Burson HA-100 Headphone amp suit Sennheiser AKG SONY

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Burson™ Audio is a registered trade mark of  Burson Audio Melbourne

To audiophiles, music is like a religion! Through music we rise above the daily confines of our lives.  Music enables us to travel through time and space, to see life through the eyes of others and to  fall in love all over again.

 Listening to music is a very personal adventure that lasts for a life time.

However in our ever increasingly cramped society with its accelerated lifestyle, this very personal experience is all too often rudely interrupted.   From the sporadic mobile ring tones, the neighbour’s dog, the Harley Davidson starting up, or the microwave that just keeps on beeping to remind us we have uncollected food waiting for us, all of these things interrupt our fellow audiophile from their pilgrimage of music.

At times like this, we need an uncompromising Head-Fi system.  

Uncompromising is the only word worthy of our Head-phone amp - HA-100.  The HA-100 employs an advance discrete power supply and power filtration network, and,  for the very first time, the Burson opamp technology has been channelled into a head phone amplifier.  True to our design philosophy it is completely free of ICs (integrated Circuitries)

Well, listening to an IC based machine is like listening to a grand concert through a key-hole!  With ICs you are missing out on the micro detail that makes music musical and the macro dynamic that thumbs our hearts with excitement. There is only one reason for an IC to appear in audio gear, and that is cost saving at the expense of music! (For more details please see : The Naked Truth About Opamp)

Some say, “You have to match the right head-phone amp to the right head-phone.”  We say , “That’s only true if the head-phone amp is not good enough!” Burson Audio never beats around the bush.  We believe that if our amp can drive the best then it will drive the rest.

As to-date, the Sennheiser- HD650 is widely regarded as the best.  However, Its open back design and 300ohm load also makes it one of the most difficult to drive headphones on the planet.  

True to our design methods, the HA-100 is built with a differential input stage. Neutralising our Burson Opamp technology it has no decoupling capacitor on its signal path.  This has removed the fundamental bottleneck that is often associated with lesser designs.  Powered by 2 pairs of top quality Toshiba transistors delivering up to 700mW of driving power into 300ohm! (That is more than 2W of driving power to a typical 50ohm headphone.) The entire head amp is configured in Class-A operation to remove any cross over distortion that may otherwise occur..

As a result, we’ve  ended up with a head phone amp that can drive a small book shelf speaker.  Is it over kill? Probably.  Is it worthy of the Burson badge? Without a  shadow of doubt.

Headphone amps are often criticised for their lack of sense of space.  While most manufactures are keen to tell you that  this is the norm for headphone amps, the truth of the matter  is that it is an unpleasant form of distortion.   

Once you have listened  with  the HA-100  you will be taken by the sense of space.  In addition, the delicacy and transparency of the high-frequencies are beyond reproach.  Teamed with the HD650, one can hear all the vibrations transpired on the recording microphone.  The good the bad and the  ugly.  Listening to Norah Jones’s Come away with me, one can hear the variation in recording quality from track to track.   One can also tell that the earlier tracks such as “Don’t know why” and the sensual, plaintive sounds of  “Come away with me” were recorded in less than ideal conditions, while the latter tracks were greatly improved.  But most importantly one can hear Norah’s un-surpassing love for music and those moments when “the handsome band” was having so much fun.   When the last note falls in “The long day is over”, you know that your soul has been cleansed once again.  

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Input impedance: 47 KOhms

Frequency response: 5Hz (-0.3dB) to 35 kHz (-1dB)

Signal to noise ratio: >98dB at 0dB gain

THD: <0.001% at 6mW/300 Ohms

Channel separation: >70dB/10kHz

Output power: 650mW/300 Ohms, 800mW/60 Ohms

Output impedance: line out 60 Ohms, phones out 5 Ohms

Power dissipation: <10W, internal, regulated power supply

Dimensions: 280 x 110 x 44mm3 (case only)

Connectors (audio): Neutrik phone jacks 6.35mm

- 1x parallel to line out

- 1x line out muting

- gold plated RCA connectors with Teflon isolation

Weight: app. 5 kg

Colour: silver anodized aluminium

Burson HA-100 review by Joe Elliott