What you see are a pair of AKG K240 600 Ohm headphones. Why 600 Ohms? Because I'm driving them directly from the James Bonjiorno designed SUMO Athena preamp. It's a Class A design with tremendously low output impedance. Certainly low enough to drive these headphones, but it does get noisy if I turn up the gain as much as I need to.
I wanted a headphone amp so I could get gain and power, and free up some desk space. The Rega EAR is less than half the width of my preamp, and fits nicely in a cubby in the desk.
After getting the EAR home, the first thing I did, which was probably a mistake, was take it apart so I could look at the guts. In large part because no magazine review I'd seen had shown us the insides. And now I know why. Tis a sad thing indeed. I am hesitant to even show you but since I know thats why you come here, I'll give you the full naked view first:
From what I can see, you could make something better with about $40 worth of parts. $45 if you include the wall wart. Throw in another $40 and you could have top quality jacks.The inadequacies with the price/value of this product begin in the power supply. It is single ended power supply, with a single voltage regulator. Remember this, because this is going to cause us problems in the audio section design, which we will cover later.
All of the electrolytic caps are standard grade Korean made Samwha capacitors. By the way, nothing wrong with Korean products. Especially their shoes! My complaint is that they are very standard grade parts, and that by using the simplest possible power supply design you end up having to route your output signal through capacitors before feeding your cans.
Another sad parts about this product is the single input buffer and possibly voltage gain stage. Rega chose to use a single op amp, the NE5532. It's a fine Op Amp. Phillips used to put them in their top of the line CD players, circa 1989. Come on fellows, it's 2006, almost 2007. Would it have killed you to at least use the class A biased NE5535 instead, or any of the superior Burr Brown or Analog Devices products out there today? And how about two of them so you minimize the crosstalk between them?
The one bit of good news is the discrete output stage. Unfortunately whatever good this does for us is undone by the power supply. Because it's a single ended supply, this means that there must be output capacitors. And there are. Two big electrolytics, which are NOT bypassed. That's right. No bypassing. Just straight through. Are they kidding me? No, seriously, an NE5532 and tin can electrolytic output caps? Are they bleeping kidding me?
The last problem I had was that the circuit board is single sided. There's nothing wrong with this, in general, but when you use a single sided circuit board you end up sacrificing the cleanness of the copper layout in order to save a few bucks in the board manufacture. This tends to affect the critical ground and power planes the most. Also, this is a dirt cheap thing to change.
If you can get this thing cheap, it may be a good started uprgrade project for some one. Rip out the electrolytics and replace them all with Panasonic FM. Bypass the output caps, and socket the Op Amp so you can experiment with a variety of op amps.
I did get a chance to audition the Rega EAR at the store with an AKG 701, and compare it to a pair of 600 Ohm AKG 240s. In my opinion, the AKG 701's started to sound compressed and tired when music got complicated and loud.
Over the rest of the week I'll start actually listening to this thing in my system. And maybe after that I'll start discussing the upgrades. But seriously, it's almost a sad thing to NOT upgrade this thing.
Based purely on the parts they put into this product, I have to say, you are better off saving your money and getting something like the HeadRoom Micro Amp for $299. It has seriously better parts value than this... throw back to the days of early mass market Japanese components.
Sorry Rega, I think that this is an exorbitant amount of money to charge people for what you are giving them. Get rid of the extruded aluminum exterior, and take the money you'd save on it and put it towards some decent grade components.
By this Thanksgiving weekend I'll have my actual listening tests concluded and will publish the results.
No comments:
Post a Comment