[Rogare]

I'm looking for a headphone amp capable of driving 50 Ω earbuds at up to 5 V rms / 20 V peak (1% duty cycle).  Any recommendations would be terrific.  It doesn't need to incredibly high fidelity—I'm aiming for the low hundreds of $, if possible.
 
Thanks for reading!

 

[Hooster]

Quote:

I'm looking for a headphone amp capable of driving 50 Ω earbuds at up to 5 V rms / 20 V peak (1% duty cycle).  Any recommendations would be terrific.  It doesn't need to incredibly high fidelity—I'm aiming for the low hundreds of $, if possible.
 
Thanks for reading!

 
Interesting. Can I ask what you are trying to achieve by putting 20V into 50ohm earbuds? Blow up your ears, the earbuds or both?

 

[Rogare]

The high volumes are for use with a very low duty cycle signal as part of an experiment.  No ears will be harmed in the amplifier's use.
 

 

[Hooster]

20V into 50 ohms is 8 Watts. I doubt that there are any earbuds that are rated to take more than 1 Watt. I suggest you save your money and connect the buds directly to a speaker output on a speaker amplifier. An amp that is around 60 Watts into 8 Ohms should be able to give 8 Watts into 50...

 

[Rogare]

Thanks for the reply.  I'll look into speaker amplifiers.  (The earbuds being used are specially for high levels—the specs in my original post are from their data sheet.)
 

 

[Hooster]

I don't know any headphone amp that can generate 8 Watts into a 50 ohm load. I would be interested to know if one is out there. The amp I am using right now is rated at 4.5 Watts into 50 Ohms and it is very powerful. I only use a tiny fraction of that. The headphones I am using, Q701 are only rated to take 0.2 Watts.
 
This Bryston http://bryston.com/PDF/brochures/BHA1_BROCHURE.pdf is considered to be a powerful headphone amplifier and it is rated 4 volts into 32 ohms (500 mW) at 001% THD + N at 20-20K
 
By the way, what earbuds are you talking about?

 

[Rogare]

Thanks for the link, much appreciated.  It might be higher end than I need, but I can take a closer look.
 
(They're actually called insert earphones—I mistyped above—and here's a link.)
 

 

[Hooster]

Thank you, very interesting.