Cranborne Audio N22H

In my circumstances this device has made a big difference to the clarity of my headphones and so the enjoyment of producing / mixing. It is more fun now I can hear better what I am doing.
I was using my 38ohm headphones out of the interface outputs (Steinberg UR816C) and had felt for some time something was off, even using Realphones (speaker sim) plugin the base sound was poor quality, but I did not feel it was the headphones at fault. It turns out that the headphone output of the UR816C is either 40 or 90 Ohms depending on the source you read. Let's take the minimum of 40 and to get reasonable sound your headphones should be 320ohms! This is the rule of 8, for headphones. So this is a huge mismatch trying to drive my phones when the Ohms are so close in rating. It produces a cloaking of the sound and minor distortion.
Now with the Cranborne N22H we have a headphone output of only 0.33ohms. now with my 38 ohm headphones there is way more headroom and they are being driven by clean power with no distortion.
The result is fantastic, literally like a cloak removed from the sound. The most blatent example was listening to a favorite track that is only sadly a mp3... Previously I could hear minor annoying artifacts of mp3 encoding but not enough to spoil the song... Now with N22H I had to stop the song, the mp3 artifacts I could now hear fully and it was terrible. I expected a much smaller difference so I'm delighted to have a rather large difference. Everything is so much clearer... Bass sustain, reverb tails, delays. It's remarkable the difference. If you are running headphones in the 30-60 ohm range straight out your interface (even RME interfaces headphones outputs are around 30 ohm) then you could investigate and consider this product. For the price it's outstanding, and even if more pricey still a solid choice. Of course if you are using high impedance 300+ ohm headphones, you likely will not have the big difference as I had as you don't have such a big mismatch as I had.

The whole concept of Cranborne Audio is very appealing: building ultra-professional products at a very competitive price.

I was sold on the N22H the first time I heard it. I connected it to the outputs of my digital mixer (A&H QU-SB) and woww... I put on my very well known favourite compilation that I have listened to so many times. But this time I was blown away by the amount of new detail I heard. Some of the tiniest reverberation tails, barely perceptible clicks and smallest nuances became apparent and pristine. I simply did not expect this kind of clarity from my old familiar interface. For me, it was a change from the Behringer headphone amp, which was definitely not in the same league. So you can imagine my delight. Don't underestimate the importance of a headphone amp! I understand that it may be at the bottom of your wish list. After all, you probably already have a headphone amp built into your interface. But dedicated equipment is something else in terms of audio quality. And I am really happy with the A&H headphone amp, which is really powerful and nice. But the Cranborne N22H is a high fidelity device. You can feel it. Look at the characteristics, they are not even comparable with other more expensive headphone amps.

So I bought it as a headphone amp at first. But now I've switched to the Cranborne interface and I'm also using the capabilities of C.A.S.T., which is wonderful. I've got shielded Cat6 cable to carry +48 phantom power from the preamp to the active RNDI. And I get two-way communication with a single Cat6 cable instead of four XLR cables.

Oh, and the mono/stereo switch is a really useful addition when mixing! You can instantly check your stereo field being summed to mono. So you can make your mixes more mono-compatible. Of course, you can also check this on your DAW, but having this switch is really handy.