True Headphone AMP?

My girlfriend walked in and caught me on my computer hanging out in a room full of HEADPHONE ENTHUSIASTS! Or, "hey Bob...are you forgetting to iron your tunic or are you a headphone enthusiast?"
Or "a priest a cowboy and a headphone enthusiast go into a bar"....

There are a number of headphones still in production that can be run directly off a speaker amp. HiFiMan's line of orthodynamics, for example. Do a search on Head-Fi and you'll find some very experienced members who prefer this approach to a dedicated headphone amp. No need for an attenuator beyond the volume pot and some common sense.

05-10-11: Bjb_nva
There are a number of headphones still in production that can be run directly off a speaker amp.

I've been in this hobby for decades and can say I never seen, or heard of a pair of headphones made to hookup directly to a power amps speaker outputs. Would you provide us a link to a pair. Would they compete against regular good mid-price headphones like the Sennheiser HD-600? Thanks.

At head-fi.org there is a 246 page thread with 3,677 posts about the Hifiman HE-6 which most there agree sounds best with a speaker amp from the speaker outs. A number of vendors are making pigtail adaptors for this. I myself recently purchased a vintage sansui au-717 just to drive an HE-6, a fantastic sounding headphone.

Greetings everyone.

This thread has been very helpful to me and I'm very happy that lots of members have chimed in. I’m going to be very careful as I proceed with this attempt of using my Hafler DH-220 as a headphone amp. I’ve made lots of notes to myself on things to watch out for from the posts here. I don't like heading to head-fi that much because while there are some good threads and posts there are way too many bad ones to sift through. I like the membership here a lot better.

I contacted Divergent Technologies about the Antique SoundLab UHC Signature Headphone Listening Device and here is what they said:

"ASL UHC Signature is a passive impedance transformer that converts amplifiers loudspeaker outputs for headphones.
It is equipped with a set of inputs, a set of output loudspeaker binding posts and a bypass switch to shut off the loudspeakers when listening to headphones with your amplifier."

I was lucky enough to find an older Realistic headphone junction box that was made in Japan. It even says Tandy on it but it still looks like a quality piece that I think this unit may be from the 70's. If it doesn't work out then I may buck up for the ASL UHC Sig or try that Bravo V2 Headphone amp Wolf_Garcia posted about. I have some other budget headphone amp makers in mind.

Swampwalker. I looked into the AKG K1000 headphones. They are quite cool looking and must sound amazing but I saw a new pair being listed for $1150 or best offer on another popular auction site. Very nice set of headphones but way out of my price range. I also took note about what you said about volume. I will be proceeding with extreme caution. I wasn’t able to win the auctions for the Sennheiser HD 580 headphones as well as the AKG K701 headphones. I may now look into BeyerDynamic DT-880 250 ohm or 600 ohm headphones.

Almarg. Thanks again for your very detailed posts. They were very helpful. I should have read the Hafler DH-220 manual in more carefully regarding the need of a junction box. I found from looking at the instructions provided with the Realistic junction box that the wiring you wrote about is very similar to how I have to hook up the Hafler to it. The Hafler DH-220 I’m working with is the regular 2 channel version.

Now I was going to try make the wire you wrote about and when I went to Radioshack to get the appropriate wires and tools I found a Y-Adapter that had 2 male RCA jacks on one end and a female headphone jack in the other. I decided to give this a try before I start making the wire. This was all before I found the headphone junction box. I used this Y adapter on one of my preamp’s outputs with a pair of Sony MDR V6 headphones and the sound was horrible. I believe I had issues due to what you are Sarcher30 were discussing.

Again many thanks everyone for your help. Whether or not I get this to work properly I'll post my results.