![]() Both sound great and if I would describe the 339 as “lush”, the Crack would be “clean”. This last one is overall warmer sounding, has even smoother mids, more rumble in the bass (but looser) and has less pronounced treble as the Crack. It is quite a different sound signature as my other OTL amplifier, the Lafigaro 339 (review coming later). Bass is deep, well defined and punchy, the mids are very natural and smooth and the treble is nice and sparkling. Overall the Crack is a very clean sounding amplifier picking up every detail the music has. The stock configuration is good but the RCA tube just gives the amplifier a bit more body and weightier bass. I rather quickly replaced the stock Electro Harmonix input tube with one of my RCA clear top tubes. Even without any music playing, turning the volume pot was completely noiseless. The volume button, being a bit bulky, is smooth to turn and I never needed to turn it further as 10 o’ clock to get to my preferred listening level, so there is more than enough power left for you to play with. I was very happy to notice the Bottlehead Crack was dead quiet with the stock tubes and with my replacement tubes (it doesn’t hum at all). (only normal with the HE-400 not really needing any amping). I did try it briefly with the Hifiman HE-400 and while that worked, I didn’t really experience any distortion like Mike, it doesn’t really need the Crack and it also doesn’t do anything special to it. Most of my other headphones have low impedance or are orthodynamic headphones and the Crack wasn’t developed with those in mind. I specifically bought the Crack for this headphone after seeing raving posts about this combination over and over. I’ve only been using my beloved Sennheiser HD650 with the Bottlehead Crack amp. Looks do matter when buying an amplifier but in the end the sound it produces is more important, and that’s where the Crack really shines. While I think its looks are basic and very cool, I have to admit that having all the cables on top will probably never make it win a beauty contest. Some people like the look of the Crack and others hate it. It’s a DIY project so if you have the skills you can do pretty much whatever you want. It doesn’t really bother me but I’ve seen a lot of people using L shaped plugs with the Bottlehead designs and other DIY’ers have changed the layout and put the connectors on the back and front. That can be unhandy when you don’t have a lot of space or when your interconnects and power cable are rather unflexible. Like with every Bottlehead design all in- and outputs are located on top of the amplifier (even the power cable goes in on top). Anyway since Mike did the build on both our Cracks, I will let him talk more about the building process later. If you don’t feel like building the amplifier yourself, you can always order a pre-assembled Crack from Bottlehead, at an extra cost of course. Bottlehead also includes a very detailed step-by-step manual making it almost impossible to screw up. The DIY Bottlehead Crack is a fairly easy to build amplifier, anyone having experience with soldering and a multimeter can surely build one himself. Bottlehead did forget to send us the logo badges we paid for and the wood of one of the casings was slightly damaged but we were to excited to complain about that and we decided to build them like that. As Mike mentioned before in his Facebook notes, it wasn’t always easy communicating with Bottlehead, with emails getting lost/unanswered but a couple of phone calls and lots of emails later we got our DIY packages in the mail. We ordered a couple of Cracks right before the price increase was announced (more on that later) so that probably explains the long waiting period. The Bottlehead Crack amplifiers arrived a little over two months after having ordered them on Bottlehead’s website. Writing a review after Mike’s interesting and complete 2 page impressions on Facebook isn’t easy, so don’t shoot me if this review turns out short □ This is a review of the Bottlehead Crack OTL tube headphone amplifier. ![]()
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