Rupert Neve was tired of people settling for the ubiquitous "Chip" headphone amplifiers, prevalent in most small consumer digital products, and wanted to make something that professionals could turn to for a reliable headphone amplifier. Although they are lower power than loudspeaker amps, a good headphone amplifier is much more difficult to produce than a good loudspeaker amp, because of the reactive and widely diverse load that headphone amps provide. 

Headphones are in theory the most reliable reference for an engineer, as they don’t have the acoustic and spacial anomalies that loud speakers have in rooms. They also having the advantages of being portable and not upsetting up the neighbors when at mixing home.

When making decisions about mic placement or mixes, an RNHP with a decent pair of headphones can actually be significantly more effective than monitors that cost many thousands of dollars, even in relatively well treated rooms. Compared to “chip” amplifiers, the RNHP has a reliably flat frequency response, more clarity, better imaging, and less noise / distortion.  It will also have far less shift in performance for different headphones.

The RNHP has tons of clean power, is VESA mountable for easy installation, and can be sold for use either with or instead of a headphone mixer.  A couple of the beta testers who have relied heavily on headphone mixers mentioned that they won’t be going back, and they now can see the effects of the compromised monitoring quality and the added technological distraction on musicians.

Features

• Precision Headphone Amplifier
• High Power, high-headroom design
• Near-Zero output impedance
• Three selectable input styles, +4dBu Line Level, Unbalanced RCA, and 3.5mm
• VESA 100 Compatible Mount for Rackmounting