Burning Blue audio headphone amp review

The USB Headphone Amplifier is actually a little aluminum box about the size of a package of mints, and draws all power from the USB cable itself. Is it useful or a gimick?

Quote from the review:

“Burning Blue Audio produce a $149USD USB Headphone Amplifier that in their own words “uses a digital-analog converter (DAC) designed explicitly for high quality headphone amplification,” so we want to assure you that we’re testing with headphones capable of distinguishing between shoddy sound, and the good stuff we all crave. Now that you know what equipment is involved in the testing lets begin.  The USB Headphone Amplifier is actually a little aluminum box about the size of a package of mints, and draws all power from the USB cable itself. From a distance the unit does have the appearance of an MP3 player, but it is definitely not one. The amplifier simply takes a digital signal from a USB connection and translates that into an analog signal regular everyday headphones can pump out as sound. There are two black buttons on the unit to control volume levels independently of the computer itself, but neither were labeled on the unit we evaluated.”

Our take: At $149 dollars, PC Stats doesn’t recommend this product and we can’t blame them. This seems to be a huge gimick in my eyes. The CPU is being taxed considerably in an effort to amplify the volume to your headphones. If you have a good soundcard and a nice pair of headphones, that should be good enough. Now that I think about it, for $149 dollars, you should be able to get a pretty nice set of headphones at that!

Read the review.