Headphones and amp questions

Hi Brian; The Senn. 600s are an open back design and can be heard-- at very low levels-- for a few feet, so it might bother someone you were in bed with? But the 600s allow air flow through the cans (don't want hot, sweaty ears) and are more comfortable than the Grados. The Grados are quieter to nearby people. I haven't heard the RS-2, but it has an excellent reputation.

I use a Grado 15 ft. headphone extension cord with Senn cans when I need more distance from source-- sounds good too-- available from Audio Advisor or others.

My SF pre-amp has an excellent headphone section so I use it, but for travel I have a Headroom Supreme that will operate off batteries or an AC adaptor, and the little amp sounds excellent. FWIW, the Supreme used to be a Stereophile Class B component, and Headroom still makes it if portability appeals to you. Cheers. Craig

Both the Grados and the Sennheisers are open back designs that will leak a little sound. The RS-2 and the HD-600 are both among the best headphones available. They do sound different (I've tried both), but neither is absolutely better than the other. Headphones are very personal choice and you have to try them on for comfort and listen how they sound with your source material. If you're interested in the X-cans, I would try and get the "version 2" edition. For headphone extension cords, I use both a Grado and a Tara Labs extension cable and they both work fine-no signal loss. The Tara is a tiny bit sweeter, but I am not sure it is still made. I got it from Audio Advisor.

You might like to check out the Berning Micro Z for a good headphone amp. Its dynamics and musicality are both superb. It uses a couple 6sn7's for output tubes, which are some of my favorite tubes just by virtue of sonics.

Good luck,
Chris

You will get a variety of opinions about the Grado vs. Sennheiser HD600 headphones, but I will quickly crawl out on a limb here and state that the HD600's are the best headphones I've heard except for the Stax Lambda, which cost a LOT more money. I've owned a number of headphones over the years, including several Koss models, Stax SR-80 electrets, a Grado, and 3 models of Sennheiser. I think that Stereophile picked the HD600 as one of the components of the year in 1998 or so, and I think they were a deserving choice.