whats the difference between headphones and speaker amps? is it possible to swap between them?
Well, headphone amps are essentially just smaller speaker amps more suited to driving the load of a headphone. What do you mean by swap between them?
like say if you only had a headphone amp use it to run a pair of speakers, but judging from your previous response that doesnt seem possible
So that would be more possible with a speaker amp as you can just run the signal through some resistors and lower the amount of power and noise so it’s better for headphones, but it’s not ideal. You could run efficient speakers from a powerful headphone amp, but it’s again not ideal. I would just use the respective amp for the respective sound device.
There are combo units that exist that combine a high quality headphone and speaker out if that’s what you are looking for
thx thats more or less what i thought would be the situation. what kind of combo amp would you recommend sub $300
For sub 300, I would actually say grab a topping pa3 and an amp like a magni heresy or liquid spark, and a dac like a topping d10. It won’t be an integrated unit, but that’s because I think the good integrated units cost more like around 500 ish range
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I know it doesn’t measure the best, but for an entry point, I’ve enjoyed the Topping MX3. How about the Emotiva BassX A150?
I think you can get better performance out of the aforementioned stack vs the mx3 for sure imo. The Basx a100 is pretty good but you can’t really use sensitive iems or other picky headphones that well imo.
It works but it doesn’t sound that great. I think if you really want the he6 you will need to spend around a grand or 2 on a nice powerful speaker amp to really get the most out of them. I think you would be better off getting an arya or hex v2 if you don’t plan to spend for a high end speaker amp