cMoy Headphone Amp

Intro

iPod and cMoy Amp  Top View - assembled 

The cMoy Headphone Amplifier is a popular, well-documented DIY project, which makes it great for beginners to take on.  That’s exactly the reason I chose to do it.  I followed the instructions and suggestions from the TangentSoft cMoy Tutorial written by Warren Young, and it came out great, especially for my first attempt at building a headphone amplifier.

I won’t get into how I built mine (the tutorial at TagentSoft is where you should go for that) but read on if you’re interested in seeing what parts I used and some of the problems I ran into.

The parts

Problems/Concerns with my build

Inside view - angle  top view cover off

This was the first headphone amp (and one of the first electronic circuits period) that I’ve built, and I deviated from the “stock” build in several areas, so I had to expect some issues would arise.  And they did!  It’s not too bad, and the amp works, but these are some things I’d probably try to improve in a second build:

Final thoughts

Front Panel view  Bottom view

Despite (or in spite of) the few issues I had, the finished amp looks and sounds great.  I like the simple panel with just input, out and a volume/power knob.  The translucent case allows my hard work to be seen.  And the amp works great. To be honest though, I've never used it very much. Most of my headphones are low impedance, and this amp doesn't serve them well. But building it was a good experience which helped me build my skills designing and assembling electronic circuits and projects.

Many thanks to Warren Young for his excellent tutorial and website, and to the Head-Fi community for the tons of information on their forum.

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Originally posted June 2, 2013 on my old site; posted here April 17, 2018 with minor changes.