Stop the Hedonic Treadmill
Find lasting pleasure with this new headphone amp
300B amps are prized, and with good reason.
When Kevin was at Axpona, he did a little shopping and came away with a clutch of a great new 300B headphone amp from a brand called Auris.
Auris is a Serbian brand started in 2013 and makes turntables, tonearms, preamps, power amps, and headphone amps. The Headonia 300B is the flagship headphone amp built around two 300B power tubes and two 6SN7 input tubes. It offers 7 W of output power.
Unlike many tube amplifiers, the Headonia 300B includes an impedance selector switch for the output transformer secondaries. This feature allows users to match the amplifier's output impedance to the impedance of their headphones, ensuring optimal performance and sound quality across a range of headphones with different impedances.
Crafted with meticulous attention to detail, the Headonia 300B boasts a chassis made from thick milled aluminum. This sturdy construction minimizes interference and vibrations, providing a stable platform for pristine audio delivery. The amplifier also features rubber-plastic-metal sandwich legs, further reducing vibrations for a cleaner sound.
Auris Audio has integrated components of the highest caliber into the Headonia 300B. This includes Japanese Alps potentiometers known for their precision, German-made Mundorf capacitors for exceptional performance, and Lundahl transformers on balanced inputs, enhancing sound quality and delivering an immersive listening experience.
June 1 Deadline for Crystal Clear Streams
Nordost is raising prices on the QNet on June 1, so if you're in the market to greatly improve your digital audio without changing your streamer or DAC, add this audiophile network switch to your system.
While many similar switches just upgrade the power supply or oscillators, the QNet has been designed from the ground up to provide excellent isolation, low noise, and great low-jitter performance.
The QNet housing is made from aluminum and serves as both shield and heatsink. The ciricular design allows the Ethernet ports to be separated by a good distance, creating less crosstalk and other interference.
Ethernet cables carry noise into your system, and can also cause embedded noise that results in jitter further down the chain due to incorrect readings of when the digital square wave reaches its highest voltage. The human ear is extremely sensitive to these timing errors, so improvements to your network components result in a clear improvement to the sound.
The QNet has five ports, so you can connect your streamer, add a router, NAS, or Roon Nucleus, and still have a port leftover. The optional stand further enhances isolation and noise reduction.
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Nordost QNET Network Switch |
Nordost Stand for QNET |
Clean Diana: New Abyss Headphones
Dubbed a luxury audiophile headphone, the new Diana DZ is built around a lightweight machined aluminum frame with a highly engineered internal structure that properly supports the new DZ planar speaker driver.
At 315 g without ear pads, this is the lightest Diana headphone ever produced. The soft sling on the headband assembly provides exceptional comfort. The 63 mm Abyss planar speaker driver has a 50 ohm impedance and offers the highest resolution of any Diana model.
Choose from a beautifully curated selection of color options with custom exotic inlays of New Zealand Abalone or Forged Carbon.
New Video: Monster Hybrid Power
Kevin Deal of Upscale Audio and Dave Nauber of T+A Elektroakustik meet again in our video studio to talk about great power. The T+A M 40 HV monoblock is a 550 W, class-A hybrid with a 6SN7 input stage, and delivers shocking scale and dynamics, as well as great delicacy.