If you spend lotsa time with headphone or your puny little MP3 playing cellphone just cant seems to be able to blast off your ear drums then this headphone amplifier is definitely a gadget you cant do without!

Headphones need about a thousandth as much power as loudspeakers to achieve similar sound pressure levels at the eardrums. This generally means a few milliwatts per side, at most, for normal listening. A few tens of milliwatts, for loud music or if you’re using unusually inefficient ‘phones - as with loudspeakers, manufacturers of high-end headphones may sacrifice efficiency for higher fidelity.

You wouldn’t think even cheap music hardware would have much trouble delivering this little power. But, actually, even quite expensive home stereo gear frequently doesn’t drive headphones very well, especially at high volume. And if you’re pumping your tunes out of a mobile multi-faceted transformative device at sufficient volume to cut through the sound of the bus, surf or very upset policeman tied to a chair, you’re likely to be asking for rather more power, from an amp of rather lower capability.

Some portable players (including big-brand units) sound lousy at all volume levels, usually because of a unavoidable equalisation settings where “ROCK”, “JAZZ”, “POP” and “CLASS” each manage, paradoxically, to sound worse than the other three. Lots of cheap portables also come with ghastly bundled earphones that add their own vacuum-cleaner-tube ambience to everything. Even if you avoid these problems, though, many portables sound OK playing quiet and lousy playing loud.