The little headphone jack is not so little after all.
We spend extraordinary amounts of time matching amplifiers to loudspeakers. Power. Current. Impedance. Damping. Headroom. Signal path.
Then somebody buys a serious pair of headphones and plugs them into whatever little hole happens to be nearby.
Fried Reim has spent nearly forty years explaining why that might deserve a little more thought.
The founder of Lake People began developing dedicated headphone amplification in 1986. That engineering lineage grew through Lake People into Violectric and Niimbus, spanning professional studios, broadcast environments and serious personal HiFi.
His Headphone Amplifier Cookbook is now in the 26Eight HUB Library. The 56-page reference works through the real engineering differences between loudspeakers and headphones: headphone loads that can span roughly 8 to 600 ohms, dramatically different sensitivities, voltage requirements, gain structure, damping, volume control and balanced operation.
That makes Fried Reim the first official Headphone Hero.