Can you plug headphones directly into an amplifier?

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[kengihepworth]

"Bloods going to be running down your ears, you don't want that."
If that isn't advice enough, I'm unsure what is.

[danielf]

Disclaimer, depending on the amp and headphones YES, Headphones like the Beyerdynamic DT-880 Edition 600 Ohms, need a lot of power and those you can more than safely connect to the speaker outputs of a speaker amp, do be careful though, either have a preamp or DAC you trust and avoid power amps with no volume adjustment, as what you have to do,
1. TURN ALL VOLUME KNOBS DOWN!
2. Connect headphones, and raise preamp/ DAC to max volume
3. Slowly raise the volume of the Amp until you reach the limit you want to listen to
4. You can now turn down the preamp/ DAC to a comfortable listing level, and never touch the amp volume again, as this way you can safely turn up your preamp / DAC to max without blowing off your ears or headphones, also this way you're only amplifying the signal as much as necessary, and will give the best signal to noise ratio

[rendyg]

Don´t forget there are headphones like T50RP mods or HE-6 which are famous for being power hungry. Apparently they sound best of an speaker amp :)

[GuitarD]

Just got myself a new headphone amp and my Dad asked why I couldn't just plug it into my power amp. And I said... I'm actually not too sure. Thanks fo the answer hahaha

[Ratchman_]

One year later-
Raphael's ears still have bandages on them.

[CoolDudeClem]

I use my mixer as a preamp and that has a headphone output on it so I just use that when I want my speakers off.

[johnhodgson]

I did that on an amp and had an accident with a patch cord. I have a picture of the flattened diaphragm with the voice coil smushed into it. Fortunately the headphones were on the table at the time. One of the reasons for this idea was the old practice of putting a 50 to 150 ohm resistor in series with the speaker terminals to the headphone jack in older receivers etc. If the headphone impedance varied a lot with frequency, the frequency response of the headphones would also vary. So hooking the headphones to the speaker terminals flattened the response and gave you lots of hum and hiss and anxiety about the inevitable time when too much voltage appeared on those speaker terminals.There are amps like the Crown D60 and so on that hooked the headphone jack directly to the speaker terminals, but that was for driving electrostatic self energized headphones like the Koss ESP6. Yes I am old.

[ancientalien]

I totally disagree with this. For a normal guys av stereo receiver, maybe lower powered 40 watts per channel rms, on a 300 ohm headphone, that's roughly 500mw per speaker. That's very easy to control and I've seen plenty of dedicated headphone amps that will put out that kind of power and more. I've done this and had a excellent experience.

[tomtaylor]

Can my wife use her rabbit vibrator in the headphone socket she's asking while listening to a CD, , , ???? Tricky I told Vibration I said, , ??

[Systomd]

depends of the headphones impedance, 40 ohms instead of 4 ohms you have 4V instead of 40V.. maybe a good idea with 2 resistors...

[KING_DRANZER]

Susvara enters the chat
Susvara: I think you need to get to know me better
Paul: O_O

[spacemissing]

Receivers and integrated amplifiers have resistors in series with the tip and ring contacts on the jack.
The value used depends on the brand and model, but 150 ohms is common.
A proper voltage divider would of course be better and safer,
but it would cost that tiny bit more that most manufacturers don't want to invest.
Paul --- Why didn't you say what Your company does about this matter?

[agp]

The correct answer would be yes, it as you stated it would be suggested that a proper resistor combination is used to attenuate the output power amplifier delivery to the speaker terminals . You would definitely want to provide a 4-8 ohm resistive load for the amplifier then divide that into the calculation for your headphone specifications.

[davesbrewing]

The AKG k-1000 plunged strait into the amps speaker outputs, If I remember correctly they were rated 8 w at 120 ohms

[jasper_north]

Hello there, my amp (ACUS FERDI 8) does not have a headphone output. Can I try to circumnavigate it by connecting “something: to my DirectOut on my amp? Thank you.

[MAELOB]

Hifiman He-6 are probably the hardest to drive headphones out there. Some owners use the speaker taps to drive them. But other than that i would never do that. For the Grados and Sony a decent headphone amp would be all he needs.

[kautkascitadaks]

some headphones actually need it, like the akg k340 or pretty much most hard to drive planar. Same goes for 600ohm headphones, as long as the amplifier does not put out much more than 80-100w and 4 ohms there is no real danger in plugging in 600ohm headphones directly into speaker outputs. Thereby something like the emotiva a 100 bassx exists where you have the headphone jac directly wired to the speaker output

[woodkraft]

Thanks for your good video and I fount an adapter (SAT UB-1) that can connect headphones by connecting to the amplifier speaker terminal on etsy.

[pepemonnerat]

In recording studios, we used to do this. One small box with a 2 resistors per jack Tip/ Ring with 1Watt 600 - 680 Ohm for a generic studio headphone something in between 32 to 80 Ohms.
Great to for drummers. Normally studios had Haflers or Bryston amps minimum with 100 W!
don't forget you will need 2 channels from the power amp to have a stereo Cue! If you have the time, try to match the resistors for a minimal tolerance . This helps to have a better stereo imaging and overall quality over the Cue mix.

[VaioII]

That is true to about 98% Paul

I am using a pair of planar headphones JPS Labs AB-1266 Abyss 46 Ohm connected to the speaker outputs on my SimAudio Moon 700i integrated dual mono SS class A/B amplifier that produces 350 watts into 4 Ohm resistance and about 30 watt at 46 Ohms.

I have had this setup for 4 years and can play at 80% of the max vol. without any problem.

So it is absolutely possible, but you need to know what you are doing and now to understand what headphones who can handle heavy loads and what amps that can handle higher impedance loads.