Super Stereo Headphone Amplifier Kit

The Amplifier kit is a good buy and does perform as described, with very good sound for your headphones. The kit was not difficult if you use a good fine tip iron and fine rosin core solder. I used a Sigma iron and 0.8mm. solder and it fired up with no problems. It took the better part of a day, but I continually checked each connection and component. Rather than using a clipped lead in step 59, I soldered a 0.8mm. steel wire from a small paper clip to the 9V battery holder and "stapled" it through the board. This gave a very tight and clean installation. A much required tool not listed in the Ramsey brochure is a good magnifying glass with light.The headphones I'm using are the Sony MDR-V6. There is no "hissing" as reported by other reviewers and my Siglent scope shows only clean outputs. But then, any "hissing" would be a relatively high audio frequency and my 83 year old ears cut off at about 4.2 kHz.But a few comments regarding the design; I have no use for the "Buffered Loop Output" and the associated jumpers. The Clipping Detector does nothing except to light an LED. So, U1, the Quad Op Amp, a LMC 660AIN does nothing useful. Some better quality potentiometers and a slide or push button on/off switch lighting an LED would have been appreciated instead of the Buffered Loop Output and a clipping detector circuit that does nothing. I wonder? if the volume control pot has a logarithmic audio taper and the bass and treble pots could be notched to mark their flat position and the balance pot notched at the left/right equal position.The Manual is very friendly and has some useful tips. The layout and schematic diagrams are useful and needed. The Circuit Description is nice but, after the first paragraph, gets all the left/right channel components reversed. And there is some confusion with C5 and C33, the 470 uF capacitor .The supplied RCA to 3.5mm. stereo cable has the RCA plugs reversed. The red plug connects to the tip of the 3.5mm. plug. The white RCA plug connects to the ring. In the universal TRS (tip ,ring, sleeve) world, red is right to the ring, The tip is always left. So, when connecting to your audio source, just reverse the plugs.In summary, it's a nice kit but it has a few problems that maybe might be corrected by Ramsey with a new SHA3 kit? Eliminate the Loop Output, some better controls, an on/off switch lighting an LED and maybe redesign the clipping detector circuit to generate some negative feedback when clipping does occur.

This is a nice solution when you want to listen to Music on your computer with headphones. Most front mounted headphone jacks found on todays computers don't provide enough power to really listen to music as you might like to with a good set of headphones.I built the kit version of this amp and instead of using the supplied case I mounted the pc board into an old school case/adapter that was designed to mount a 3 1/2" floppy drive into a 5 1/4" tower bay and installed a front mounted headphone jack. Then powered the amp with a plug in power brick. Do not try to power the amp from power supplied from a 12v drive power connection, the noise through the amp was incredible.I agree with the other reviewer on the problem with the "pop" when powering on and off. I just remember to take off the headsets first. And the hiss - yeah, it is there.

Product is ok. I have two of them, one for the computer, and the other one for my MP3 player. It's impossible today to find a headphone amplifier with tone controls, and balance. This is probably the last one on the market.

I bought this to try to get a headphone amp with bass and treble so I can shape the sound. The kit is easy to assemble, works okay, but high level of white noise (hiss) even with volume all the way down. I am not using it.

Don't make the mistake I made by missing that this is a kit that requires a lot more assembly than I realized. There are a lot of very small parts that have to be soldered to the main board. I don't have a soldering iron because when I tried to learn how 20 -30 years ago I never got the hang of it without making an ugly mess and I don't think the main board has enough space to allow someone like me to succeed in getting it all connected etc.

There are plenty of stereo headphone amplifiers are on the market. Some more expensive, many less expensive. What sets the Ramsey apart?Well, first and foremost this has tone control whereas most of the others out there have volume and balance, or volume only. The tone control makes a huge difference but it goes beyond that. This also has output for two headphones or speakers (3.5mm), a loop out, and can run on a 9v or DC power supply.The shining feature however is the loudness control button. Flip this on and the music becomes very rich! Very loud and without distortion. This will deliver top notch playback quality on even meager, cheap sets of cans. It's equivalent to the CMSS offered by creative labs on the PC, but if you have CMSS going AND the loud switch on with this device, playback is simply phenomenal.Unfortunately, there are a couple of things that hold this back from 5 stars. The first being that there is a deafening POP anytime the unit is powered on or off. So bad in fact that it will give you a headache, and I worry that this popping could blow out the headphones. Proceed with caution if you're using a $250 set of Sennheisers.The next thing is that there is background hiss, but it's only noticeable when there is no audio going through. Start up a game or an mp3 and it's irrelevant.On the Ramsey forums, the person who designed this device acknowledged these issues and even apologized for them, citing that he couldn't get it worked out. Therefore, Ramsey is aware of the problem and these kits have been produced for 5 years without correction, so they're here to stay.Having said that, overall the performance is a definite upgrade. What I appreciate about them is that this device allows me to select headphones for use with a PC that do not have inline volume control. I used to be restricted in what I could use because I had to be able to adjust volume without going into the OS settings. This solves that problem and adds the loudness and tone control to boot. If you're willing to tolerate the pop and a hiss at idle, then this is a good buy.