Monoprice 111567 Desktop Headphone Amplifier

I don’t have previous experience with headphone amps. So when I went to purchase this, I was skeet shooting in the dark. I needed a review that gave me little more than, “neat, sounds great,” so I am writing something that puts the amp in context of the music that’s being amplified. I recently purchased a pair of AKG 701 Reference Headphones. I am a musician, and do quite a bit of home recording and mixing. I also have been a classical and pop music fanatic since the early 1970s. And I still go though the new releases on Spotify every single week. I lean towards classical these days. But Norah Jones first album still gives me goosebumps, and Frank Ocean blows me away. As much as I loved the AKG headphones, my iMac just didn’t have enough juice to optimize the listening experience. So I decided to purchase this Monoprice Headphone Amp. I have purchased a lot of wires, cables, and connectors from Monoprice, and have always been impressed with the quality and attention to detail. So I wasn’t too shocked when i got this baby hooked up. Simply put, this amp is breathtaking. Yeah, I am listening with a Rotel RDV-1040 DVD/CD player (vintage) and my iMac that (streaming, and AAC, mp3s, and two or three formats of lossless. I am using an AudioQuest Forest USB A to USB B 0.75m Digital Audio Cable to the computer, and a pair of five buck Monoprice 1.5ft Premium 2 RCA Plug/2 RCA Plug M/M 22AWG Cable - Black for the cd player. The first test was to stream a few pop songs - a couple of old standards, and a few well recorded newer songs. Nothing added, purist. Through headphones are made to be acoustically flat - no added bass (today’s norm) and no added treble or brightness, sparkle or zing. Starting with “The Cure,” GaGa. The Lady has a great voice and you can hear every nuance of what she’s doing at the mic. Crisp, up front...but OMG, there is a presence I have never heard on a pop recording. Every finger snap has a place in the mix, every echo, left right is spread across an incredible rich sound stage. You don’t just hear it. There is a third dimension of presence and space. With full dynamics. On a GaGa recording. Rich. “Thunder,” Imagine Dragons. Again, love the music, but I never heard the textures in this kind of recording. The layers of vocals, the placement of every percussion sound, and every delay, echo, of every single raindrop. But the amp is breathing life, body and character into these recordings. Better put, it is letting you hear what the sound engineers put there in the first place. Sweet. “Every Breath You Take.” It’s the dynamics and placement. Sting’s vocals have body - just a touch of short reverb. But the the guitar arpeggios don’t sound repetitive. Andy Summers plays every phrase differently, every attack is skillfully controlled - you actually hear this stuff. Copland’s snare hits explode, and you can hear the sticks on the cymbals. This is one of the hookiest pop tunes of the eighties, but this Monoprice amp lets you hear the craftsmanship that went into making it. You get immersed in the experience. Now for something much harder. Dylan. “Lay, Lady, Lay, Bob Dylan. I’m going to faint. Dylan is a baritone. Timbre in the vocals, a sound he wasn’t usually going for. He isn’t just telling a story here. He’s singing. And he CAN carry a tune in a bucket after all. But the simple percussion, the acoustic guitar on a soundstage. Not everything coming down the middle, which is all I heard up to this point. The steel guitar padding just floats in and out. A pattern in emerging. You can hear the “room,” the acoustics, the reverb on the vocals (in the exact amounts the engineers put there) - even on something as simple and old as a 1960’s Dylan tune. And folks, the dynamics and richness are there on the old monaural Sinatra recordings. Still streaming… “Brahms: Academic Festival Overture,” Bruno Walter. Now we're having fun. Analog classical stereo recordings with very noticeable tape hiss. Again, you can hear the hall, the acoustics, the bow hair digging into the strings, sounds and placement of every instrument. But something you don’t often hear - the phrasing, the zeitgeist. The masterful interpretation under Maestro Walter’s baton. Once you adjust to the getting the detail and nuance, the chair creaks and clicks of the woodwinds - you realize you’re in concert hall. For a hundred bucks. The Texas Instruments Digital-to Audio Converter is doing a masterful job. Switching to the analog RCA input. 1999 Jeez, darn!” Except in the real form. Remember that guy in the Maxell poster Blown Away Humor Art Poster Print by Steve Steigman, 36x24 Photography Art Poster Print by Steigman , 36x24 ? Blown away. Punch. Everything I said on the “Every Breath You Take” recording times 10. Warning: This amp is so good it could make a preacher cuss. When you have heard as much pop as I have, it really takes piece of magic to make anything you’ve heard a hundred times sound new and fresh. And you don’t have to crank the volume to get the effect. Schubert: Symphony 5, First Movement,” Karl Bohm The Berlin Philharmonic.” Schubert: 8 Symphonies Not to belabor the point...Soundstage, character, detail, overtones, and this time, breadth and depth. You can hear distance and breadth! I guess it has been there all along. But this 100 buck headphone amp pulls you into the music...what you’re hearing, where you are hearing it, how well you are hearing and EXPERIENCING the music. If you just want to listen to your music, I know a really find set of Panasonic headphones Panasonic ErgoFit In-Ear Earbud Headphones RP-HJE120-D (Orange) Dynamic Crystal Clear Sound, Ergonomic Comfort-Fit you can grab and plug into any 3.5” jack that will give you a very pleasant listen. (No joke, they really are a steal). But classical music listeners will appreciate a device that will take you to the symphony or opera, not just listen to a recording of it. “Piece by Piece,” Kelly Clarkson. And there you have it. Emotion. Everything..the detail, richness, depth, craftsmanship - let you hear the artist, the songwriting - art and craft to a thing. This time, it’s not the concert hall you get yanked into...it’s the talent, the passion. I really wanted to say this amp showed the flaws and studio tricks. But I am going sappy on you. Bottom line. Detail, dimension, depth, breadth, nuance, punch. The essence of what these recordings were supposed to be in the first place. Yeah, the light is bright and blue. Goes off when you turn the unit off. My RCA cables stay tight and snug. No problems there. Just pull your credit card and buy it already. You won’t be disappointed. I’ll shut up now.

First I will talk about how this product fits my needs perfectly. Then I will talk about it's various pros and cons of its features. I have a Macbook pro, a pair of low impedance, easy to drive headphones from senheisser and a pair of sen's HD650 which are middle of the road impedance at 300ohms. I also have a pair of powered studio monitors on my desk that I use during the daytime or when I'm alone in the house. I am able to have my monitors plugged in through the back and use the volume switch to control the volume of the speakers. Previously I had to reach around the back of the monitors to adjust the volume in the correct way (not adjusting the source volume). So this product is perfect when I'm at my computer. No drivers for Mac to install. Just plug it in and it works automatically. This product does have a few flaws. Fortunately the sound is great. On the other hand their are some design issues. This unit desperately needs at least an output mute for the Pre-out, because when I want to use my headphones I ether have to turn off the speakers, or unplug them from the unit. I'm waering headphones, why do the speakers need to be blasting as well? Yes, the LED is too bright (not a big deal to me). Also there is a little scraping/grinding sensation when turing the volume knob from ~80% to 100%. This was easily fixed by pulling off the volume knob and sliding back on. Now the knob is as smooth as butter. Overall I really like this product. Sounds great, useful for my setup with headphones, laptop, and studio monitors on my desk. It also looks nice, a brushed black metal brick. Depending on your setup, and as a first high powered headphone amp, you should definitely consider this product. For under $100 it's a very good product. It came with a USB cable and the power cable.

I got this DAC/Amp recently and it seems to perform well. The audio quality is noticeably better than my on board sound and it can go a lot louder. I am using this with my Superlux HD681 headphones, and even with the volume knob turned all the way up there is absolutely no hiss. I hope to upgrade my headphones soon so that I can see how well this amp drives other headphones. The build quality feels sturdy, and I like that it has a switch to switch between the onboard DAC and an auxiliary RCA input, and I hope to use this to connect my computer that is across the room. I would recommend this DAC/Amp, but keep in mind that this is the first higher end DAC that I have used. Update 5.3.15: The DAC is still working well, and now I have better headphones to use it with. I have the 250 ' Beyerdynamic DT 770s, and this DAC/AMP complements them well. The audio is very detailed, and the amp makes them sound amazing. This amp can push the 770s to the higher end of comfortable listening levels. *IMPORTANT TIP* If you use Windows, the driver will default to an overall lower bitrate being sent to the DAC. To fix this, open your sound settings, right click on the DAC, go to the advanced tab, and turn the audio quality all the way up. Before doing this I heard hissing in the background, like onboard motherboard audio.

It seemed to be great. But despite all the reviews, the unit I received was broken when it arrived. Sound only comes out of one channel. I tried every input method, and 3 different sources, multiple cables, and all of my headphones. The right channel is dead. I've bought from monoprice before, and love their gear. But now they're losing my trust.

tried this headphone amp with a pair of DR DRE beats mixer model headphones ,has good sound but a tad weak in the bass compared to my old Prodigy Cube dac - headphone amp ive been using ,has more output then the prodigy but id say less detailed and has weaker bass. other wise a nice unit but also as I had the gain switch on low the sound was balanced and separation was good, but on high gain the left channel seemed to get louder then the right a bit and made the right channel sound a bit weaker then the left but could be remedied by adjusting the balance through the sound settings. other wise a great unit

I research many brands for a DAC amp. I found that amps that do not come with power source could be too weak for select headphones because they rely on computer USB for power. This Monoprice is built like a tank. I was surprised how solid the build is on this unit for the price. The knob is metal and turns fine. Very smooth for most of the rotation albeit it slightly sticks at full. I just pulled knob out ever so slight and now very smooth. The unit gets warm but not hot. The light is bright blue which matches my computer rig. I sit the unit to my left so the knob hides the light and I do not even notice the blue light. It comes with a gain switch. I use this for my Sennheiser Game One headphone. It works excellent. The sound is fairly neutral to warm. Slightly warm. But the details are very clear. Keeps the music natural. Think sound but not too bass laden. This comes well packaged and looks more expensive then what I paid. Make sure you get the good 1/4 adapter and not the cheaper ones. I am very pleased I purchased this product.

Using the preamp outs on this is risky. They are capable of generating 6 V RMS. Most amplifiers are expecting to see 2 V RMS at most, and many are rated at lower input voltages than that. In practice what this means is that if you feed a power amp from this, and you're listening to music with a wide dynamic range, it is possible to overdrive your amplifier. I nuked a nice old NAD 2400 listening to Beethoven two days ago. I was listening to the USB input and it was set for high gain (for my headphones, the high gain setting is often helpful.) The amp shut down before killing the speakers, but the damage was done. After giving it a day to recover, powering it back on showed that the speaker protection circuitry was dead and two fuses had blown. Replacing the fuses served only to deliver current to a pair of resistors on the main board which had already been damaged. They failed catastrophically - but the amp, to its credit, never powered the speakers again. The sound quality is very good, and although the headphone output is fairly high impedance (10-13 ohm) it sounds fine with 50 ohm headphones to my ear. Probably not a good amp for a lot of common 16 and 30 ohm headphones, and too high impedance on paper even for 50s, but sounds good to me with them. I have no idea why Monoprice is building the system to be capable of pushing a 6 V signal and calling it a preamp output.

It's a great headphone amp for the price. I'm using it to drive a pair of AKG K612 Pros and it has no issues. I've only used the USB DAC function on it, so I can't speak for the Aux In. As far as a DAC/AMP goes it performs very well. It translates a very natural sound; I LOVE using this paired with the AKGs when I play guitar. Also, while the base mix is good for pretty much all music, with a bit of EQ, you can get absolutely crushing, punchy bass when you fancy. You'll still be able to appreciate everything else that's happening, too. Looks good, sounds good, shipped fast, fair price. My only concern would have to be the switches. There are two; one switch toggles between USB and AUX, while the other lets you select a setting for high or low impedance headphones. Of course, using the 612s I never even think about switching the gain down, and I've never used the AUX function. I'm just neglectful - clumsy, even - and anything short of a lightswitch worries me.

Have been using mine daily for 4 years now and it has been great. It has a very clear and neutral sound, no detecable noise, alot better than some other headphone amps I've tried. Has no problem driveing anything from the cheapest 8 ohm ear buds to 300 ohm studio headphones. This thing is a bit of a beast, it is very well built. It's been on 24/7 for 4 years as of 2 days ago, it's given no problems I suspect I will be using it for a very long time. Only complaint is the blue led on the front is way too bright.

Es un Dac y un amplificador de audifonos regular 2 en 1, tenia dudas acerca de adquirirlo porque no viene muy explicado, pero lo recomiendo ampliamente, lo ocupo para la Lap y para mi tornamesa es un buen amplificador hace que mis audifonos suenen mucho mejor.

Functional amp. First I’ve ever owned, and adds high quality to sound, easy plug and play set up and no apps to install.

Considerando que el equipo audiófilo es difícil de conseguir en México, creo que este producto es una buena opción cuando está cerca de su MSRP que es $99. Lo uso con unos Sennheiser HD 650. La calidad de la conversión digital analógica está bastante buena, aunque tras sesiones de varias horas a veces se calienta y tiene un poco de aliasing. En mi experiencia, dejarlo enfriar vuelve a limpiar el sonido. La amplificación es mucho más que suficiente, aunque es importante escoger la configuración de ganancia correcta. Los HD 650 se distorsionaban un poco y tenían más aliasing en el modo de baja ganancia por su impedancia, entonces recomiendo probar el modo de alta ganancia si tus audífonos son de más de 50 Ohms. El LED de encendido es azul y muy brillante. Recomiendo cubrirlo.

First Amp/DAC so nothing to compare against. Can only say that it handles my 250ohm drivers well and now i can run a somewhat hifi setup for music AND gaming. Never going back to the usual gaming headsets with their... less than satisfying sound quality.