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Single or balanced? Having not previously experimented between both modes of headphonia, I frankly considered the subject minor at best. Just so I was ready to be outed and impressed. For proper teeth to sink into this topic, I spun up a superior recording, Andreas Vollenweider's Air. Having heard him live at last year's Montreux Jazz festival, I can vouch for the professional excellence and care his team throws at their productions. (Natasha Atlas at this year's Paléo festival in Nyon was far rawer but also far more intimate.) Looking for my teeth now I felt quite ancient at first. Did I have any biters left? It took me a while to realize where the balanced action was, namely in subtle ambient textures which were a bit more developed or wet and drier/more damped in standard shared-ground mode. Simply put, decay trails seemed longer and the ambience slightly more 'reverberant' when I switched to my 4-prong tails on T5p and LCD-2.

On balance I'd call this a very minor gain well below upgrading from a plainly inferior stock cord like Sennheiser's HD800 to something like Ken's own salt 'n' pepper braid. Because the Three is better than the two (not radically so as the Two was too good already not to be beaten to a pulp now by a pesky successor) and because it achieves its lead with fully balanced circuitry, I would never question its clearly efficacious dual-diff voltage gain power processing.

However whether you exit on 3.5mm mini or 4-pin balanced is anything but critical. Once you know what to listen for and spin sufficient recordings which are good enough to make it worthwhile in the first place, it does become one of those viable final upgrades which one here would pursue after the headphones and proper source have been sorted out to satisfaction and available budget. On the subject of source, moving converterage offboard to the Cypher Labs or something equivalent makes a vastly more pronounced difference than gilding your cans with an esoteric XLR. Pursue a superior source first would be my motto. Really and truly!


Gain. More gain doesn't just go mo louda. It also changes the sound. Here higher gain is fatter and denser, minimum gain leaner and more transparent. What's more, gain also affects bass boost. In high gain it comes on faster and gets more pronounced. With three gain settings and 270° of boost rotation the Three offers a lot of wiggle room for personalization of your sonics. Purists meanwhile can defeat the boost. It doesn't just go to zero. It actually turns off.


Tuff customers. AKG's K701/702 is an ill-disguised wolf in sheep skins. It's far more affordable than the HD800/T1 league. Yet it howls surprisingly close if. That niggling 'if' is a function of the right amp. Many amps will go plenty loud but still leave the AKG in the limbo of mere workman-like performance that fails to inspire. I'm not sure what in an amplifier's makeup determines the difference between a stifled 702 yawn and a cheery hello. Even so I'm routinely using this humble can to determine whether a 3.5mm or 6.3mm plug has the right stuff. The Three passed this cheap litmus test with flying colors. It turned the AKGs into cans you're not quickly keen on trading in for the first flashy >$1.000 operator that comes along.
the 'brick' with balanced and 3.5mm pig tails for T5p
HD800. As arguably the most widely admired über can, it's sensible to make some comments with it. Particularly with bass boost engaged, the fluffy whipped-cream character of the 800s to do with their broad soundstaging and top-end airiness expressed a lot more get-down vibe and boogie factor than the Sennheiser is known for. It was testament to the ballsiness, control and LF power ALO Audio's three contract engineers wrote into their circuit. If we invoke damping factor as usually understood—an amp's ability to stop particularly woofer motion right after any impact—the Three behaves like it. That said, it doesn't go to the >10.000 extreme of certain class D amps which turn everything into a marching band with hyper-realist exactitude but zero elasticity.
Three bass goes wiry, growls, rumbles, punches and grips to a surprisingly high degree but for all that doesn't forget that it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. Relative to headstage size—which asks whether the subjective stage seems to end at the ears or extends slightly beyond them as well as whether it's projected more frontal (forehead) or backward (occipital like an airline pillow)—the Sennheisers played it more compact/focused and forward than I hear with my bigger stationary amps. If we reinvoke damping as a basic concept (never mind whether it's mechanically or electrically accurate) that's sensible. Rather than flow beyond the stops to blur the boundaries, the Three keeps things in place. At this stage in the game the Mk3's blue LED had gone milky pale. Plugging the battery charger in sorted that to a solid green as though to say 'go'. Which I did without interruption to move right along. Play as you charge is definitely on the ticket.

I've been openly critical of the 800's top-end heat and sizzliness with its stock leash in the past. Relative to my earlier description of the Three being clearly more lit up than the Continental, it's useful to stress that rather than tonal balance imbalance—a turned up treble control—this lucid quality seems a function of very low self noise. This opens a passage to upper harmonics which are so low in level as to otherwise be easily obscured and flattened out. Harmonically the Three is admirably non-flat where the tubed and clearly noisier Continental squishes things just a bit.

Happy happy without any clouds? Having recently concluded a trio of headfi amp reviews—Burson Soloist, HifiMan EF-6, Linnenberg Audio u:c:a—my exposure standards were pegged solidly at the $1.000 mark and educated by beefy linear power supplies and up to 4 watts of high-testosterone output power. Add Linnenberg's and Burson's 'we don't use no stinking IC op amps' campaigns. One could easily feel set up just so to regard the veritably op-amp studded RxMk3-b with haughty suspicion. True, a Soloist sounds even bigger and more effortless which perhaps involves the absence of feedback (IC op amps use a lot). That's a bit like moving from high-quality 2-way monitor speakers to floorstanding three-ways with 10-inch woofers. The latter move more air. But it's mostly really just the sense of scale which going mobile, miniaturized and battery-powered impacts. Raw resolution, SPL and general sound quality transition surprisingly intact. It's simply a smaller experience. That's perhaps perfectly fittingly. After all in the outdoors this ear experience will be shared with your visual sense if for no other reason than personal safety and keeping your wits about you.

Is ALO Audio's #3b prescription the world's top antidote to the iPod's freebie earbuds? That'll obviously depend on which headphones you use. And one would have to first listen to Ray Samuels' competing Emmeline Blackbird SR-71B before one entertains any adolescent 'ultimate' paranoia of Predator vs. Alien caliber. What does seem safe to say is that the Mk3-b must be one of just a handful of potential contenders to that throne. It's clearly a tour-de-force in parts density and multi-layer PCB execution of the kind very rarely bequeathed on a market sector where most punters are perfectly content with fashionable. That means they don't bring any advanced hifi expectations to bear. The Three is for those who care about not just that difference but all the smaller ones that come with the high-end approach: the superiority to the Mk2 and Continental which isn't huge but easily heard; the superiority of balanced headphone drive which is infinitely more subtle; the differences which gain and bass boost settings can make relative to a particular load and song. And so forth. It's high-end's ongoing sigh and black swan song that not enough people give a damn. Ken Ball & Co. clearly do. And with their latest launch they bank on others to do likewise.


Is that our form of the banking crisis? Not for $649. That's because this amp is right at home at home where the big headphones live. Its portable appeal is somewhat of a ruse. It's absolutely perfect on the go clipped to a belt. But there it's nearly too good. That's because it'll be—should be—the very rare occasion where you can completely 'trance out' in public and pay no attention to your surrounding eyes closed for any period of time. The real Rx magic starts when you can source the amp with a Cypher Labs or better DAC and plug in the type of full-size headphones that would not only look silly outside but risk being ripped off. I'd look at it then as an ultimate bedside amp. It'll follow you around like a loyal dog at all hours only to go to sleep at the feet of its master when the day is over. Kudos to Ken and his team for pursuing their unreasonable dream to the very end. As the British would say, this one's a real cracker!
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