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#Bottlehead amp review 2a3 crack#
I did try it briefly with the Hifiman HE-400 and while that worked, I didn’t really experience any distortion like Mike, it doesn’t really need the Crack and it also doesn’t do anything special to it. Most of my other headphones have low impedance or are orthodynamic headphones and the Crack wasn’t developed with those in mind. I specifically bought the Crack for this headphone after seeing raving posts about this combination over and over. I’ve only been using my beloved Sennheiser HD650 with the Bottlehead amp. Looks do matter when buying an amplifier but in the end the sound it produces is more important, and that’s where the Crack really shines. While I think its looks are basic and very cool, I have to admit that having all the cables on top will probably never make it win a beauty contest.
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Some people like the look of the Crack and others hate it. It’s a DIY project so if you have the skills you can do pretty much whatever you want. It doesn’t really bother me but I’ve seen a lot of people using L shaped plugs with the Bottlehead designs and other DIY’ers have changed the layout and put the connectors on the back and front. That can be unhandy when you don’t have a lot of space or when your interconnects and power cable are rather unflexible. Like with every Bottlehead design all in- and outputs are located on top of the amplifier (even the power cable goes in on top). Anyway since Mike did the build on both our Cracks, I will let him talk more about the building process later. If you don’t feel like building the amplifier yourself, you can always order a pre-assembled Crack from Bottlehead, at an extra cost of course.
#Bottlehead amp review 2a3 manual#
Bottlehead also includes a very detailed step-by-step manual making it almost impossible to screw up. The DIY Crack is a fairly easy to build amplifier, anyone having experience with soldering and a multimeter can surely build one himself. Bottlehead did forget to send us the logo badges we paid for and the wood of one of the casings was slightly damaged but we were to excited to complain about that and we decided to build them like that. As Mike mentioned before in his Facebook notes, it wasn’t always easy communicating with Bottlehead, with emails getting lost/unanswered but a couple of phone calls and lots of emails later we got our DIY packages in the mail. We ordered a couple of Cracks right before the price increase was announced (more on that later) so that probably explains the long waiting period. The Bottlehead Crack amplifiers arrived a little over two months after having ordered them on Bottlehead’s website. Writing a review after Mike’s interesting and complete 2 page impressions on Facebook isn’t easy, so don’t shoot me if this review turns out short ?