The King Headphone Amplifier, created exclusively for Audeze by legendary circuit builder Bascom King, especially matched with our flagship LCD-4 headphone, produces a powerful, dynamic and panoramic sound with awesome power in the bass. Upon first listen many are shocked by the tremendous sense of space; enveloping you-are-there sound that’ll make you jump! The King’s sound is so clean and engaging that you’ll turn up the volume to enjoy the immense transparency and palpable imaging. The utter pleasure The King delivers is totally addicting.
The King was designed exclusively for Audeze by legendary circuit builder Bascom King. It’s a two-stage hybrid design featuring a pair of twin-triode E88CCs input tubes, a differential P-MOSFET driver, and MOSFET output devices. The King uses NPN MOSFETs that allow perfect device matching that yields faster response times. The amplifier exhibits low impedance, low distortion, and wide frequency response along with its 6W of music power, characteristics that create a breathtakingly spacious and emotional listening experience.
The King’s anodized casework is beautifully done and solid as a vault. The side panels are fully 1/2" thick, the top and bottom 1/4" thick, featuring a 5/8" thick clear-coated front panel. All active components are "faraday cage" shielded along with the AC input to reduce RFI. The front-panel meters are engineered to reflect actual SPLs and power levels when used with the LCD-4.
Bascom King’s exclusive design for Audeze includes such perfectionist elements as left and right channels on separate PCBs, each with its own voltage regulators. Each PCB features a protective shield of perforated, powder-coated magnetic material. The toroidal transformer is massively oversized, molded in epoxy and shielded to further improve signal-to-noise ratio. A DC servo circuit between input and output stages keeps DC offset as close to zero as possible. And a symmetrical regulated power supply delivers ±16V DC to the output devices and there are no capacitors in the signal path resulting in virtually flat frequency response.