Amplified Headphones – When Do I Need Them?
I just bought a new mp3 players, so do I need amplified headphones? There are many applications where you might want some extra power and help from an amp. The mp3 player bought is really small and only runs on one AAA battery. There isn’t a whole lot of output power to drive headphones. Cheaper mp3 players include high efficiency headsets that sound really bad. They sound bad because the high frequencies which make the sound more tinny require less power to reproduce. These cheap mp3 players are never able to power a good set of headphones if you want some bass and volume.
In order to fix this problems you want to buy an external powered amplifier or a pair of headphones with the amp built into them. This gives you alot more flexibility. When you put an amplifier in the loop, you can get loud volumes again and bring back some heavy bass.
You are probably needing amplified headphones on your computer aswell. My sound card had lousy speaker driver. This is because it had a low current output that would cause a lot of distortion at high volumes, over 10% even. I hate this distortion and it is pretty obvious and really ruins my music. I got some amplied headphones and now I get high sound levels at very low distortion. Adding any ampliefier to the loop helps the playing device by elminating distortion and playing the much at real high level cleanly.
Amplified headphones are much better today on power. You won’t use as many batteries as you might have thought. I get over 100 hours of play time on a single set of batteries! If you use the headphones on the train an hour a day, that means you’ll get 3 months on one set of batteries. Pretty good deal. I use rechargeable batteries because they cost less in the long term. I leave on set at home and the other at work.