Headphone Amps

I purchased a set of Sennheiser HD650's a few months ago for late night mixing, and I absolutely love them. My problem though is that I need more gain (I like to mix at low levels in the box and make up for them by turning up the volume on the audio card). I'm at the maximum and it's not enough. So I am interested in purchasing a headphone amp to properly drive these babies.

I don't know anything about these though, so I don't even really know what to ask other than please discuss, if any of you have experience. I'm thinking solid state, can't be bothered with tubes. Also I only need one stereo channel, none of these 4-way ones or anything like that. I'd rather put all my money into one decent amp rather than spread it across multiple.

A couple I've been looking at:

Schiit Asgard

Headroom Micro Amp

research CMOY or pimeta amps, they are supposed to be fairly easy to build, if you are handy with a soldering iron, and people build to sell on ebay for not much $$

cheap - JDS Labs cMoyBB

http://www.jdslabs.com/

pricey - Avenson Audio headphone amp

http://avensonaudio.com/headphoneamp.php

kit it up!

for future searches on this topic:

i ended up getting an aphex headpod 454. it's probably not the most hi-fi thing out there, but i hit up a few local hi-fi headphone shops here in Vancouver and tried some, finding nothing near as loud as this guy in the single stereo channel hi-fi market. went over to trusty tom-lee and picked this up, gets fucking loud which is exactly what i needed, and it doesn't seem to colour the sound in any way, so i'm thrilled with it. my mixes are already coming out so much better/cleaner just working with proper headroom and mastering to taste later, instead of clipping everything so i could just get punch in the compositional stage with a quiet audio card/headphone setup.

lol comes to this thread instead.

  On 1/4/2011 at 7:38 AM, ryanmcallister said:

I purchased a set of Sennheiser HD650's a few months ago for late night mixing, and I absolutely love them. My problem though is that I need more gain (I like to mix at low levels in the box and make up for them by turning up the volume on the audio card). I'm at the maximum and it's not enough. So I am interested in purchasing a headphone amp to properly drive these babies.

 

I don't know anything about these though, so I don't even really know what to ask other than please discuss, if any of you have experience. I'm thinking solid state, can't be bothered with tubes. Also I only need one stereo channel, none of these 4-way ones or anything like that. I'd rather put all my money into one decent amp rather than spread it across multiple.

 

A couple I've been looking at:

Schiit Asgard

Headroom Micro Amp

lol at shit ass guard... sorry