Okay so I purchassed this unit and it arrived today. This is a headphone amp with a USB slot that bypasses your computers noise inducing crud.

As I am leaving for South Korea for a year I am loading all my cds onto an external Samsung 250 gig hard drive in Lossless format. This Total Bithead serves as a DAC and a headphone amplifier. The unit runs either off the computer's power or via 4 AAA batterries with an expected life of 40 hours. The unit can drive two sets of headphones at the same time. The unit has a crossfeed on off switch which assists in creating a proper out of head stereo image which must be turned off for binaural or mono recordings.

I use Sennheiser HD 600s which require a headphone amplifier as this can is very difficult to drive and will not be powered from portable players by themselves.

Initial impressions so far are very good. - the headhome amp is capable of solid bass response and can play quite loud. The unit has a clipping indicator to tell you when the unit is under distress and it engages rather fast on the computer power so it is advisable to use batterry power. The sound so far leans toward thick and rich which is actually quite pleasing considering that the tizzy and bright is what I was expecting from such an inespensive unit. Obviously I need more time on the unit to give a more competant description. I have a feeling the sound will yield an overall safe balance of slighly warm and less resolute and detailed that some of the better headphone amps but considering that people are likely to use it for MP3 and Computer listening or portable use this is probably a wise overall choice.

So far it's a very nice little unit clear and has a nice pace to it.

The Unit is very small indeed being about the size of an Ipod video player.

The Unit runs $279.00US but I bought it on sale for $199.00.

Don't expect it to compete with an Audio Note DAC or real high end replay but it is a LOT better than running from the computer's internal processing and a necessity if running tough to drive open air cans such as the Senn 580 or 600 and presumably the 650.

Here is the link for further information: I purchased the Total Bithead Clear at the bottom. You gotta like the names of these things
http://www.headphone.com/products/he...e-mobile-line/