Hi,

I've recently acquired Sennheiser HD650s, and I was wondering if there's good reason to invest in a new amplifier.

Currently I use and sr 2040 Stereophonic Receiver, which is about 30ish years old. I don't have any specs for it, to be honest, so I'm asking for guess work.




These are pictures of it next to my old HD555's. Obviously the amp has a lot of power, but I'm wondering if maybe that being such old tech it might not be a clear as new ones? I don't have any new amplifiers to see for myself, so I'm hoping there's some ancient posters who can shed some light.

Thanks,

When driving headphones, most of the amplifier specs are relatively unimportant. Frequency response matters, but it's not that hard to design an amplifier that is flat over the audible range.

The spec that I would focus on is noise. If you set the volume at normal listening levels, then turn off the music, can you hear noise coming from the amp? If yes then you might want to replace it, otherwise it should be fine for you.

Old amp and new headphone simply let you discover how good the headphone or how bad the amp is, good headphone let you know the amp may have noise or other problem, good amp let you know the headphone high and low frequency limit.

If you know electronic, try checking the capacitors of the old amp, most of them may have little problem (usually leaks) and need to double check if they still works fine, otherwise need to replace.

Old amp usually have a good design (especially it already worked for 30 years), just need to make sure the components still works fine.

I agree... It's "easy" to drive headphones, and amplifier specs haven't generally improved over the past few decades.

The only thing that's likely to make a difference is noise. And, I wouldn't automatically assume that a new amplifier will have lower noise at the headphone output.

High power amps are more affordable than they used to be. And, with modern ICs it's cheaper & easier to build a good amp.

There was a big leap in sound quality (of the average amplifier) when tubes were replaced by solid state electronics (discrete transistors). Tube amplifiers require the audio signal to go through a transformer, and it's somewhat tricky to make a transformer that has flat frequency response.

When ICs replaced transistors, there wasn't such a big leap in sound quality, but it became very easy to build a good-sounding, amp and even cheap amps have pretty good specs.

Thanks. There's no white noise when it's paused if the amplifier isn't set too high, but that's only achieved because I am turning up the volume on my iPod (not anywhere near max, but not near 0 either).

Is it bad that my iPod is supplying some of the amplification? I know it sounds much better than the iPod alone (bass is weak alone), but I haven't got any LOD for my iPod to make it the sole source of power.