A Solid Call 2.0

Treat Myself? : It may be time to treat myself. The good folks at Headroom have a gadget that's right up my alley. The BitHead is a headphone amp designed specificaly for computers. It jacks into USB and acts like an external sound card with an amp.

See, right this very minute I am sitting at my desk with my Sennheiser 280 headphones and an early version of their Airhead amp. It's a pretty cool setup, but here's what happens with the sound. Computer goes through soundcard, soundcard goes to an Altec amp unit, amp goes to cheap speakers, cheap speakers have a headphone jack, and the jack goes to my headphone amp, to my headphones and from there directly into my soul. The end result of that equation is way more hiss than any human should have to endure. It's hiss that's going, as l said, right into my soul! This is no good. I've tried going right from the soundcard to my amp, but the weak-sauce company issue card's only got one line out, and I can't be switching behind my computer everytime I want to flip from cans to speakers and back.

So this BitHead seems to be the ideal answer. But at $199 (or $269 for the premium version) can I afford the luxury? Listening to this hiss, I'm really wondering if I can afford not to... Any suggestions?