Portable amps: Are they worth it?

Soontir C'boath · Post by **Soontir C'boath** » 2007-03-17 09:32pm

I went to headphone.com out of boredom and I noticed they have the Total Airhead amp for $100 ($50 off). How good is that amp and others in general?

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2007-03-17 09:48pm

Portable amps certainly help, though there are alternative designs that may be cheaper or easier to carry around.

Soontir C'boath · Post by **Soontir C'boath** » 2007-03-17 10:19pm

phongn wrote:Portable amps certainly help, though there are alternative designs that may be cheaper or easier to carry around.

Oh, do tell!

kheegster · Post by **kheegster** » 2007-03-17 10:51pm

Unless you're a serious audiophile, the main reason to get a portable amp is if you're using high-impedance headphones. I'm not a real audiophile, but I do have an AKG-501 that sounds very faint even with my CD/MP3 player cranked to max, so I picked up a Go-Vibe amp. The sound quality was improved noticeably as well.

aerius · Post by **aerius** » 2007-03-17 11:04pm

Given that you have the Grado SR60 and Shure E4G, a portable amp is likely more trouble than it's worth. Both of them are easily driven by an iPod or pretty much any portable music player, and unless you want to play around with crossfeed on the Airhead there's not much point for an amp IMO.

Exonerate · Post by **Exonerate** » 2007-03-18 07:02am

aerius wrote:Given that you have the Grado SR60 and Shure E4G, a portable amp is likely more trouble than it's worth. Both of them are easily driven by an iPod or pretty much any portable music player, and unless you want to play around with crossfeed on the Airhead there's not much point for an amp IMO.

On the audiophile forums I've visited, there's a lot of talk about them improving audio quality, etc - is this an actually perceptible improvement? I was toying around with the idea of building a cmoy amp awhile ago.

Soontir C'boath · Post by **Soontir C'boath** » 2007-03-18 07:27am

aerius wrote:Given that you have the Grado SR60 and Shure E4G, a portable amp is likely more trouble than it's worth. Both of them are easily driven by an iPod or pretty much any portable music player, and unless you want to play around with crossfeed on the Airhead there's not much point for an amp IMO.

That's a relief. I'm somewhat an impulse buyer especially when it comes to discounted stuff so that's good to hear.

aerius · Post by **aerius** » 2007-03-18 11:09am

Exonerate wrote:On the audiophile forums I've visited, there's a lot of talk about them improving audio quality, etc - is this an actually perceptible improvement? I was toying around with the idea of building a cmoy amp awhile ago.

A CMOY isn't going to improve audio quality unless the built-in amp in your music player is truly anemic and craptacular. As for portable amps in general, I'm not really a fan of them. The way I see it is this, portables are normally used on the go in environments where there's a lot of noise & other distractions, so chances are you're not going to notice much difference between amped and unamped. However, if the portable system is used for listening in a relatively quiet place like an office, dorm room or library, then an amp can make sense.