Building the venerable CMoy DIY Headphone Amplifier

The last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking of building a small headphone amplifier. I want to tap into the line-out of my iPod to get better sound. I also have a problem with my headphone jack on my pod. After fighting with my friend Hermans dog, he managed to get his paw entangled in my headphone cables and destroyed the cable jack. So I have searched the net to try to find a good amplifier to build (I don’t have the money to buy one right now), and I found the Cmoy headphone amplifier. But I used another build page that has some upgrades to it. Unfortunately I could not find the bread board they used, so I had to make my own design. So after a couple of hours of soldering and using a drill it was time to try it out. And it worked! No debugging or anything. This must be a first.

Learning electronics

This is a great way of learning electronics. Just read the articles at TangentSoft about audio amplifiers and you will learn a lot on how audio and amplifiers work. And you’ll find ways of improving or even building better headphone amplifiers as well. You’ll even learn how to improve manufactured headphone amplifiers by modding them.

So how does the CMoy amplifier sound? Loud! And I think the quality is very good. I have tested them on my Shure e2c, Koss MX100 and my Sennheiser 600. I didn’t do a lot of listening with the 600, but the Koss MX 100 get a big quality improvement. Will continue to test it out tomorrow.