PRICE LOWERED TO $220.00The Zen Head was voiced to be musical and non-fatiguing with an openness typically only found in the sound stage between your speakers or of course a live performance. You can listen to them literally all day with zero fatigue. Layers of detail are here, as well as some impressive dynamics and range, but nothing is over done or artificially featured that shouldn't be. Voiced with Burr Brown's best Op Amps and internal parts it tries rather successfully to sound like tubes - dynamic and open.The Zen Head is 9 Volt DC battery operated with around 50 hours play time from a single battery. It drives headphones between 10 ohms and 600 ohms with authority. It aflso drives line level applications up to 100K ohms making it very at home as a line level preamp. Internal set up switches have also been provided for Hi-Z and Lo-Z output, Hi and Lo gain, Hi and Lo dynamics, and Cross-feed On or Off.
NEW: $429.00, SELL $295.00 OR BEST OFFER BID WITH CONFIDENCE I HAVE 100% POSITIVE FEED BACK ON AUDIOGON AND EBAY USERNAME: ALFA_LOVER. If you use PayPal add 3.1% to the price. A great portable Headphone Amp with signature Decware sound. Looks and sounds like new, very light use. I am adding some custom very wide rubber bands for attaching an iPhone/iPod, etc. to the ZenHead (they are very cool, I found them on eBay). Also I will enclosed a Sennheiser Bag to hold all the items, I used it to replace the tiny bag Decware supplies. Feel free to make me an offer. Peter From The Decware Website: Comment from the Designer There's tons of little portable headphone amps available today and most for a fraction of the Zen Head's price. I make no apologies. I wanted a true audiophile headphone amp that would do two things; A) Something I could plug a real set of phones into and get small listening devices like IPOD's and ZUNE's to sound good over long periods of time. B) Be good enough with my hi-end source to sound hi-end. I'm a tube guy, spoiled by the openness, ease and dynamics of our Zen Triode SET amplifiers. I wanted a headphone amp that got real close to this sound so I started with Burr Brown Op amps known for these attributes. From there I applied the same design principles and pain staking voicing that I do on everything we make. The end result more than earns it's reference to Zen in the name. It's a headphone amp done right and for people who think they don't care for headphones, well the vast majority of headphone amps be it portable or not, portray music in an unnatural way sounding either artificially wide or inside your head, either of which is fatiguing. This one does it right, and not by any magic, but largely from the absence of all the extraneous crap that is left out of it.
If you're into bells and whistles, want to use it as a flashlight or alarm clock, or just want something cheap, look elsewhere. The Zen Head has a perfect center of gravity both in your hand and inside your head. It was designed for serious audiophiles or anyone who wants to reach for a higher fidelity in this format. - Steve Deckert / DECWARE High Fidelity Engineering Co. FROM AN ONLINE REVIEW: My summary of the above comparisons is: Expect the Zen Head to have a clean tight bass with great impact when the music source and headphone are up to the task. Midrange is no issue - it's completely free of any colorations or other annoyances that I can detect. Highs will probably be somewhat limited by the portable music players, but of course the Zen Head can be connected to a computer DAC which would relieve most or all of that limitation. The amount of volume provided by this amp will vary according to the headphone used, and also depending on how the internal toggle switches are set. Decware states which settings they recommend, and the following is my analysis and the specific settings I used in evaluating the sound. The Input Impedance switch can be set to 10k or 32k ohms, and the Interstage Gain switch can be set to High or Low. Decware recommends using Low with 10k and High with 32k, but my amp was set to 10k and High when I got it. I listened for a few minutes with that initial setting, and didn't hear anything that sounded wrong. The Output Impedance switch can be set to HiZ or LoZ, and Decware's description of these is: "HiZ is direct coupled to the headphone, and LoZ is capacitor coupled". Decware further states that HiZ should sound more neutral or lean/analytical, while LoZ should sound more spacious or lush. The 4th switch is the Crossfeed switch, which according to Decware is "Crossfeed done right". I don't doubt that they are in fact doing it right, because although I didn't hear an obvious difference with the few tracks I played with the initial settings (Crossfeed set ON), there wasn't a significant loss of space or detail either way. FROM THE DEWARE OWNER'S MANUAL: BATTERY A single 9 volt battery is used and easily accessible from the rear by a simple press of the thumb. You can use either Alkaline or Rechargeable batteries. If your using this with a hi-end source you may find Alkaline to sound better than rechargeable batteries. If selecting between different types of Alkaline batteries, always go with the highest current rating. Battery life is dependent on how loud you play the ZH-1 and the quality of the battery, but at a normal listening level you can expect around 50 hours. THE BATTERY SHOULD BE REPLACED IF the sound easily distorts when you raise the volume or if the green LED light is dim. DESKTOP USE If you need to use your Zen Head continuously and don’t want to replace or recharge batteries we have found products like the “9V Battery Eliminator” to work rather well with the ZH-1. This particular product and others like it are fully regulated 9VDC supplies and available on the Internet. SOUND CHARACTER Sometimes it helps to know the general sound character of a component so that you can spot troubles if the creep up. For example, the ZH-1 has jet black, noiseless backgrounds so if you hear any noise you know it’s coming from your cable, your source, or is in the recording itself. The ZH-1 is grain free and musically involving. It has been specifically designed to be completely fatigue free even after all day use. So if your sound is dry, grainy or fatiguing in any way, again you’ll know it’s not the ZH-1. The voicing that went into the ZH-1 took over a year to perfect and the result is a nearly perfect balance where nothing is featured that shouldn’t be, your attention is drawn to where it should be, not to frequency or dynamic based anomalies. You can trust it’s frequency balance, timbre and sense of timing. BONUS - A LINE LEVEL PREAMP TOO! Unlike most headphone amplifiers, the ZH-1 has the ability and gain to be used as a line level preamplifier into impedances all the way up to 100KOhms. This unusual ability makes the ZH-1 a sleeper of a preamp for purists wanting to hook it to their favorite tube or solid state amplifier. In front of a great SET amplifier known for transparency, the ZH-1 is far from disappointing. The internal switches let you voice your amplifier with the same excellent options that you used with your headphones! IPOD USE Many people will insist that the line level output coming off the 20 pin connector of your Ipod has better sound than the headphone jack. This requires an IPOD dock of some kind to convert the jack to RCA outputs via a ribbon cable. For that reason alone, the sound is usually worse. We designed the ZH-1 to sound best coming off the headphone jack of your IPOD. Of course all portable players and phones will also work fine with a ZH-1 via their headphone jack. FEATURES High quality 3.5mm stereo input & output jacks. DPDT Gold heavy duty power switch to insure a perfect connection to the 9 VDC Expensive high quality miniature toggles (red) for setup instead of inferior sounding dip switches. Carefully selected precision resistors for each part of the circuit demonstrate that voicing was taken seriously. High grade electrolytic's (light blue) with rated voltages well over twice what was needed. Audiophile grade polypropylene film caps are used for both coupling caps in the signal path and power supply bypass caps. Polyester Film caps with rated voltages over 100 times greater than required live in the carefully executed crossfeed circuit. Select grade Burr Brown OPA2132 Op amps. High quality stereo carbon volume pot with excellent feel. Adjustable range can be achieved with the input impedance switch. Setup switches (miniature red toggles) include Cross-feed, Gain, and input impedance allowing you to switch on the fly while you listen for the best combination. Lame portable sources like the iPod Touch will require the lower 10K input impedance to have any real gain and preserve dynamics, while sources with a bit more drive will prefer the higher input impedance of 32K to keep things from getting too aggressive and or too loud. Double sided fully shielded circuit board with faceplate attached is easily removed from the chassis by removing the two front screws and sliding the unit out. Hand stuffed and hand Silver soldered throughout. Alkaline Battery life is 50 hours. Compatible with all 9 volt battery types. No surface mount components whatsoever, all resistors and board traces are over-sized to prevent the dreaded dry solid state signature so commonly seen in these things. No sockets used on Op amps - no chance to degrade the sound over time and because no other Op amps will work as well in this circuit. OVERVIEW SIZE: 1 inch x 3 inches x 5 inches. The case and face plate are machined aluminum and all internal parts are premium grade making this bomb proof little buddy likely to outlast you! it comes with a lifetime warranty. HEADPHONE IMPEDANCE'S It has a built in range from 10 to 600 ohms so it will drive most headphones without issue and you don't have to worry about what impedance they are or what impedance to set the headphone amp to for best results. CROSS-FEED Cross-feed is well thought out and works so transparently to preserve imaging and keep the sound out of the center of your head or from getting too wide that it needs no adjustment, ever. So once again you don't have to worry about what crossfeed setting to use from recording to recording and source to source. Cross-feed is also defeatable so if you don't like crossfeed, or use a portable source that has crossfeed options in the digital domain (like the iPod Touch for example), you can use that instead. BATTERY POWER SUPPLY It uses a single 9 volt battery that can be removed and installed without taking the unit apart and without tools! Battery life is 50 plus hours and unpolluted with a charging circuit allowing you to use often better sounding high current alkaline batteries. There are also no voltage level circuits to pollute the sound, just a simple green LED that glows when the unit is on. A dim LED or premature distortion at high volume means it's time to change the battery. The on/off switch is a mil spec toggle clearly marked ON / OFF. (In fact the switch I use costs more than a cheap battery powered headphone amps total sum of internal parts! ) QUALITY When you get one of these in your hands - before you even listen to it, the quality is immediately apparent. The entire chassis is machined aluminum, even the thick aluminum faceplate is powder coated and engraved. It has a perfect center of gravity with no rattles. Even the battery compartment was designed with viceoelastaic lining to snuggly hold the battery in place. Internally only the best precision resistors are used on a top grade circuit board. Polypropylene film caps are used and selected OPA2132 Burr Brown amps. The volume control is a high quality feature in this unit with a smooth analog / infinite adjustment like any fine piece of audiophile equipment. Easy and intuitive. Besides the fact that overbuilding and resonance control in a personal headphone amp help it sound good, it also makes it pretty bullet proof. Nothing gets hot, nothing is going to burn out, it has perfect RF shielding and yes you can run over it with the car and expect zero damage. In other words; it's designed to last a lifetime, and it will.
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