HeadRoom Home Amp

The Home Amp is some truly serious headphone amplification. Forget the numbers for just a moment and focus on a perfect place for listening right inside your head. Even the most killer ultra high-end stereo system has to contend with individual -- often complex -- room acoustics and the relatively huge amount of amplifier output power needed to properly drive room speakers. Most importantly, speaker systems also have to "move" some major amounts of air within that room, never a good thing when it comes to purity of sonic detail resolution since a sound wave's interaction with varying room surfaces (floors, rugs, drapes, walls, furniture, bodies, etc.) greatly impacts what your ear actually winds up hearing. Conversely, a great headphone system is basically excellent acoustic coupling DIRECTLY to your ears so the result is an intensely immersive listening experience where the space in a room basically doesn’t matter; where the sound is happening purely inside your head and you have a personal, intimate connection to the music without the world around you intruding. High-quality headphone systems possess the unique ability to transport you directly into the subtle nuances of any musical performance, and a superb reference HeadRoom Home Amp in your audiophile-grade stereo rig gets you there perfectly right between the ears!

Now, let's go back to the numbers again... The difference between the HeadRoom Home and HeadRoom Desktop lines is basically that the larger Home Amp design allows for the highly-upgraded, super-stable, ultra-quick power supplies to be built-in. Hence, dual left and right power transformers are aligned on the main circuit board with the vertically standing left and right channel electronics module boards. The Max module employed in the HeadRoom Home Amp is a deeply 'Class-A' biased configuration using our own specially-tweaked versions of Walt Jung's solid-state discrete Diamond Buffer design as the output stage and Burr-Brown OPA627 op-amps in all other active stages. Of course, another major difference is the sizing of the units; the Home Line is much larger than the Desktop Line so please keep in mind these full rack-space size HeadRoom Home Amps require a good bit of real estate. For space situations demanding a smaller-footprint amplifier, the HeadRoom Desktop Amp along with Desktop Power Supply offers all the module/DAC sonic upgrades available here in a much smaller footprint.

Options

The HeadRoom Home Amp is fully decked out with our own HeadRoom-built 24-position stepped attenuator volume control, the ultra top-shelf 'Max' electronics module mentioned above, and an OPTIONAL digital-to-analog converter board (DAC) with discrete USB, optical and co-axial cable digital inputs. This top-level Max DAC is an add-on for folks listening to lots of digital-output audio sources like computers or CD players with optical or co-axial outputs... To clarify: people often ask if all this high-end componentry is truly worth it; our general answer is don’t overly strain yourself, these improvements are subtle and very nuanced, so the HeadRoom Home Amp is actually about 98%+ of a completely tweaked HeadRoom Max Amp. However, we'll add that for those with a hearty wallet, pristine ears, and superb component sources, the rich pleasures of an ultra high-end audio connoisseur are available fairly decently priced in these flagship HeadRoom products -- but also keep in mind you’ll need to be dropping a small chunk of change on outstanding headphones, and possibly recabling them too, to make it all worthwhile.

If you need help choosing your amp, please feel free to contact us for personalized help, by emailing sales or calling our geeky HeadRoom sales staff at 800.828.8184.

Accessories

The HeadRoom Home Amp does NOT include any interconnect cabling. If you are ordering the DAC option, a USB cable will allow you to hook up your Home Amp to a computer. If using the optical input on the DAC, you will need an Optical Digital Cable, and if you are using digital coaxial inputs then take a look at this coaxial cable. To hook up your Home Amp to a portable audio player with an 1/8” (3.5mm) input, you will need an RCA to 1/8 cable. If you are using an audio source(s) with an RCA output, you will need an RCA cable. You may also want to consider some upgraded headphone cable options to further improve the quality of your headphones. Not all headphones can be effectively upgraded, and some need to be sent in to HeadRoom in order for us to perform the upgrade. While it may be a bit of a process, we feel it’s a worthwhile upgrade offering noticeable sonic improvements. If we still didn’t cover something you’re looking for, take a look at all of our cables.

All HeadRoom Home amps are hand-built in Montana, USA.

Dimensions

The Home Amplifier is housed in a beefy six piece custom-manufactured aluminum enclosure. The unit measures 15.5 x 15.5 x 5.25 inches and weighs just under 18.5 pounds. The Home and Max Amp series units require significant real estate and occupy a full rack-space size. They employ a nifty rubber bezel to dress out the chassis enclosure and provide sturdy footing for the amp on any surface.