Little Labs MONOTOR, Руководство оператора

Страница: 17 / 20

I think another headphone with that spec is the Mr. Speaker Aeron
(closed back), a headphone I like a lot. I have never pushed it so loud
the monotor distorted, but I don’t dispute that you can.
In my experience with headphone amps, voltage gain, which is nec-
essary to drive phones to a respectable level, is far more important a
spec than power output. Rarely is over 100mw of power necessary to
happily drive a well-designed headphone. The Monotor has 13.8 dB
of gain. I chose that gain for a perfect pairing with my most popular
headphone the HD600. That gain with the HD600 gives you a great
range from soft to ridiculously loud, and oh so clean... Now where
that gain becomes a problem is with super sensitive phones, mostly
IEMS. Some IEMS are crazy sensitive, those IEMs I do not recom-
mend with the monotor.
The monotor is not a one size fits all, you don’t use a Porsche for
off-roading now, do you?
That being said I have some drummer friends that love it super loud
and use the monotor on stage to power their IEMS, they couldn’t be
happier. I worry about their ear health.
Frequency response:
The monotor is .3 dB down at 20kHz, at 50kHz it’s 1.7dB down this
is on purpose. I can assure you, you cannot only not hear less than
1dB imbalance left to right you sure as hell can’t hear .3 dB down
at 20kHz. Amplifying stuff that’s not music does not add to a sonic
experience. Overlooked in this review, the monotor has an excellent
low-frequency response, flat to 3Hz (where you can actually feel it).
Mono functions and other pro features and price:
The monotor found its way into audiophile circles, but it is truly a
pro device.
The mono functions do add greatly to the cost of the monotor. The
phase function makes checking azimuth on tape machines and phono
cartridges a breeze.
The monotor remains balanced, completely differential internally
through to the output driver. We don’t use any balanced to unbal-
anced buffers.
Only a single active stage is used surrounded by top-notch passive
components in a hybrid thru-hole/smt component selection. This