Are Headphone amps worth the expense?

I do say tape out in my post. If you use the line out, make sure you don't drive the preamplifier volume up to high. The headphone amp would distort too high a signal. It should be an unamplifiedoutput.

A good quality headphone amp with god headphones will blow away most receivers with a headphone Jack. Thi receivers or intergrateds with a phono stage. You really need to look high and low to find one as good as a standalone, but I have heard they are out there.

thanks for all the advice

I think they are. I have read that the headphone outputs on high end equipment often are not up to par with the same quality of output as the device. I built a cheap cmoy headphone amp using a Burr Brown 2227 opamp. I use it with
Grado SR-80 phones and WOW. I didn't believe the sound. I can't believe that high end phone amps do much better. I took my homebrew amp into a high end audio shop and they said it sounded like a 250.00 phone amp. You might consider building a cmoy amp. Many places on the internet with info. Dean

I never owned a separate headphone amp until recently.
I just relied on whatever headphone input a piece of gear had built in.

Then when I no longer had any gear with built in headphone inputs I purchased a Burson headphone amp, and discovered how poor the bulit in units mostly are.

My phones are the entry level Grado SR 60,which sound so much better thru the Burson, that I am considering moving up to the top of the line Grados.

Headphone listening can be quite educational.
You can remove all the influence the room brings to your sound, and really hear what's on a recording.

I used headphones to discerne the differences in power cables.
The differences I heard from entry level Shunyata to Annaconda was quite easy to hear thru the phones.

A good set of phones and a good headphone amp can be quite a smart investment,and provide a real high end musical expereince for way less dollars than a conventional amp, speaker pre amp set up.

And did I mention, there's no room interference?

Lacee,

I agree. According to John Siau (technical director of Benchmark) headphones are the only way to accurately reproduce a piano - an instrument with very complex harmonic structure. Speakers' Xover screws up this complexity thus timbre. On the other hand I don't like headhones on my head (reminding me it is not a live performance), feeling of immobility (cord) and sound inside of my head instead of soundstage projected in front of me. Sennheiser HD-580 (same drivers as 600) was my last attempt. (I used them with good sounding Benchmark DAC1 built-in headphone amp).