Attaching mult. headphones to amp speaker out

[Cradle22]

Hi!

A friend of mine just asked me how he could hook up 4 - 5 Headphones to the Speaker-out of an amplifier (and the amplifer has no headphone connector).

Although I discouraged him, he really need s a quick and dirty solution for live recording on minimal budget, and the headphone connectors on the computer used for recording were too quiet for live recordings...

Any suggestions (since I am not at home, and cannot check the way some old amps I have connect their headphone connectors)...?

Thanks,


Arndt

 

[peranders]

Connect each headphone via a 100 ohms (or slightly more) resistor. Be prepared though of noise from the amp.

 

[Cradle22]

Thanks for the answer...

Just one thing, is the rating (W) of the resistors important? In other words: Are normal 0.25 - 0.5 W resistors sufficient, or do I need 5W , 10W or more?


Bye,

Arndt

 

[mrfeedback]

Typical 40W amplifiers run 220 ohms 1/2W resistors in series with the headphone outlets.

Eric.

 

[Cradle22]

Typical 40W amplifiers run 220 ohms 1/2W resistors in series with the headphone outlets.

Eric.

Would that also be applicable if they run multiple headphones into the reistors?

Or do they take a resistor for each headphone, calculating the normal paralleled resistor value?

Bye,

Arndt

 

[mrfeedback]

220 ohms per headphone channel = 44 ohms total load on the amp per channel.
IOW you need 10 220 ohm resistors to run 5 headphones.

Eric.

 

[Duo]

I used to run a set of headphones directly off my Harman Kardon. No resistors. They were 600ohm headphones so I guess they wouldn't have been as sensitive as regular headphones; still, however, they didn't produce any noise whatsoever. I think if you find the right amplifier, you don't have to worry to much about noise. However, I suppose you could fry some headphones quite easily by not using the resistors 🙂...