This is a review and detailed measurements of the TCA HPA-10 compact headphone amplifier. It was sent to me by the designer and member @tomchr. It costs US $469 and is manufactured and assembled in the friendly country north of us, Canada.
The HPA-10 as noted is quite small compared to other high-performance headphone amplifiers we have tested:
The single on off switch feels quite solid and industrial as if it is controlling a few thousand watts.
There is no gain switch which makes use easier but will be harder on the design.
Not much on the back than the necessities:
TCA HPA-10 Measurements
As usual we start with our dashboard:
The lone third harmonic distortion is below -130 dB which well, well before threshold of audibility. Noise therefore dominates and pushes SINAD up to 112 dB which is at threshold of audibility in the best case scenario. In plain English, this is a transparent headphone amp and any impairments you hear will be that of the headphone or your source (at this playback level).
Frequency response is super extended and flat as we have come to expect from high-performance headphone amplifiers:
Dynamic range is as expected from our previous measurement:
When driven at very low output of just 50 millivolt (to simulate usage with a very sensitive IEM), performance is quite good considering that there is no low gain mode:
Power is almost everything in headphone amps so let's measure that against distortion and noise with 300 ohm load:
My threshold for excellent performance is 100 milliwatt and the HPA-1 nicely exceeds that. It is gain limited though so if you had a DAC with higher than 2 volt output, it could produce more power yet. Same is true of 33 ohm load:
The lower impedance does give rise to more distortion than higher impedance but at nearly -100 dB below our main tone, it is unlikely to be an audible issue. This is a much smaller amp than its competitors so something had to give a bit.
Finally, here is the channel balance performance. As always, there is some variability here in each sample:
You should be fine if this is the performance you get.
Headphone Amplifier Listening Tests
As always I start with my killer test which is the Ether CX closed headphone with 25 ohm impedance (and hard to drive). Performance here was excellent with excellent fidelity, detail and bass performance. I could barely tolerate the loudness at maximum level. Switching to Sennheiser HD-650 produced similar (good) performance. As the measurements predict, you can crank up the volume to max and never hit any clipping or distortion.
Conclusions
It seems every month we are treated to another high-performance headphone amplifier but each brings its own specificity. Here you have a great designer who is a member here and builds and manufactures the HPA-10 in Canada. Yes, with that the cost goes up but such is the nature of our economies.
I am happy to recommend the Tom Christiansen HPA-10.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The HPA-10 as noted is quite small compared to other high-performance headphone amplifiers we have tested:
The single on off switch feels quite solid and industrial as if it is controlling a few thousand watts.
There is no gain switch which makes use easier but will be harder on the design.Not much on the back than the necessities:
TCA HPA-10 Measurements
As usual we start with our dashboard:
The lone third harmonic distortion is below -130 dB which well, well before threshold of audibility. Noise therefore dominates and pushes SINAD up to 112 dB which is at threshold of audibility in the best case scenario. In plain English, this is a transparent headphone amp and any impairments you hear will be that of the headphone or your source (at this playback level).
Frequency response is super extended and flat as we have come to expect from high-performance headphone amplifiers:
Dynamic range is as expected from our previous measurement:
When driven at very low output of just 50 millivolt (to simulate usage with a very sensitive IEM), performance is quite good considering that there is no low gain mode:
Power is almost everything in headphone amps so let's measure that against distortion and noise with 300 ohm load:
My threshold for excellent performance is 100 milliwatt and the HPA-1 nicely exceeds that. It is gain limited though so if you had a DAC with higher than 2 volt output, it could produce more power yet. Same is true of 33 ohm load:
The lower impedance does give rise to more distortion than higher impedance but at nearly -100 dB below our main tone, it is unlikely to be an audible issue. This is a much smaller amp than its competitors so something had to give a bit.
Finally, here is the channel balance performance. As always, there is some variability here in each sample:
You should be fine if this is the performance you get.
Headphone Amplifier Listening Tests
As always I start with my killer test which is the Ether CX closed headphone with 25 ohm impedance (and hard to drive). Performance here was excellent with excellent fidelity, detail and bass performance. I could barely tolerate the loudness at maximum level. Switching to Sennheiser HD-650 produced similar (good) performance. As the measurements predict, you can crank up the volume to max and never hit any clipping or distortion.
Conclusions
It seems every month we are treated to another high-performance headphone amplifier but each brings its own specificity. Here you have a great designer who is a member here and builds and manufactures the HPA-10 in Canada. Yes, with that the cost goes up but such is the nature of our economies.
I am happy to recommend the Tom Christiansen HPA-10.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
