Just about anyone who knows me knows I love listening to music preferably all the time. I have an iPod (of course) and a decent set of in ear “monitors” from Ultimate Ears. The one piece missing is a headphone amplifier. Now I know what you are thinking “But there’s an amplifier in your iPod” and true there is, but have you seen how thin iPods have gotten? There isn’t much room inside that thing. The point is a headphone amp provides a cleaner form of amplification. I admittedly don’t completely understand it all yet, but I am learning.
A while ago, when I first purchased my Ultimate Ears phones, I was looking in to headphone amps and I came across a DIY approach called Cmoy. Cmoy amps are apparently fairly easy to build and have decent amplification properties. I thought about building one, but my soldering skills have faded and I lack any electronics knowledge. So I hopped on to Ebay and found these Cmoy amps. The guy selling them seemed to have sold a bunch and the price was approx. $41 with shipping (the parts for the Cmoy are around $20 with out shipping) it was no brainer. I would like to build my own some day, but for now it’s worth the extra $15 to have someone else build it and know it works.
I got my amp yesterday in the mail and I haven’t been disappointed. The amp is contained in a repuposed breath mints tin and runs on a 9 volt battery. I might need to invest in some rechargeable batteries in the near future. I would like to replace the cheap Radio Shack cable I purchased with something that connects to the iPod Dock port. The dock port provides a line level source which bypasses the internal amp. I think I also might put one of those hook and loop (Velcro) dots on my Nano and one on the amp so they can be attached to each other.
– Jeremy