Optical Headphone Amp


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.

8 thoughts on “Optical Headphone Amp

  1. 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.

  2. 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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