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Woo Audio WA3 headphone amp?

K

kingston12

pfm Member
I have been looking for a decent headphone amp for my Sennheiser HD650s and the Woo WA3 seems to get good reviews and I'd like to give a valve amp a try.

I am a bit worried about buying something like this without being able to audition, but it looks as though I will get quite a lot of my money back on ebay if it doesn't work out.

Has anyone got any experience with these are equivalent amps?
 
I have one, bought from Orangutan a couple of years ago.

If you are anywhere near to South Yorkshire you are welcome to have a look/listen.
 
John James said:
I have one, bought from Orangutan a couple of years ago.

If you are anywhere near to South Yorkshire you are welcome to have a look/listen.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the offer, but too far away.

How do you find it in general? I have heard it is a good match for high impedance phones like my Senns, but it is going to cost about £350 so I want to know that it is going to do a better job than the headphone stage on my standard Marantz!
 
At the moment you have to take pot lock on a Woo amplifier: they are great: we've had one or two here, but there's no way to try before you buy, or reclaim the import duty, VAT, Parcelforce handling charges and currency fees if you sell it on . . .
 
If your in UK the NJC monitor II is a superb VFM neutral headphoneamp (not available outside UK unfortunately)
It won't add warmth like some valve based amps, your HD650 is allready slight to the warmer side

Massive upgrade on Senn's vs what you seem to use now
 
I used to own one, and it was excellent with the HD650: the WA3 is not overly warm, has very good dynamics and liquid signature. I didn't like it with the DT880 though. I'm sure you'll like it
 
Thanks for the replies. Yes, it is is actually £350 plus all of those charges :(. It does seem to be just what I am looking for, though.
 
It is a fair price. The WA3 is well built and it looks very nice too. You'll also have some fun rolling tubes, ecc88/6922 and 6080 are popular.
 
boegelund said:
If your in UK the NJC monitor II is a superb VFM neutral headphoneamp (not available outside UK unfortunately)
It won't add warmth like some valve based amps, your HD650 is allready slight to the warmer side

Massive upgrade on Senn's vs what you seem to use now
Click to expand...

That looks interesting. It seems that will drive virtually anything where as the Woo 3 will only do the high impedance stuff, so I need to change again if I got different phones.
 
The Woo 3 is an OTL design and works best when the impedance is higher.

Good think on an OTL design is that you don't have any output transformer in the signal patch that degrade the sound. Even the best output transformers costing many hundreds GBP will degrade the sound somewhat.

Using my Grado SR60 on the Woo means they will start distorting as the volume goes up.

But all my main headphones are between 120 and 600 ohms and for that it works grand.
 
Another valve headphone amp to consider is the Schiit Valhalla. It uses four valves without any output transformer. It sounds sweet but modern, very different from the normal opinion of valve amps being lush and slow. The Valhalla does not give very deep bass like my previous Lehmann Blackcube Linear solid state headphone amp. It costs US$349 plus shipping cost directly from Schiit.

I use the Valhalla with a Schiit Bifrost DAC for my Sennheiser HD600 headphones. They simply sound superb!

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