So, what’s the difference?
Active speakers have an in-built power amplifier and just need a power cable (or battery) to operate. Passive speakers require an external power amplifier to operate.
In short, you need an amplifier for passive speakers, you don’t with active speakers.
Fully-balanced. 1,600mW. Battleship headphone amplifier.
Laptops and smartphones have a really low power output of <1.0v. On a good set of headphones you’re always running out of juice. You never get to really hear what they can do.
Use a laptop, phone or DAC to feed your music to the ZEN CAN and connect your headphones. Pumping out 52x more power, now you’ll hear what you have been missing.
The ZEN CAN has trickle-down Class A discrete balanced circuitry from iFi audio’s US$1,699 flagship Pro iCAN. With 15.1v @300 Ohms on tap, it has serious power that will make even difficult-to-drive headphones thump to the beat.
Audio recordings are made for speakers and when played back on headphones, the sound is always driving you nuts by being only in your head.
Our 3D special sound circuit solves this:
Satisfies all listeners.
Behind XBass is our active EQ circuit which meets a common gripe with headphones head-on, a lack of bass.
Open-back headphones in particular, let all frequencies (especially those precious bass frequencies that the drivers generate so little of) leak freely out of the back instead of trapping and redirecting them back to your ears.
XBass equalisation is a much more elegant solution to bass correction than seen elsewhere. It consists of active and passive components and its frequency response curve corrects their low-end response problems with precision.
Underpinning the Balanced and Active EQ circuitry are:
A fully-discrete and balanced amplifier audio circuit. The full symmetric dual-mono headphone amplifier with gold-plated 4.4mm balanced connection. Premium engineering is more expensive but lowers the noise floor to a whisper-quiet levels.
Check out the tech note for the details.
Class A Discrete is a circuit that has come straight out of the iFi’s flagship headphone amplifier, the Pro iCAN, which at £1,699 is 11 times the price of the ZEN CAN.
As with many other iFi audio products, we’ve incorporated a custom OV Series operational-amplifier. This top-notch component contributes to the extremely low noise, low distortion (0.0001%) and wide bandwidth.
TDK C0G (Class 1 ceramic) capacitors offer high stability and low losses for resonant circuit applications.
Getting ever closer to the theoretical ideal of pure, frequency-constant capacitance, these capacitors reduce capacitor-induced distortion to vanishingly low levels.
They are pricey but are a perfect addition to our products.
Sonically superior – richer, deeper.
The XBass® analogue bass correction system corrects for the missing headphone/speaker bass response.
An ‘Out of Head’ listening experience. Our 3D Holographic® dual-analogue matrices place the artist with you in the room, not inside your head.
| Inputs | 4.4mm Pentacon BAL RCA L/R Socket SE 3.5mm Jack SE | 4.0V nominal @ 0dBFS, 24 kOhm Zin 2.0V nominal @ 0dBFS, 1 MegOhm Zin 1.0V nominal @ 0dBFS, 1 MegOhm Zin |
| Max Output | Balanced | >15.1V/385 mW (@ 600 Ohm) >11.0V/1890 mW (@ 64 Ohm) |
| S-E | >7.6V/196 mW (@ 300 Ohm) >7.2V/1600 mW (@ 32 Ohm) |
|
| Output Impedance (HP) | BAL SE | <2 Ohms <1 Ohm |
| Zout | Line out | <200 Ohms |
| THD & N | Balanced S-E | < 0.0007% (4V out, 600 Ohm, 1kHz) <0.006% (@ 100 mW/1.27V 16 Ohm) |
| SNR | Balanced S-E | >120dBA (@ 15.2V) >118dBA (@ 7.6V) |
| Max. Input | Balanced RCA 3.5mm | 7.4V RMS 3.8V RMS 1.92V RMS |
| Gain | 0dB, 6dB, 12dB and 18dB | |
| Frequency Response | 20Hz - 20kHz (+0dB / -0.03dB) | |
| Power consumption | No Signal Max Signal | ~5W ~13W |
| Input voltage | DC 5V/2.4A AC 100 -240V 50/60Hz |
|
| Dimensions | 160(w) x 117(d) x 35(h) mm 6.3" x 4.6" x 1.4" |
|
| Net weight | 515g (1.14 Ibs) | |
| Warranty period | 12 months |
“… for the listener who wants an amp that will drive most any headphone, and make just about any track sound good without needing to worry about sibilance or fatigue, it’s a lovely choice, and one that I can happily recommend to anyone…”
This is a tough badass amp….works perfect with V-Moda Crossfade LP2 headphones…MORE BASS THAN YOU CAN EVEN HANDLE…AND THEN WAY MORE!!!😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆
“I found the Zen CAN to be an excellent product. Its sound was detailed, articulate and dynamic and I thoroughly enjoyed my time listening to it. It is well made and delivers where it matters. I highly recommend it.”
Hi-Fi World
Watch the full review here…
I’ve been running my Sennheiser HD660s through my PC motherboard’s line-out, as well as a Behringer audio interface and I thought they sounded ok. However, I didn’t like that the bass was a little mushy and the mids were rather over-powering. I thought that a 150 ohm set of headphones would be no match for the 600ohm my motherboard said it could handle.
Apparently I was very wrong. I recently picked up the iFi Zen CAN amp and have it sat between the computer and my headphones using an RCA cable. I have the gain set to 18dB using a regular single-ended connection from my headphones (I haven’t tried the balanced cables yet), the bass boost is on and it sounds incredible.
The bass has tightened up, the highs are clear as daylight and the mids are wholesome. My musical tastes include everything from Dire Straits, Pink Floyd and middle-of-the-road rock, to industrial and thrash metal –Fear Factory, Pantera, Ministry etc. Everything sounds sublime.
I’m now going through my whole music collection and hearing things in a whole new way.
