Background

I spend a lot of time at work and wanted a reference quality headphone rig to match my home system. Technology is constantly improving, reducing the price of reference quality audio every year. I still love my LCD-2 headphones, so they were at the top of my list yet I was open to trying any new headphones released since then. I wasn’t going to get another Oppo HA-1, which I used in my home system. It’s too bulky and has way more features than I need, and at work I use the computer as an audio source. I have a great computer audio system at home too, using a Juli@ sound card and Corda Jazz amp. I’d consider getting another just like it, but first wanted to check out what alternatives might have recently appeared.

If you’re using a computer as the audio source, you need two things:

• A high quality D-A converter to get a line level analog signal.
• A high quality headphone amp to amplify that signal and drive headphones.

A sound card does the first – but it’s not portable and only works with desktops (not laptops). Now, all computers can stream audio files out a USB port to an external DAC. This is portable and works with any computer – desktop or laptop. With the right configuration (adaptive or async), the external DAC clocks the bits and jitter is not an issue.

Given my preference for no-nonsense engineering over audiophile mystique, I quickly found JDS Labs, aka some guys in Illinois building well-engineered and built headphone audio gear on a budget. They started by producing a little amp called the O2, an open source design released into the wild by NwAvGuy. Prior to JDS, this was only available as a kit, and lots of headphone audiophiles don’t have the skills to build it. Perhaps they should – no Jedi’s training is complete until he builds his own light sabre – but that’s a different subject.

A few years ago, JDS started building their own designs, which took the O2 to another level in performance and higher power output enabling them to be used with a wider variety of inefficient power hungry headphones like the HiFi Man HE-6. Yet even JDS’s new gear was built to solid engineering specifications without any audiophile nonsense and reasonably priced.

Long story short, I got a second pair of LCD-2 headphones and a JDS Element to drive them, which is a headphone amp combined with a USB DAC. I compared this amp to my HA-1 and Corda Jazz, which is stiff competition.

I posted my reviews of the Element and 2016 LCD-2 separately.