Amp recommendation

[Aud99]

Looking for advice, as I’ve spent days reading about headphones amplifiers.

My current setup is as follows:
- Headphones: Focal Stellia
- Streamer / DAC: Eversolo Master Edition
- Amplifier: Yamaha A-S2000 (has a built-in headphones amp, not sure what it’s worth)

I might also try other headphones down the road.

I suppose that having a dedicated headphones amplifier unit would provide a significant upgrade.

Going through the past few years of discussions on this website, I get the feeling that the most recommended options would be Benchmark HPA-4 (pricey and reliable) or Topping A70 Pro or A90D (cheap and unreliable, also a risk of damaging headphones).

Would like to hear thoughts about this. I don’t mind paying way more than for the Topping to get a product that’s more reliable and doesn’t risk blowing up my headphones. But going to the HPA-4 costs 7x higher!…

Are there any good alternatives I should consider between these extremes?

 

[Dunring]

You don't risk damage keeping in low or medium gain more, even on a powerful amp it's safe. A Topping A30Pro has all the performance you'll ever need, I use one daily. The A70 Pro is excellent, and has a volume limiter you can set for even more safety like the A90D discrete.
The Topping L50 is the value for money winner along with the Sabaj A20h. The HPA4 runs really warm, and it's huge compared to something like an L50.

 

[Aud99]

You don't risk damage keeping in low or medium gain more, even on a powerful amp it's safe. A Topping A30Pro has all the performance you'll ever need, I use one daily. The A70 Pro is excellent, and has a volume limiter you can set for even more safety like the A90D discrete.
The Topping L50 is the value for money winner along with the Sabaj A20h. The HPA4 runs really warm, and it's huge compared to something like an L50.

There were reports about some Topping units damaging headphones as they were defective: https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/s/pnJ3kkQH1q

 

[Dunring]

There were reports about some Topping units damaging headphones as they were defective: https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/s/pnJ3kkQH1q

I've had three so far, the early one from the first production run and a static crackling only on the balanced side, and others reported issues even with a firmware update. The two new ones from after they fixed it were flawless, so I'm not worried as long as it's a current model. If you buy new from Hifi-College they've got the current ones on Amazon. Using a credit card that doubles the warranty can give even more peace of mind. They have great warranty coverage also, they're like Apos where you don't have to ship it back to China. I don't like buying the first production run of anything for that reason, usually wait 6 months at least on a new product.

 

[Rhamnetin]

You can also get the same amplifiers as the Benchmark HPA-4 in the SMSL SH-9 for $290. Less power in this one though, but there's really no benefit in spending thousands on a headphone amp. You can get just as good performance and also good reliability for much less (there's minimal price to performance correlation, as with DACs). With that said, I went with and recommend Topping since the A70 Pro and L70 are just so dominant in performance and value, there's no better than them in those metrics.

But if you don't trust Topping (I don't blame you) and by extension SMSL, there's always the JDS Labs Atom Amp 2 which has a surprising amount of power for its price and measures superbly all around. Their more expensive El Amp 2+ isn't even more powerful. Considering the performance of this amp, the only logical reasons to go beyond this are more power and/or preamp functionality.

If you want more power than that (not at all needed for the efficient Stellia of course, nor for many other headphones), there's the Schiit Midgard. This brand doesn't have a good reputation for customer service though.