In my experience of either power amplifiers or headphone, how much power you have available determines fidelity first and foremost. There is copious amount of power here, and what distortion there is, is masked for the most part. There, I can confirm the appeal of using the 336SE with high impedance headphones of 300 ohm and higher. People though get such products for their subjective qualities. It is worse than it should be but at $310 for all that you get, I guess that is to be expected. It will also depend on your hearing acuity as to whether you can hear small distortions and true resolution.įrom objective point of, the DarkVoice 336SE is absolutely horrible. The lesson here is that what you hear will be highly load, volume and content dependent. Bass impact was gone and highs become more shrill/hissy. Switching to my sensitive AKG AK60 headphones exaggerated the situation with the Sony above. That sense of "hi-fi" that makes you feel every note was gone with the 336SE. The issue was loss of resolution and impact in bass frequencies. Here, hum from the 336SE was audible when music was paused, or at times during very quiet parts. I then tested the two amps with my Sony MDRV6 which I think is rated at 60 ohms (?). It has enough power to do justice with high impedance headphones. With a reference to test against, if you are coming from a lower output (or no) headphone amplifier, you are going to find the 336SE a revelation. Once my ears tuned into them though (through careful AB test with the THX), it became a small annoyance. The accentuated highs did give the impression of "more space" at times and exaggerated high frequency tones on some content was a pleasant addition. Still, push the 336SE and you were greeted with shrill highs and lack of bass. Because of this you could operate the 336SE at lower volumes and hence much reduced distortion. I could easily outrun the the THX AAA 789 (in its single-ended mode). What the community did recommend was high impedance headphones such as my Sennheiser HD-650. I read a bunch of reviews online and it was good to see the community's consensus being the same. Negating that by lowering the volume on THX 789, we were greeted with severe distortion if you turned up the volume on the 336SE. As such the THX amp would run circles around the 336SE, producing tons more power, and dynamic range. Let's start with easier part of this trial, namely using low impedance headphones like my Hifiman HE-400i. After much work I think I got some useful results but not as reliable as I wanted.
#Darkvoice 336se power tube trial#
I had to match levels manually against the reference Massdrop THX AAA 789 which is a difficult trial and error. As such, matching levels with test tones and my analyzer got me close but not close enough. Due to high output impedance of the Darkvoice 336SE, the output level you get in your headphones will be highly variable. Testing the subjective fidelity turned out to be more complicated than one would imagine. So if the hum doesn't get you with sensitive IEMs, the channel mismatch will. Dashboard measurements using RCA outs show the same: That reduced the hum substantially although you could start to hear it past 12:00 o'clock or so on the volume control. Indeed in measurements there were more hum than signal! So I switched to the Raytheon 6SN7 which I had from review of Schiit Saga. There was massive amount of hum both audibly and in measurements. I put one in there randomly and boy, was that a mistake. The owner had given me a few tubes for the first stage (6SN7). Let's get into the measurements and see how she does.
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There are a set of RCA outputs in addition to inputs so you can use the unit as a pre-amplifier if you like. The volume control is damped and a bit stiff but otherwise fine. Until then, I would make sure to not touch the chassis any more than you have to and only use one hand if possible.įit and finish is OK but you probably noticed the crooked power switch. I will be opening the unit later to see how it is inside. The big transformer here is for the power supply. The drawbacks depend on the design with the most common one being high output impedance. The benefit is supposed to be getting rid of nonlinearities of the transformer. This is most often done with a transformer but in OTL designs, other methods are used. A tube amplifier needs to block high voltage DC from going out of the unit and also reduce the rather high output impedance of tubes. The configuration is OTL meaning Output-Transformer-Less. In DarkVoice 336SE, the signal path is all tube. That allows the output impedance to be as low as solid state amplifier yet give you the "benefits" of tubes, whatever they may be.
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Up to now we have tested hybrid tube headphone amplifiers that use tubes as the first stage but drive the headphones using transistors.