Has anyone tried the new Lejonklou headphone amplifiers from Sweden? I own the preamp and power amp and they are incredible. I am tempted to get the headphone amp too.
Here is some info on them:
Product Page:
https://www.lejonklou.com/product-categories/headphone-amps/
French review:
Ah damn, i wish you had the HP to tell us more, I almost purchased one but backed off finally due to the fact that the HP plug is on the back of the amp and that was just not conducive to use on any of my set-ups without endangering the amp itself and all the equipment located around it. The fear of pulling the cable and knocking everything off the desk along w/ the fact that i would need 8ft cables made to be able to reach all the way around back was just more than i could handle. I really was curious about the SQ of that amp though.
I can’t speak to the Giella, but I recently acquired a Lejonklou Tundra power amp and it is awesome.
That’s why I brought this topic up. I recently got the Lejonklou Sagutan Mono preamp and Tundra Mono power amp and I am flabbergasted how much better they are than anything else I have tested in my system. I bet the headphone amps are amazing.
Yeah I’m definitely curious. The only thing that makes no sense is the jack placement. It makes no sense design wise, the guy behind Lejonklou is kinda maniacal about his designs and yet comes up with this. I’m puzzled.
However, the Tundra sounds so good, it’s hard for me to believe that this would be anything but a home run.
Here is some info on that issue from the mad scientist himself:
You’re asking two questions:
My answers are:
I chose between having an XLR 4-pin female connector and the 1/4" jack and I chose the 1/4" jack because it’s more common. There’s room on the rear panel for one of them but not for both. Giella is a rather compact case. I have evaluated the sound of a lot of 1/4" jacks but not any of the rather few XLR 4-pin connectors out there.
None of them can go on the front, because behind the front panel, there’s a transformer. So there’s no room for it. The reason to put the connector to headphones on the rear is that it will become optimal: It can be soldered directly to the main circuit board. To route it to the front plate is very similar to getting an adapter (as Pierre just mentioned), because it would require the signal to travel through cables to the connector on the front plate.
Speaking of adapters, I did try a lot of 3.5 mm jacks (the small 3-pole headphone connector) and strangely enough, it was better to use an adapter from 3.5 mm to 1/4" and plug this into the best sounding 1/4" jack on Giella than using the best sounding 3.5 mm jack that I found. This was a rather odd finding, but it made me decide to not use any 3.5 mm jacks and only provide the optimal 1/4" mm one, directly soldered to the circuit board.
The XLR 4-way connector has a theoretical advantage in that it provides two different grounds, one for the left and one for the right channel. However, these two grounds are best directed directly to the ground Mecka (a term in electronics meaning the point where all the grounds come together as a “central ground point”). So there is no difference between an XLR 4-way connector and a 1/4" jack in how Giella is designed. They would both be connected directly to ground Mecka on the circuit board. Therefore an adaptor will work as well as exchanging the 1/4" jack to an XLR 4-pole. But I’d make that adaptor short as possible, one decimeter is probably reasonable.
