me — the lack of crossover and the simplification of design variables combined with geometrically-cool-looking boxes had me transfixed like the Millennium Falcon in a tractor beam. Among the things I learned in my voyage through many styles of DIY full range speaker design is that Zoebel networks shouldn’t be feared — great passive ingredients really do deliver great results — and that raw driver quality plays a huge role in the eventual sound. In all things audio, the less you have to fix, or the less you ask any circuit to try to fix, the better. The less any piece of gear has to “work,” the better. Often when components — especially drive
Read more