Benchmark article on headphone amplifier specifications

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Here's a nice article - and associated white paper - by John Siau of Benchmark, talking about how headphone amplifiers with similar quoted specifications can nevertheless sound noticeably different when driving real-world loads.

Spoiler: it mostly boils down to the fact that headphones have widely varying load characteristics but are generally nothing like the ideal load used to measure the specifications.


This might be interesting reading in the context of using the Devialet's pre-amp outputs to drive headphones directly.