As the first purchaser of the Cen.Grand 9i-806 “Little Silver Fox” headphone amp in the US, I feel it’s my duty to start a thread for this relatively unknown (for now at least) headphone amp. I was considering the TOTL amp from Cen.Grand, the 9i-906 “Silver Fox”, but decided to go with the little brother that shares most of the features of its big brother at a much more affordable price.
For now let’s ignore the Silver Fox and focus only on the Little Silver Fox. Here is the handsome devil:
This is a seriously powerful headphone amp. I can’t imagine it would have trouble driving any headphone out there including the Susvara. It pushes 15W at 30 ohms for goodness sake! It has 4 different types of headphone jacks including:
- 4-pin XLR
- Dual 3-pin XLR
- 4.4mm balanced
- Two 6.3mm single ended outputs
(shared with 3-pin XLR ports)
It has two RCA inputs and two XLR inputs on the back. There is no preamp function. This is purely a headphone amp.
The amp has four output modes: Normal, Balanced(BTL), Virtual Ground(Active G) and Parallel, as well as three low resistance modes and one high resistance mode.
It’s my understanding that the “low resistance” modes are in place to be used with highly sensitive headphones/IEMs. The way it works is low resistance mode 1 adds a 50 ohm resistor in-line, mode 2 adds 100 ohm, and mode 3 adds 150 ohm. High resistance mode has no resistor in the signal path and is recommended for most headphones. The wording is a bit confusing, with some of the documentation calling the modes “high impedance” and “low impedance 1, 2 and 3”. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but I think I have a handle on how it’s being implemented.
If a single-ended input is plugged in, the amp converts it to balanced, so you have the same output power whether a balanced or single-ended source is being used. Cen.Grand recommends using a balanced source to avoid more processing of the signal, but it’s nice to have the option to use single-ended sources without any impact on output power.
Here are a few pics of the inside of the amp. I’m not very familiar with amplifier topology, but the 4 pairs of Exicon lateral MOSFETS are supposedly a good thing!
I haven’t received the amp yet, so I won’t be posting any impressions until after I’ve had a few weeks to get accustomed to it.
