Top Picks: HeadRoom Amps & DACs
The truth is that we're very careful to try to offer great value, and you'll find that all our gear has very similar price performance characteristics because we design it that way. Nonetheless, here's some of HeadRoom's top selling products.
Go straight to recommended products.
The Total BitHead excels at turning your laptop into a great portable listening system, but it can be used with any computer that has a USB port. The BitHead does a great job of getting the audio out of your computer and leaving the noise and poor sound from the cheap analog audio circuits of the computer behind. It connects to and can be powered off of USB and includes excellent power filtering circuits; but it can also be battery powered, which completely disconnects all potential noise sources from the computer. Many people also use the BitHead headphone jacks as a source to plug in their computer speaker system, and with good results. Finally, the BitHead can also be used as a stand alone battery powered headphone amp with an iPod or other portable player.
HeadRoom Micro Amp And Micro DAC
The HeadRoom Micro Amp and Micro DAC may represent the best audiophile-quality electronics in the smallest package available. The Micro DAC has both optical and coax S/PDIF digital inputs, and computer USB inputs. The Micro Amp has two analog inputs and both a headphone output and a pre-amp output on the rear for sending signal to your desktop self-powered speaker system. The two Micros securely stack one on top of the other to make an extremely compact headphone system for desktop and/or night stand/end table use.
Ultra Desktop Amp
The Ultra Desktop Amp is a full blown big-rig in a six-by-six inch footprint; a perfect partner for your computer workstation. It has a very high quality internal DAC, letting it act as an excellent source, and includes both optical and coax S/PDIF digital inputs, and computer USB inputs. Two analog inputs and a rear panel pre-amp output on sweet Cardas RCA jacks on the back, and a high quality Neutrik headphone jack and 1/8" mini headphone jack on the front, provide a versitile array of audio connections.
Balanced Ultra Deskop Amp And Ultra DAC
Introduced in 2009, the Balanced Ultra Desktop Headphone Amp (BUDA) and Ultra Desktop DAC (UltraDAC) are HeadRoom's current crowning achievements. HeadRoom made the first commercially available balanced headphone amp some years ago, and balanced drive as a concept for driving headphones stuck with audiophiles because it simply works so well! The BUDA is an extremely high quality balanced headphone amp, with two precisely matched channels for left and right balanced output to your headphones. In order to use this amplifier in balanced mode, you will need to have specially re-wired headphones for balanced operation; but, the amp also drives normal headphones in single ended mode from the 1/4" headphone jack within the Neutrik "Combo Jacks" on the front panel. With balanced headphone listening, a truly exquisite experience awaits.
At the heart of the UltraDAC is the stunning ESS Sabre DAC chip, a spectacular digital to analog converter chip including numerous patented and proprietary technologies. The UltraDAC accepts optical and coax S/PDIF digital inputs, and computer USB inputs, and has outputs for four audio channels in a balanced, differential drive mode: Left Normal, Left Inverted, Right Normal, and Right Inverted on two male XLR connectors on the rear. It also has single-ended outputs on Cardas RCA connectors.
Make Sure You Have A Quality Source
Last but not least, we believe the order of importance to achieving the best sound quality when putting together a headphone system is: source, then headphones, then amplifier. The source is most important because you can't reproduce something that isn't there to start with; you should always start to improve a sound system with the source first. The headphones are next in importance for two reasons: poor headphones will limit everything before them, and headphones tend to be the least expensive of the components, so you get the best improvement per dollar with a headphone upgrade. The headphone amp is last in importance because the source and headphones can be pretty severe limitations if not done well and, it's not too difficult to build a competent amp so they tend to perform fairly well. On the other hand, most people just plug headphones into the jack on a portable player or receiver, and the headphone amps behind most headphone jacks are pretty miserable. So, for many people, it's the headphone amp behind the headphone jack that's the limiting factor, and purchasing a headphone amp is the biggest improvement to be made once one has purchased a good set of headphones.
As mentioned above, the source is generally (keep reading!) the most important aspect of an audio system. We build a variety of digital to analog converters (DACs) to further improve your audio source. HeadRoom amps with internal DACs, and our stand-alone DACs, both contain high quality DAC chips in our designs; and, these contemporary high-end digital recievers and DACs are extremely good at reducing or virtually eliminating jitter from the digital bit-stream. Now, here's the exception to our rule about sources being so critical: when constructing a front-end for your stereo system, it is much less important where the digital signal is coming from when a very high-quality DAC is used. We've even found, in fact, that sometimes very expensive CD transports sound only slightly better than the digital output of inexpensive CD players or USB audio outputs from computers when using a good DAC. So, keep that in mind when putting together your rig!
