HeadRoom Ultra Micro Amp

We may have perhaps lost our HeadRoom noggin here, but we just simply couldn’t resist putting the ridiculously high-quality electronics of our Max amp in the tiny Micro enclosure. Good thing too, because it gives you the chance to lose your noggin in luxuriant immersion inside your favorite music -- and it doesn’t even take up much more space on the desktop than a coffee cup! Expect perfectly detailed extension to the very edges of the audible frequency range, lightning-quick dynamics, and enough clean robust power for effortless reference-grade musicality from intensely demanding high-impedance headphones.

Electronics

The headphone amplifier electronics inside the Micro Amp is a Class-A biased, emitter follower design based on the famous Walt Jung Diamond Buffer. It’s a DC-coupled amp (no caps in the signal path), and the left & right channels are completely separate back to the power supply and separately decoupled too. The already excellent Texas Instruments OPA134 op amp of the 'standard' Micro Amp is replaced throughout in the Ultra edition with the rare & astronomically expensive (and worth it!) Burr-Brown OPA627, plus all resistors and caps are of extraordinary reference-grade audio quality as well. The Ultra Micro Amp maintains all active op-amps including the gain stage biased into true 'Class-A' operation using JFET CCDs.

Features

Sure it sounds dang amazing, but the HeadRoom Ultra Micro Amp is also a fully-featured headphone amp/pre-amp device for your desktop workstation. It has an 1/8” (3.5mm) headphone jack on the front, but it also sports a volume controlled 1/8” jack on the back that you can use as an audio output source for your self-powered desktop/computer speakers. The Micro features two line inputs on 1/8” mini-plug jacks that are switch selectable from the front panel so you can easily juggle source duties between an iPod and a computer, for example. A gain control switch allows you to adjust the volume range to easily control headphones of any impedance or efficiency. And, of course, the famous HeadRoom Crossfeed circuit that improves the audio image on headphones … subtly and carefully.

Build

All that gadget goodness is wrapped in a lustrous and amazingly sturdy black anodized aluminum enclosure and urethane bezels. What’s a bezel? It’s that rubber piece around the front and back panels. They’re pretty handy as they act as bumpers protecting the amp, and they will also allow you to securely stack the Ultra Micro Amp and the digital-input Ultra Micro DAC pair together safely.

All HeadRoom Ultra Micro Amps are hand-built in Montana, USA.

Accessories

An external AC power-supply "wall-wart" is included with the Ultra Micro Amp. For optimal performance of HeadRoom's Ultra Micro Line of products, the optionally available HeadRoom Astrodyne Power Supply is highly recommended.

* The Ultra Micro Amp does NOT include any interconnect cabling. To use your Ultra Micro Amp, you will likely need a mini-plug 1/8-to-1/8 (3.5mm) cable. We highly recommend the Cardas Audio 6"-inch (or 12") mini-to-mini interconnect cable. For additional audio cables and various lengths, please browse all of our cables.