Why are headphone amplifiers still so important to audiophiles?

[Katji]

"golden ears" do not exist, it is an illusion. Repeating it affirms the illusion or myth and perpetuates it. (...With Google contributing of course.)
It is either "trained listeners" or not.

 

[gfinlays]

The audiophile community has stopped parroting these myths like "FLAC sounds better than MP3 (320kb/s) and "expensive cables will improve audio quality" but for some reason we are still spreading the misinformation that one must buy a headphone amp otherwise your shiny new headphone will sound like crap.

There's no way to prove with measurements that amp will sound better than listening straight out of a decent laptop. The vast majority of the audiophile community nowadays listen to modern pop and hiphop music which are compressed to death. There's no reason to tell them to buy an aditional $100-200 amp when most laptops and PC's will drive the vast majority of headphones just fine. 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.

The queston is, when will people in the audiophile community stop putting so much stock in amps when there's no scientific way to measure their usefulness outside of pure volume?

Of my various pairs of headphones, 2 are high impedance - 250 ohm and 300 ohm. Driving them to any kind of listenable level requires a headphone amp.

I have a vintage Rotel RA870 amp on the shelf - its headphone output is wired from the speaker outputs with a 300 ohm series resistor in each channel to the headphone socket. It has a >300ohm output impedance. That does seriously weird things to the frequency response of a 300 ohm headphone. A good headphone amp has enough gain to drive high impedance headphones and a low enough output impedance to not affect the frequency response of said headphones.