I am not a frequent user of headphones on my main systems, although they do get used on laptops and the smaller units late at night, especially in Germany.  In the UK I have a few pairs of headphones, but they only get occasional use and this was partly due to the headphone amplifier (HPA) being just a tad too far away to make them comfortable to use without an extension.  Having shuffled the racks a bit a few weeks back, I could now access the HPA with greater ease and so have used it a few times late at night.  This was fine and the Teddy Pardo unit I was using was Okay, but that was it.

Following the addition of the EtherREGEN and my disappointment with its UltraCAP PSU, I had started looking for an alternative PSU.  I was aware of Ferrum Audio and had read / heard good things about their products and of particular interested was their Hypsos programmable PSU.  I after reading more I decided to buy one for the EtherREGEN, but my research also led me to read about their HPA as well, the OOR.  So, I decided that this could be a good alternative to the Teddy Pardo unit:  It is the right size to fit in and was getting very good reviews from the headphone-user community.

Well, the OOR arrived last week (the Hypsos units are still being made it seems) and today I popped it into the system powered by its standard SMPS.  And blimey, straight out of the box it is impressive with stunning dynamics, rich and textured bass and a beautifully natural presentation.  It is being fed straight from the analogue output of the NDX2 (the only thing I ever use that for) using Townshend Audio Fractal RCA cables.  So far I have only tried it with my Focal Utopia headphones and they work fine with the 0 db setting on the unit.  I'll try the Grado PS1000e ones later - I lent the HiFiMan HS560's that I bought from Jerry to a friend a while back and I must get them back to try as well.

All-in-all, the OOR had surpassed (by a significant margin) my expectations and I will be making more use of it than I expected I think!