DarkVoice 336SE OTL Headphone Amp Reviews | Drop

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DarkVoice 336SE OTL Headphone Amp

Audiophile

FULL DISCUSSION

somerandomusername1

Sep 14, 2023

Verified Buyer

Very unimpressed

TLDR:

Sound quality is overall pretty poor, and uninteresting to listen to. Sucks the life out of music.
The first unit which was shipped to me was clearly a return and was damaged.
The replacement was fine, but the pre-amp tube was broken
Massively over-hyped AVOID AVOID AVOID !!!
Pre-amp tube hard/expensive to replace
Main tube is shockingly bad

I've bought products via Drop before and never had any issues. However this is overall a bad product. The most important thing is the sound quality. This amplifier has an EXTREMELY BORING sound signiture. I won't disagree it sounds "dark", and treble is recessed and "mushy". Definitly not a "hifi" product. I don't like bright sounding equipment, which would suggest that I might have liked this, but sadly no. It is genuinely really, really bad. Totally uninteresting to listen to and makes me want to turn the music OFF. You can FIX the sound by replacing the main tube with something better. But its on you to guess what a good sounding replacement might be. The pre-amp tube CANNOT be replaced with modern equivalents. You need to find a non GT or GT-B tube. Those are very expensive, because they're old and rare. The stock pre-amp tube is ok though, you could just keep it. Assuming you get a working one. The sound is the most important thing, however further to this: As stated above, the first unit which was sent to me was quite clearly a returned unit. Several of the screws on the bottom of the unit had been stripped. The unit was also heavily scratched with a deep scratch on the top of the unit and also elsewhere. Totally unexcusable, and should have never been sent to me. Drop were good enough to send me a replacement unit, but it shouldn't have happened initially. The second unit arrived shortly after the first. It has been sat unused for a couple of weeks as it has been hot in the UK recently. (Too hot to run a tube amp in my rather small room.) I turned it on this evening to find the pre-amp tube was defective. I swapped it with the tube I had from the defective unit. Overall, massively overhyped and definitly not worth buying AVOID.

Recommends this product? No

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