HeadRoom Total BitHead Headphone Amplifier
Not only do headphone
systems take up less room than speaker systems, but they can offer great bang for your
performance buck. When I lived in Brooklyn and space was at a premium, I put together a
decent headphone system for my hi-fi. At the heart of that system was a HeadRoom Little
amplifier ($259 USD), which included the HeadRoom processor. I spent many hours with my
Little amp and some great headphones: the AKG 501s, and Grado’s SR60s and RS-2s. But
since leaving Brooklyn, I haven’t spent so much time with headphones.
The HeadRoom processor is one important thing (in addition
to the company’s wittily written ads, website, and manuals) that sets HeadRoom amps
apart from the competition. The processor is a crossfeed filter that compensates for the
unnaturalness of headphone listening. If you listen, for example, to a Beatles or old jazz
record, you’ll notice that the engineer has hard-panned the instruments so
you’ll get bass and trumpet on the right, drums and piano on the left. This can make
these recordings nearly unlistenable on headphones. The HeadRoom processor sends some of
the signal from each side to the opposite side to compensate for this -- instead of having
completely different sounds coming at you from each side, your ear-brain is tricked into
hearing a single aural image.
HeadRoom’s Total BitHead ($269), which also includes
the processor, arrived at my house at a fortuitous time: I’d just come down with
chickenpox and was too sick to get out of bed. With the arrival of the BitHead, I was able
to enjoy some high-quality sound without leaving my bed or lifting my head from my pillow.
While I wouldn’t recommend getting chickenpox, if you can get a week to relax in bed
with the Total BitHead, your laptop, and portable music player, go for it.
Features and setup
The Total BitHead measures a little over 4" long, just
less than 3" wide, and 1" thick, and is best described as a rectangular prism
with its corners cut off. At the rear of the unit, each of these cut-off corners has an
input: on one side is a mini-USB input, and on the right is a 1/8" input to accept a
line-level connection. On the BitHead’s front, each cut-off corner has a 1/8"
connector with which you can connect your headphones. There are two headphone outputs --
you can share the BitHead with the one you love, or set it up with two different sets of
headphones.
The BitHead’s front also contains the rest of the
controls. From the left are the headphone jack, the power switch, a green LED to tell you
whether or not the BitHead is powered up, the volume control, a red LED that acts as a
clipping and low-battery indicator, an On/Off switch for the HeadRoom headphone processor,
and, finally, the second headphone jack. The BitHead’s top is a hard rubber cover
that can be removed to reveal the bay that holds the four AAA batteries. On the bottom of
the amplifier are three indents in which you can place rubber feet (included) or Velcro
(also included; discussed below).
The BitHead comes with a short USB cable to connect it to
your computer, but if you’re using the amp with a desktop computer, you’ll
likely need a longer cable. The BitHead can run on the power supplied by the USB cable, so
you won’t need batteries for your computer listening, but if you want more
power or don’t want to drain power from your computer, you can turn on the
BitHead’s power switch and it will run off its batteries. Plug the mini-USB end into
the BitHead, the other end into your computer, and your computer should automatically
download the driver from the BitHead. In this configuration you'll be using the BitHead's
internal 16-bit digital-to-analog converter, which is bypassed when the line-level input
is used. I had no software or hardware glitches while using the BitHead: When I plugged it
in, it was ready to play; when I unplugged it, my computer reverted to its internal
soundcard.
The Total BitHead also comes with a 9" mini-to-mini
cable for connecting the amp to a portable device -- a portable CD player, MiniDisc
player, or iPod. If you want to connect your BitHead to a full-size component, you’ll
need to buy a mini-to-RCA cable; understandably, one is not included.
The headphone geeks at HeadRoom have gone the extra mile to
make sure the Total BitHead is ready to use with laptops and portable digital music
devices, such as the Nomad Zen and Apple iPod. Included in the package is an assortment of
Velcro circles in four different colors: white, two shades of gray, and black. If you
place one set of pads on the bottom of your Total BitHead in the three indents, you can
then place corresponding Velcro pads on the back of your laptop screen and the back of
your Zen or iPod. I’ve done this with my laptop, and it’s very convenient -- I
can move around with my computer without having to worry about remembering to pick up the
amp as well. When you put the Velcro on your portable device, you then have the device and
amp connected back to back. This allows the hard-rubber door of the battery bay to act as
a stand for your combo. While this works well at holding the two devices together, it adds
considerable bulk to your player; you might want to think about whether the improved sound
is worth the extra bulk. If, like me, you find the tradeoff worthwhile, HeadRoom makes a
couple of cases -- the GigaBag and Bigger GigaBag -- that fit the player-amp combo nicely.
I wasn’t sent one, but my familiarity with the overall quality of HeadRoom products
makes me think that buying one should be a no-brainer for those buying a Total BitHead for
portable use.
Trials and comparisons
I usually watch DVDs in my home theater, but sometimes
it’s more convenient to just pop them into my laptop. The main problem with this
approach is that the sound isn’t very good. When I use my favorite portable
headphones, the Sennheiser PX100s ($49.95), the soundstage is congested, the imaging is
flat, I hear all kinds of internal noises (e.g., when a DVD or the hard drive spins), and
the headphones don’t play very loud. I could live with all this, but was eager to
hear how the Total BitHead would improve my experience of watching movies on my laptop.
I began by watching "Born to Run" and
"Thunder Road," from Bruce Springsteen’s Live in Barcelona DVD. The
Total BitHead made several improvements: the crowd’s cheering became recognizable as
people’s voices and not white noise -- during "Born to Run," I could
actually hear some of the crowd singing along, which I couldn’t hear before. The bass
was much more authoritative, the soundstage was wider, and the imaging was greatly
improved. I then tried Spider-Man, scenes 18 and 27: "Battle Over Time
Square" and "A Final Battle." Again the BitHead did not disappoint as it
widened the soundstage and improved three-dimensional imaging. With the BitHead in place,
I was not only able to follow the Green Goblin’s glider back and forth across the
screen; I could also tell when it was coming toward me and when it was going away. In
"A Final Battle," the shattered glass sounded much more crisp than without the
amp in place. If you use your laptop for lots of movie watching, the Total BitHead might
be a necessity.
I was even more pleasantly surprised to find that it
wasn’t only DVDs that sounded much better through the Total BitHead -- streaming
audio also sounded better than it ever has to me. I listen to a number of BBC radio shows
over the Internet, and while I enjoy the music, the sound straight from my computer is
pretty bad: congested, lifeless, one-dimensional, and cut off at the frequency extremes. I
had chalked this up to the limitations of streaming audio, but the BitHead showed me that
the problem was in my computer. When I listened to BBC 1’s The Blue Room
through the BitHead, all of my concerns disappeared: the sound was full, the bass was
deep, and everything was lively. I liken the change to that of listening to a song on an
old mono AM transistor radio, then hearing it on a good stereo FM tuner in a respectable
system. I’ve been listening to more and more of the BBC since the BitHead arrived,
and I couldn’t be happier. (If you’re looking for some shows to listen to while
surfing the Web and reading the SoundStage! Network sites, I suggest BBC 1’s The
Blue Room and BBC 3’s Late Junction and Mixing It.) With both music
and movies, the BitHead’s performance as an external computer sound device was
excellent.
Having heard how well the HeadRoom improved my
computer’s sound, I was hopeful that it would also improve the sound of my portable
music player, a Nomad Zen, though I didn’t think it would be so easy -- for a
portable, the Zen sounds very good. Sure enough, the Total BitHead’s improvement of
the Zen’s sound was much more subtle than the improvement in my computer’s
sound, but subtle changes can make big changes in perception. My Nomad Zen is full of
192kbps MP3 files that sound just fine when I’m out walking the dog or having a
late-night listening session in bed. When I added the BitHead, I noticed a few subtle but
important changes in the sound: the soundstage opened up, the decay and ambience of sounds
became much more lifelike, and the bass was deeper and tighter. On the Beatles’
"Wait," from Rubber Soul [CD, Capital C4-90453], the tambourine sounded
much more lifelike, especially in the decay of the sounds. "Isis," from Bob
Dylan’s The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue
[CD, Columbia C2K 87047], had a much wider soundstage, and imaging was slightly
improved -- I could hear each distinct guitar string being strummed, instead of the single
overall sound I’d heard without the BitHead. The bass on Jobim’s "Waters of
March," from Cassandra Wilson’s Belly of the Sun [CD, Blue Note 35072],
was much tighter and deeper with the BitHead than without. I could listen to the Zen
unamped and be very happy, but now that I’ve heard the improvements wrought by the
Total BitHead, I no longer want to do that.
I didn’t find the HeadRoom processor useful with the
DVDs I watched, or with most of the music I listened to, but it did come in handy with
hard-panned stereo recordings. In general, I thought the processor seemed to dull the
sound somewhat, though not much -- I really had to pay attention to hear the difference.
On tracks such as the Beatles’ "Wait," however, the processor had a greatly
beneficial affect. The circuit made the recording much more pleasant to listen to, doing
away with the distraction that comes from hard-panned stereo played through headphones.
Conclusion
I’ve had more fun with HeadRoom’s Total BitHead
than with any other component I’ve reviewed. This little amp, more than any
medication, made my bout with chickenpox pass by more easily. It isn’t a product for
everyone, however. If you don’t use a computer for music or watching movies, you
could stick with HeadRoom’s Total AirHead ($199) and save some money. If you
don’t need a portable amplifier, you could get the Little for about the same money.
The Little also has a built-in upgrade path that’s great for the budget-conscious
audiophile. If you like your portable system to be as small as possible, then you might
want to stick with headphones efficient enough to be easily driven by a portable music
device. But if you use your computer for media consumption or want to get the most out of
your portable CD player, Zen, or iPod, then you should audition the HeadRoom Total
BitHead. It totally rocks.
...Eric Hetherington
Price of equipment reviewed
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