dCS Lina Headphone Amplifier
Whether you’re listening with custom IEMs or reference-level over-ears, the dCS Lina Headphone Amplifier will ensure you experience the full impact of your chosen headphones, and your music. With its ultra-low output impedance, it confidently drives a vast range of designs, and adapts to suit their unique requirements and characteristics for optimal performance.
- Purpose built for headphone playback
Our first ever standalone amplifier, its design builds on learnings gained from our experience working at the forefront of audio design and engineering, and developing a custom Class AB headphone amplifier for the award-winning dCS Bartók Headphone DAC. Following the Bartók’s release, dCS set out to further our work in headphone amplification, and engineer a standalone component that could be used separately or as part of a complete dCS headfi system.
Through exhaustive development, extensive testing, and creative thinking, dCS developed an all-new design that combines tried and tested features with novel innovations engineered to further enhance performance and efficiency.
The result is an exemplary headphone amplifier that delivers plenty of power and grip, while maintaining complete neutrality. With its low noise floor, wide dynamic range and excellent linearity, it delivers a compelling, dynamic experience that reveals the true sound and character of your music and headphones.
A Perfect Companion
The Lina Headphone Amplifier’s variety of balanced and unbalanced inputs make it a perfect addition to virtually any high-end headfi setup. Buffered and unbuffered options make it compatible with both high and low impedance digital sources, and guarantee the best possible sound from whatever source you choose to connect. Pair with our Lina Network DAC for the ultimate headfi experience, or use it individually with whatever system you desire.
A Novel Approach
The Lina Headphone Amplifier features a unique Class SuperA output stage that allows us to maintain a high degree of linearity and efficiency. Its design offers the fidelity of Class A system with the thermal properties of a Class B - meaning less heat generation, higher efficiency, and none of the crossover distortion problems typically associated with Class B designs. To achieve this, dCS developed a DC servo system with novel error correction technique, which allows us to maintain a clean signal path and correct incoming voltages at source. This approach provides all of the performance benefits of a Class A system, while also keeping heat - and power usage - under control.
Choice without compromise
Different kinds of headphones require differing amounts of voltage and current, depending on their efficiency and impedance. The Lina Headphone Amplifier is specifically designed to cope with widely varying loads and deliver an outstanding performance with a huge range of headphones - whatever their individual requirements or characteristics. This is achieved through a range of features and factors, including a low output impedance design, low noise floor, wide dynamic range, and an adjustable gain switch which removes the risk of hiss when listening with highly sensitive equipment.
Perfect Neutrality
All dCS products are carefully engineered to provide the highest level of transparency, and the Lina Headphone Amplifier is no exception. dCS have gone to great lengths to create an amplifier that drives your headphones to the best of their ability, while honouring their unique character - be it neutral, warm, bright, cool, or anything in between. Developed and tested with a variety of headphones, it is an amplifier that preserves and celebrates the sound of your chosen equipment, so you can experience your headphones exactly as the designer or manufacturer intended.
Ambitious Engineering
A truly ‘ground up’ design, the Lina Headphone Amplifier is engineered to deliver the highest levels of performance, quality and reliability. This is reflected in everything from the arrangement of internal components, to the design of its circuitry, electronics, and billet Aluminium casework (selected for its excellent acoustic and electromagnetic properties) dCS have relentlessly studied and questioned every aspect of headphone amplification, developing new features and techniques, while pushing existing technologies to their limits, with the sole aim of creating the finest headphone amplifier available.
Specifications
| Power Link: (synchronising on/off state) | 2 x RJ45 |
| Electronics: | Pure analogue design |
| Automatic voltage switching | |
| Analogue Inputs: | • 1 x stereo pair unbalanced RCA, input impedance 48kΩ |
| • 1 x stereo pair unbuffered balanced XLR, input impedance 16kΩ | |
| • 1 x stereo pair buffered balanced XLR, input impedance 96kΩ | |
| Power: | 90-120v & 230-240v, 50/60Hz nominal |
| Frequency Response: | 1Hz-100kHz better than +0/-3dB |
| THD+N: | <0.005% @ 1kHz 6V rms balanced output into 30Ω (80kHz bandwidth) |
| Channel Separation: | Balanced input to balanced output into 30Ω. Better than 100dB @ 1kHz. Better than 80dB, 20Hz–20kHz. |
| Signal to Noise Ratio: | 110dB 20Hz-20kHz A-weighted (referenced to 6V rms balanced input and output) |
| Headphone Outputs: | • 1 x dual 3-pin balanced XLR, right and left channel |
| • 1 x single 4-pin balanced XLR | |
| • 1 x single 6.35mm (1/4”) headphone jack | |
| Power Output: | • Balanced 2W into 30Ω |
| • Balanced 0.48W into 300Ω | |
| • Unbalanced 1.6W into 30Ω | |
| • Unbalanced 0.2W into 300Ω |
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