Optical Headphone Amp

posted Oct 19th 2007 1:41pm by Will O'Brien
filed under: misc hacks, portable audio hacks

It looks like this one’s been out there for a while, but it doesn’t make it any less awesome. [Andrija] built this combination portable DAC/headphone amp. It takes optical audio input, feeds it through an analog devices AD1866 16bit/96khz decoder. After that, the audio is brought up to volume by an op-amp style headphone amp circuit.

Side note: I wrote up a few short notes on the Sidekick LX I got today, if you dig that sort of thing.

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Comments [8]

tagged: amplifier, audio

8 Responses to Optical Headphone Amp

aleex mccown says:

October 19, 2007 at 1:53 pm

whats the point?

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Wolf says:

October 19, 2007 at 5:52 pm

I can’t help but think it would be better labeled as an optical to analog converter, as i can’t think of any other practical use for such a thing.

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monopole says:

October 19, 2007 at 7:28 pm

Why? Isolation! No ground loops, no EMI in noisy environments. Also a good test rig for checking TOS link connections.

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keo says:

October 22, 2007 at 1:14 pm

why? because if you’re the sort of person that spends more than $20 to replace the cheap-o headphones that came with the portable cd player (and you probably are, if you bought one nice enough to have S/PDIF interface), you want higher-quality audio than the device’s internal DAC and amplifier will deliver.

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static says:

October 23, 2007 at 12:40 pm

I agree what’s the point, when it come to this applications, but there are practical applications. After the tech that took care of a local ham repeater determined the lightning damage to the controller was cause in path by the path to the telephone line. He constructed something similar than this to eliminate wire conductors.

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Napul says:

October 24, 2007 at 8:09 am

Informated Article… Appreciated!

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Tubbsey says:

January 10, 2008 at 9:20 pm

so…is there anyway to have the output go to stereo speakers that connect with the positive and negetive wires?