Everything, Exept.......

The " Sugden Headmaster Class A HeadPhone Amplifier "

If Anyone out there has a mear 719.00 to spend on a Class A Headphone Amplifier, and wants to attain the best possible sound and out of this world style and class, the only answer is the Sugden Headmaster HeadPhone Amplifier. Headroom is good, but Only Sugden proves true to the source, while remaining musical. Sorry HeadRoom, better make some "Head Room" for your competition(your beat). And anyone who thinks this so called processor that Headroom uses is of any audiophile use, forget it !! It takes all the excitement and purity out of the music. Honestly, if headroom were using thier heads, they would not have made a huge, overgrown, black, and very unattractive amplifier using solid state components instead of discrete circuits ! I rest my case. Go to www.google.com and type in the key words Sugden Headmaster Amplifier and see for your self. Thanks, and Great Music to All of America......Peace.....

Similar Products Used:

Creek, Sugden, Grado...

I just had the chance to audition the Headroom The Max headphone amplifier in my system. It is simply absurb how good this headphone amplifier is -- I plugged it in right after my DAC, and before this evening, I had planned on spending $2k on a new cd player. But with this headphone experience, I immediately realized that my system had a ton of details, air, tonality, and musical-flow which I have never heard before. Guess that I'm now going to try and spend a lot more money upgrading my amp, speakers, and my listening environment. The only drawback I see is that it does not really create the large-scale orchestral feeling that I can get from listening to say, Mahler, on my speaker system. One must realize that this is a fundamental limitation of headphones (soundstaging and imaging), even with the so-claimed Headroom processor. The imaging is definitely an improvement over the conventional "two-blob" sound from headphones, but this image is not deep at all: instead, it is like a vertical plane in front of your nose.
If you are interested in what your source sounds like without room distortions, without the colorations of your amp and speakers, then try this. It sure made a great diagnostic tool to see how my front end really sounds!

In short, a VERY impressive headphone amplifier. Sounds tremendously transparent and revealing.

Associated equipment:
Sony D-Z555 discman, toslink; Entech 203.2 DAC; McCormack MicroLineDrive (passive); Parasound HCA-1000A power amp; Paradigm Minimonitors; DHLabs BL-1's and T-14's; Headroom The Max headphone amp; Sony MDR-55 headphones; various polycrystal/bdr cones, vibrapods.

I recently purchased the Headroom Max on approval. I won't be returning it.
This is a beautifully constructed, superb-sounding piece of equipment. Its resolution of detail, dynamic range and sense of musical presence and immediacy is simply stunning through my Sennheiser 600 headphones. It has an ability to draw me into the music that is unsurpassed by any other piece of equipment I own.

The Max replaced a Creek OBH-11 headphone amplifier (with upgraded power supply). While the differences are subtle, the Max has an ability to satisfy (particularly at low volume levels) that the Creek can't approach.

great technical refinement

mild solid state sound

my point of reference is a tweaked Stax eloctrostatic set. the Stax took several degrees of tweaking to get it to sound at the true reference level. this especially meant controlling the vibration of the output tubes and capacitors. for both the Stax and the Haeadroom max, the identical source unit was used, a sony x777es player, sitting on a vibration control platform (a townshend seismic sink.... btw, the sink improves subtle detail performance very noticably, where a vibraplane would be way over the top for this set up, but would probably work great).
after hours of listening to both systems, i did notice subtle but important differences. the headroom max drove sennheiser hd600 phones, and some of the effect is probably the phone's metal diaphragm, which lends the subtlest hint of "tin" to the sound.
i also experimented with varying types of a/c line filtration.
some conclusions are: line filtration and a/c cord are extremely important to get full performance out of the max. so is the quality of the interconnect. i ended up selecting a very short length of Purist (6 inch about) interconnect; at short lengths it sounds as good as the audioquest diamond cable and is a lot cheaper (this was the "elementa", the entry level P.A.D. interconnect).
the a/c filtration kept expanding until it consisted of a tice power cord, an bybee line filter, and this plugged into a MIT z-system Iso-Strip. now we are getting someplace, but this should also tell you how much garbage and hash is really on your line, totally compromising the experience of your system.

once set up, and the sony player also isolated from the didgital outlet on the isostrip. the max could really show its' stuff to the limit. much better than i had imagined. with the filters and overlap circuit turned on, my brain felt like it was floating in a sound field, a different experience completely from the stereo speaker sound, more uterine, like the sound was an etheric substance that one was suspeded in, extremely hypnotic. i often felt myself slipping into the half dream theta state where the music interacts with the mind at a pre-logical level. not bad if you want to make the effort. but well recorded material is a must, too. the only general drawback to this is that headphones deprive you of the deep bass experience. even contemporary subwoofer technology has a hard time getting this aspect of the listening experince right. go to a really cooking music club when an expert bass player is having a good night and you'll know what the fuss is all about. for instance i've heard recordings of jaco pastorious, but nothing came close to hearing him live, or many other bass deities i've heard, like rick laird with the mahavishnu orchestra at their hight, when the instrument merged with your body.
so, what's the solution ? there is one, but it means taking an extreme attitude toward one's sense experiences. i bought two Clark Synthesis transducer devices (they look like discus from high school track meets), took apart my Back Saver chair, and fastened the two transducers right behind where my kidneys are. you have to have some woodworking skills to properly seat the t-nut attachment devices, and you have to use liquid lockwasher to make sure the bolts don't slip from the vibration. then take the "variable output" from the player and feed it to a good strength amp for you bass energy. use the fixed outputs to the headroom max which has its own voulme control. with the variable out from the player you adjust the low frequency energy. i've been told that you even get a better result if you put the clark transducers under the seat part of the chair, so the sound vaves travel up and down your spine, but i was afraid that might cause my head to vibrate and be distracting. definitely roll your own according to what turns you on.
once all this was set up, i discovered that the clarks produce the most gawdaful audible speaker sound (the plastic clamshell case acts like a nasty speaker dome, phew... we need a solution to this!) so i got some silicone 2 compound made by GE i think that comes in tubes labelled "gasket material" but it's just black silicone(matches the black clark shells), and doped the living daylights out of them, but left the little hole on the other side open in case it was venting out heat. must have put about a quarter to 3/8 of an inch of silicone all over them with a one inch wide bristle brush, and rethreaded them back on to the chair... ahhh... now we're headed into the Zone, baby. some audible sound escaped from the clarks but with the sennheiser phones on it wasn't audible enough to distract from the surreal clarity of the max set up, plus the bass energy was awesomely intense. if you put on Bob Dylan's "Oh Mercy" there's a wide range of bass techniques than very eloquently explain the moods and shadings he's going for, but at the same time, you hear the higher frequency information with amazing clarity. some rewiewers said that the album sounded chalky, but i now realize it was their systems that couldn't get at the information correctly, not the master tape, that was at fault.
so how did all of this compare with the Stax. They are near equals in most respects, but the Stax remains the reference for purity. you'll notice this at once if you listen to serious string work, like beethoven's quartets or some of alfred schnittke's well recorded stuff (watch out for the BIS label, they have a sort of brittle sound). the Stax is free of the hint of odd-harmonic bite (without this comparison you probably would never notice) and the Stax has a more refined inner voicing (hey, tubes ,you know, and with the headphone configuration, output transformerless too), but the max sound reminds me of Cello equipment, it gets the macro sounds perfectly and has wonderfull engaging dynamish that gives you a strong up feeling from listening, where maybe the stax gives you a more introverted, contemplative experience. just remember, get your power source clean first and foremost, or you're throwing away your money.

Similar Products Used:

Stax Pro

I used to find headphone listening not much enjoyable, now it's a different story with Max and Sennheiser HD600. While the Sennheiser has been reviewed by many, I would like to share with you my appreciation of Max.

With Max you won't be reminded that you're listening with headphones, and that I believe has a lot to do with the processor inside. Switching off the processor brings back the good old days with budget headphone amps.

You can get into the music easily with Max. Everthing is even-handed. The sound is spacious, and it performs reasonably well when the message gets congested.


Rest of the system:

Meridian 508.24
Roksan interconnect