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Why are headphone amplifiers still so important to audiophiles?

THW

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Yeah, just like we don't need a car with more than 300 HP, but it's nice to have.
well generally with the onboard I have it is softer than what i would like.
 

mkawa

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i really don't like these car analogies, but i'll bite. the horsepower wars are ridiculous. a toyota camry does not in any way need to push anything more than 200hp, but it pushes 280 something. why? spec wars and increasing car weights.

that said, once the suspension has reached steady state on an airport tarmac, christ that thing goes.
 

Maki

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There's no laptop capable of putting out 100-1000Vpp required for my headphones ;)
 

EJ3

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Yeah, just like we don't need a car with more than 300 HP, but it's nice to have.
The Factory Five Racing 818 (Coupe, Spyder or Race [not street legal] {818 Kilo or 1803 Pounds}) with 270-380 HP seems about right for a comfortable street car with great handling and air conditioning. It can be set up with much more power but fuel economy suffers and maintenance expenses sky rocket. Beyond 380 HP for this car, I'll sink my money into other things (audio gear, perhaps?).
 

Hammyrfc

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My integrated doesn’t have a Headphone Out...
 

Tom Ace

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Decades ago, Japanese car manufacturers had a gentlemen's agreement to not make cars with more than about 270 horsepower. Part of the idea was to avoid triggering the government to regulate such things more severely.
 

mkawa

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No, they had a gentleman’s agreement not to advertise them as making more than 279hp. It was well known that all of them except the nsx made substantially more
 

Blake Klondike

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Most laptops are too noisy for IEMs and have no power for full sizes.

There is a narrow range of medium efficiency full sizes that can work well with built in headphone jacks.
what does the noise from a laptop headphone jack sound like? i have never noticed it!
 

mkawa

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actually, i'm not sure how we got here, but to extend the digression for just a moment, this gentleman's agreement actually hid a technological war that was brewing between the major japanese auto manufacturers. w/rt the engine, everyone was trying to make bets on what would be the most economical with fuel, cleanest exhausts, while providing the most useful power and providing the most durability.

Honda's supercar, the NSX, made the least power because Honda was betting that naturally aspirated variable valve timing was the best approach. they used a revolutionary cam changeover mechanism to make the car breathe at high RPM, while making the engine sip at low RPM. They were right. the technology that Honda named VTEC revolutionized motor design up to today, when every manufacturer now has a form of continuously variable valve timing. The conservative nature of the change in motor combined with natural aspiration kept the motor durable and the exhaust clean. Many NSX engines are still running to this day without a rebuild, and vtec motors kept them ahead of the game in air pollution regulations for a couple decades.

Honda's handling contribution was to design supercars as if they were formula karts. that carried through every super and hypercar to the current day, but didn't contribute much to consumer cars.

Mazda's supercar, the 3rd generation RX-7, bet that turbocharged wankel (rotary engine, derived from one offshoot of aircraft motor) would fix the wankel's fuel economy while maintaining the wankel's durability. Wankel engines utilize a rotational design to divide the combustion chamber dynamically and minimize both the number of rotating parts (1, the crankshaft) and surfaces under combustion pressure (just one wiper per chamber). naturally aspirated, this design had been proven extremely reliable, efficient per combustion chamber size (ie, small, light), but also hilariously inefficient with fuel, and with very very dirty exhaust gases -- they had a lot of trouble tuning the air intake to keep the engine stoichiometric. it turns out that turbocharging made all of this worse. the increase combustion pressure destroyed their chamber seals within tens of thousands of miles, their continued challenges with air intake timing made fuel efficiency even worse, and the chambers, because of the limited lifetime of their seals, now had to have incredible amounts of oil injected into them, making the exhaust gas slightly cleaner than a coal furnace.

the ony thing they were right about was the incredible efficiency per volume of their motor. they made more than 300hp _to the wheels_ with a 1.3l motor. there were two turbos, but only the larger one was significant for peak power.

also because of that, their cars were hundreds of pounds lighter than the competition. this never caught on in the wider market, as cars have been getting larger and heavier for the last 30 years because of feature creep. they had to be rescued by ford at the end of the 90s, so take what you want from that.

NIssan's supercar, the r34 Skyline gt-r spec V used a twin turbo setup on a medium to large displacement (2.6l) inline 6. twin turbo meant each turbo fed 3 cylinders. Nissan's bet was actually that microprocessor calculated fuel injection on turbocharged engines could increase efficiency without damaging exhaust gases too much and make the motor able to produce at-the-time v8 levels of power from mid displacement 6 cylinders. Their durability bet was that an the more balanced inline 6 dual overhead cam topology would last much longer than pushrod and carb fed v8 topologies. in few words, they were right. the rb26dett, as it was known in that car is still famous today for making hundreds to thousands of horsepower with incredibly high induction pressures and little to no increases in displacement. also, does your car have microprocessor controlled fuel injection? yes, it does. manufacturers recognized immediately that DSPs were the way of the future for fuel and air control in motors.

Nissan also made a bet on DSP based AWD drivetrains that didn't really pan out until the late 2010s with honda, so we'll ignore that for the time being.

Mitsubishi mostly followed Nissan, but with V layout 6 cylinders and rally homologation 4 cylinders. their primary contribution was complex center differentials for awd/4wd cars which i can talk about in another post. like subaru below, they used the world rally series as a testbed for AWD drivetrains. they mostly went under in the late 2000s because they didn't take the same leaps as others, and they never managed to make a reliable center differential.

no one bothered to rescue mitsubishi after the 90s. they made some money through an OEM agreement with GM and then pretty much died after after that ended. they are on life support now.

Subaru made front mounted flat motors like a reversed Porsche, but otherwise had unremarkable engine technology. Much like Mitsubishi, their primary contributions were handling-based, using the world rally series as a testbed for fully mechanical AWD drivetrains that were inexpensive and relatively fuel efficient.

toyota made a very reliable DOHC V8, but otherwise played it very very safe during this era. they did enter an awd turbo into the world rally series, but the interesting tech died on the vine and toyota decided to make a million camrys and corollas based on the exact same 2.4l 4 cyclinder for the next 30 years. they did take a bet on electric combustion hybrids and continuously variable transmissions, but that wasn't until the late 2000s.

what did make it? as far as the I6 twin turbo topology, well, almost all BMWs today are driven by turbocharged or twin turbocharged I4 or I6 designs that have completely replaced their V8 designs. And jumping back to variable valve timing for a second, BMW has been a leader in continuously variable valve timing (which they call VANOS) since the early 2000s. almost all motors are now turbocharged small displacement, variable valve timing, overhead cam motors with complex engine control units derived from these technological leaps in the 90s.

there are, however, no wankels on the market.

the handling wars are still very much in play, so i won't comment much further unless people want me to.
 

Robin L

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I would say most laptops have a noisy enough output to be slightly irritating.
I don't know if this is a time function of the development of laptops or loss of high-frequency hearing due to hearing loss, but the laptop I'm using [the ultra-cheap Acer Aspire 5] has a noise free [as far as I can tell] headphone out. The built-in speakers really suck, but the headphone out is not terrible. Mind you, going via USB out to my Topping E/L 30 is better, but it should be.
 

magicscreen

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I have done blind A/B tests with $50, 100, 200, 500 and $1000 amps and I couldn't tell them apart from my $400 dollar Windows laptop and my Macbook Air.
First of all, blind test is a wrong method. You cannot use your fallible ears+brain to prove something.
 

Yorkshire Mouth

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It'd be interesting for Amir to do a few measurements of headphone outputs on a couple of laptops, integrated amps and A/V amps, to see if there's a 'typical' standard which they reach.
 

DeepFried

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First of all, blind test is a wrong method. You cannot use your fallible ears+brain to prove something.

A correctly done blind test at least removes the possibility of a perceptual bias to one device or another. When a lot of people do 'blind' tests however they're not even getting close to doing it right. You need to effectively anonymize the sources but you also need to eliminate other factors that will create a difference, so you need to do pretty accurate volume matching to under 1db+- which you can't do by ear.

As to whether or not you can use your "fallible ears+brain to prove something" depends entirely on what you're trying to prove. If you're looking at if someone can hear a difference between two systems there there is no way to do that without using "fallible ears+brain".
 

Yorkshire Mouth

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Linn used to have an advertising slogan "If it sounds good, it is good!"

Now I know that opens a whole can of worms, but I think we all appreciate that there's a lot of mileage in that.

But any audiophile subjectivist has to accept that this works just as well for someone with a £300 set up as a £30,000 set up, and as soon as you sign up to that creed, you can't then get all snobby and look down your nose at anyone.

Surely, the ultimate sweet spot is a system which objectively measures well, and with which the owner the owner is subjectively happy.
 

ReaderZ

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Decades ago, Japanese car manufacturers had a gentlemen's agreement to not make cars with more than about 270 horsepower. Part of the idea was to avoid triggering the government to regulate such things more severely.

Is this one of the reason they can't keep up with European high performance car now?
 

mkawa

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no its largely because they have no need to. they are making money hand over fist selling economical cars that handily beat all the european and domestic options
 
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