FERRUM OOR HEADPHONE AMPLIFIER AND FERRUM HYPSOS POWER SUPPLY REVIEW

Stuart Smith takes a listen to the Ferrum OOR headphone amplifier and matching HYPSOS power supply unit.

Ferrum is a Polish manufacturer that makes a headphone amplifier, a headphone amp and DAC, and a power supply. The products we have here for review is the Oor, which is the headphone amplifier and the Hypsos which is the power supply. The price for the Oor is €/$ 1995 and the Hypsos is €/$1195 making the combination we have here €/$3190, a fair old chunk to send on a headphone amplifier, it may be said. However, looking at social media and comments made there, it is clear that headphone listening in the home is becoming increasingly popular with many music lovers choosing headphones as their main source and others happy to spend relatively large amounts of money on headphone systems for occasional listening. Given that most of us share our living spaces with others who may not share our love of music with quite the same passion as we do, headphones make for a happy compromise to keep the family home harmonious. There are others for whom headphones do away with the dreaded issue of the neighbours not appreciating Scrotum Grinder’s The Greatest Sonic Abomination Ever blasted through huge loudspeakers at 3.AM when you have staggered home in a somewhat liquidly enhanced state and feel that the world and his dog should be able to enjoy this Floridian beat-combos idea of music. Fortunately, we are currently lucky enough to live far away from our nearest neighbours, but, even so, there are times when headphone listening is a necessity. One could also argue that to enter into the upper echelons of headphone audiophilia is a lot more cost-effective than that of a full-on source/amp/loudspeaker setup. Anyway, the fact is that many people do love the experience of listening on headphones and so without further ado, I’ll get on with the job at hand and start babbling about the specific products I’m supposed to be babbling on about.

FERRUM OOR & HYPSOS BUILD QUALITY

First of all, I’m not sure what the name Oor means…or wasn’t. I did look up a translation from the Polish and was helpfully informed that it translates into English as Oor. Whatever it means, it’s probably not something you should shout out in a Northern English pub on a Saturday night, though I did learn that it is pronounced OR and not OOOOR. The helpful chaps at Ferrum informed me that the name OOR comes from the Dutch language and simply means ear. It is pronounced with a long ‘o’ at the beginning and a short ‘r’ at the end. So now you know!

Distinctive, well made and good-looking.

With regards to the build on these two units, there is absolutely nothing to say but bravo! They look incredibly good, are well-made, and feel like quality items. To me, they scream that they are a luxury product! Eastern Europe, and particularly Poland are coming out with some incredibly nice looking and well-turned out HiFi at the moment with these both having been designed and made in Poland by HEM – I like this! I also like the little rusty-looking motif on the left-hand side of the front panel that has the company’s “Fe” logo.

FERRUM OOR FEATURES AND BUILD

On the front panel of the Oor there’s the rusty coloured panel to the left with the illuminated logo that can be dimmed with a dial on the back panel, then a balanced headphone out, a standard quarter-inch jack, a knob to switch between balanced and RCA inputs and standby, a knob for boosting or reducing the output depending on the sensitivity of your cans and then finally the volume control that is connected to an ALPS RK27 pot. All the knobs are nice to use and very nicely finished.

Well laid out and easy to navigate front panel.

Round back is a well laid out set of inputs and outputs which are from left to right XLR and RCA inputs (switchable on the front), XLR and RCA outputs (more on these in a moment), a bypass switch, the brightness control I mentioned and finally the power inputs for the Hypsos or more standard power supply.

The XLR and RCA outputs are an interesting feature as these allow Oor to be connected to a power amplifier or a pair of powered loudspeakers with the volume being controlled by the Oor. This is a pretty cool feature as it provides a very cost-effective way to add on a pair of speakers for more conventional listening without having to splash out on another preamplifier. However, the function can be turned off so that the Oor pumps out its full output to a separate preamplifier/integrated etc.

Plenty of connections for all eventualities.

FERRUM HYPSOS FEATURES AND BUILD

The Hypsos looks the same as the Oor only it does away with all the sockets and knobs bar the large knob to the right and adds a large screen.

The Hypsos PSU matches the Oor perfectly and has an excellent and easily navigated screen.

Round the back is a connector for the umbilical betwixt Hypsos and Oor and a power inlet/master switch. I’m not going to go further into the Hypsos here as you can either have a look at the specs at the bottom of this review or read the review we did a while back here. However, what I will say is this is not your common or garden power supply with you being able to fine-tune the output to achieve the best sound for you. It will also work with a number of other products not in the Ferrum range with voltage outputs ranging from 5-30V and up to 6Amps of current – I did not check it out with other products. The Hypsos also has something Ferrum calls 4TSD (4T Sensing Design) which is designed to ensure that the voltage at the input of the unit being powered is kept absolutely flat using feedback. I like all this kind of gubbins!

An IEC inlet and an output for the umbilical to connect to the Ooor or the kit of your choosing.

SET UP

A simple to follow set up sheet is in each of the boxes and set up proved to be a doddle. The Hypsos is a pretty cool thing to operate; turn it on and you are presented with a list of units (not just from Ferrum) that Hypsos is automatically compatible with and you just scroll through the list to find the Oor using the dial and press it to confirm. You can then fanny about tweaking the voltage a little should you wish to get the optimum sound for you. One thing I did notice on the Hypsos videos and the quick setup guides was a good few comments along the lines of “Get this wrong and it will damage your gear” so I sense a good read of the setup guides is in order should you end up buying these products. In fairness to Ferrum, the instructions are really clear. I did have a mess about with the voltage into the Oor (within the parameters the Hypsos lets you play) and there are slight changes but nothing really obvious or night and day, and I do think this is possibly a good thing as it would be easy to allow someone to “play” beyond the capability of the unit being powered and that could well end up ruining the sound, if not the unit itself.

SOUND QUALITY

For the duration of this review I used the Stack Audio streamer into our LAB12 DAC and a pair of Sendy Peacock cans with a quick listen through a pair of in-ears. The Peacocks are a handy headphone to have for reviews as they have both balanced XLR and straightforward quarter-inch jack connectors out the box.

A quick flick through tracks before doing any proper listening and it was clear that the Oor with the Hypsos in place was a very good headphone amplifier, with my first impression being of a full and well-balanced sound with a really well-controlled bass character. I actually let the Bionaut album Everybody’s Kissing Everyone play all the way through and I really enjoyed the electronic bass which I found what I would consider to be accurate and with a dry feel to it, which suggests to me that the Oor is adding very little of its own character to the overall sound. Deep Purple’s Smoke on The Water (Made in Japan) had the required grunt to the bassline when it comes in at around 58 seconds and this is a good thing. This line can sound sometimes bloomy and sometimes a little lightweight but not so here!

My first listening was done with the standard jack, though with a balanced output from the DAC going into the Oor. The Oor is absolutely silent as far as I can tell with no background noise discernible at all which makes for a detailed listen when music is actually playing. I think the importance of quiet kit is underestimated by some! The start of Ziggy Stardust has a drum track that comes from nowhere and if there is any noise at all in the system this is spoiled. With the Oor this line came in as it should and it remains one of my favourite openers to any album. That drum line, particularly the kick drum, was easy to follow throughout the track and was a bit of a treat, really. Soul Love has a kick at the start of the track and if you listen very carefully it sounds as if it’s causing the snare to ring a bit (well that’s what it sounds like to me)  and whilst this is easy to be hidden on some kit I was pleased to hear it, even if it’s not intentional – though I‘m guessing it was intentional. Detail is a big part of Oor’s character too and it doesn’t take particularly intense listening to hear small but often hidden details in the mix.

One of the test tracks for detail a product brings out is Contact from Random Access Memories by Daft Punk – regular readers will be aware of this being a favourite torture track of ours. I use it because it can sound like a whole mush of sound towards the end of the track but on better-resolving systems and bits of kit it is far from a homogenous gloop of sound and is made up of lots of individual bits of sound. Even before the bit comes in that I’m waiting for I can hear the exquisite way in which distortion is used by Daft Punk on noises in the mix. There’s texture and a feel to it that you only get with good kit. When the finale does come, that noise (listen to the track and you will know the one I mean) rises and rises but never becomes too much or a mush of sound. Then the track breaks and there is the real riot of noise at around 4’50”. Not only does the Oor make sense of this, but it also manages to have the (what I assume are supposed to be) alien voices quite distinct from the other sounds and noises in the mix…and that throbbing bass line never disappears, though it can often be lost completely on some products. The Oor makes very good sense of a very difficult torture track and brings out texture and detail aplenty! I especially like how the Oor brings a sense of space to this and other recordings – there is a good feel of forward and backward space in the mix, as well as left to right.

Switching over to the XLR balanced output there is an immediate feeling of their being more heft to the sound and it’s one of those once you’ve heard it like this you don’t want to go back kind of moments. I’d also say that there is even more detail apparent, though I have no idea why. Deadmau5’s 4Ware has an occasional sound in it that is all but hidden and I swear it sounds like a sneeze, though it’s more likely a hihat – whatever, it really grabs my attention. It’s little things like this that do make you sit and take notice of better products out there and, as you will know, we don’t like to review anything but good products. The arpeggiated synth line in this track n the breakdown is also a pleasure to listen to as it builds before the beat comes in. Again, there is texture and a real sense of scale to the sound. I also like that even when things get pretty loud the Ferrum headphone amp doesn’t even feel like it’s breaking a sweat. It’s composed and almost clinical in the way it presents the tunes you play. This is not a bad thing, it is a good thing as it shows there is accuracy at play.

Switching tempo a tad I pop on Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter, specifically for the track Northern Sky. Again I’m using the XLR balanced output as I will be from here on in. What is good here is the level of detail. On the left channel, Drake’s guitar playing is a pleasure to listen to and follow. Sounds are panned very left and right on this track and whilst there’s a fair bit going on there’s no sense of things becoming confused or confusing. The same is true on Eels’ My Beloved Monster and it’s easy to hear E’s vocal (panned left) through all the noise.

Using the standard PSU I found the Oor to be an excellent sounding headphone amplifier with there being little to call with the Hypsos in place whilst listening uncritically and purely for pleasure. However, when listening more critically there is a difference in sound quality and that difference is a little more oomph at the bass end and spatiality in the mix with the Hypsos in place. For folk looking for a great-sounding headphone amp, most will be more than satisfied with the standard PSU. However, many readers of this will not be “normal” folk looking for something that is excellent and will want to take the product as far as it can go, and it is for them that the Hyspos is aimed, as it will eek out the very last ounce of performance from the Oor – and it also has the added tuning capabilities which I find a really cool feature.

NIGGLES

When I first switched out the Hypsos on the Oor to the basic supplied power supply it didn’t work and there was a crunchy sound to the top-end. I don’t know why this is and it certainly wasn’t apparent with the Hypsos in place suggesting to me that the supplied standard PSU was broken in some way. These things happen and the PSU is a third-party affair. A quick call to the chaps at Ferrum had them send one out overnight and all was well with the world.

There’s no remote included in the package which I think some folk will find useful. Ferrum tells me that they don’t think one is necessary given that most folk will sit close enough to the units to control them by hand, and this is a fair point. However, I would still like to have seen one included in the package.

CONCLUSION

The Hypsos and Oor are a very good pairing if you are serious about your headphone listening. I found it very easy to both get lost in the music and to really pull tracks apart into their constituent parts. And it is this latter point that really did impress me with the Oor and Hypsos partnership – the amount of detail is brilliant without being at all harsh in the top end – some products will use an artificially boosted top end to give the illusion of more detail. I also enjoyed the sense of space between instruments and noises in mixes.

Look, this is a lot of money to spend on a headphone setup, but let’s face it, nothing in the HiFi world comes cheap if you want quality and, as such, the Ferrum kit will be an attractive purchase for many. If you are a casual headphone user and can afford to add this setup to your system then you will be well pleased with the outcome, though if you are a casual headphone user on a tighter budget I don’t think three grand makes sense, but then the Oor on its own does make a lot of sense.

Would I buy it for the times I use headphones and as a reference – probably, yes, I would, though I would find a remote control very useful. Would I be happy with the Oor on its own? Yes I would and I firmly believe that most will find this as far as they need to take it – others will want to add the Hypsos to get the ultimate performance from an already very good headphone amplifier.

AT A GLANCE

Build and Features:

Great looking pairing

Solidly built and with quality connectors included

Balanced and RCA inputs and outputs

Provision for less sensitive headphones

Simple set up

Cool user interface on the Hyspos that is easy to fathom

No remote

Sound Quality:

Clean and detailed

Silent backgrounds in operation

A real feeling of heft to basslines, though I wouldn’t describe it as a bass-heavy sound

A good sense of space in the mix – be a good amp to use in a studio, for sure

Value For Money:

A tough one to answer as three grand is a lot of money to spunk on a headphone amp, but then if you are serious about your headfi then it will be good value to you. More casual listeners may want to sacrifice fidelity for price or just buy the Oor on its own

We Loved:

Good looks and very well put together

Sonically it is a great listen that is both detailed and easy to get lost in the music

We Didn’t Love So Much:

No remote

Quite pricey

Brick PSU didn’t seem to work properly but a quick call to Ferrum had them send one out that arrived overnight!

Price: €/$ 3,190

Elevator Pitch Review: Made in Poland the Ferrum Hypsos power supply and Oor headphone amplifier come as a package and costs €3190 and everything looks excellently made and well put together. There are balanced ins and standard and balanaced headphone sockets. The Oor can be used as a preamplifier. Sonically the partnership really majors on detail though without sacrificing this for heft and a fair bit of boogie factor. Simply put the Hyspos and Oor are a great sounding partnership, though that doesn’t come cheap. It will drive pretty much any headphone you care to put on the end of it and there is a switch for more difficult to drive cans.

SUPPLIED BY FERRUM

Stuart Smith

SPECIFICATIONS

OOR

• Gain (dB):balanced -4 dB, + 6dB, +16 dB / single ended -10 dB, 0 dB, 10 dB
• Operation: Fully balanced, proprietary discrete power amp technology
• Inputs: XLR, RCA, 2.5 mm DC connector centre positive, proprietary 4-pin DC connector
• Outputs: Balanced 4-pin XLR, 6.35 mm jack
• Frequency Response:  20 Hz – 100 kHz 0.1 dB
• Output Power Single Ended: 400 mW into 300 Ω, 2 W into 60 Ω
• Output Power Balanced: 1.600 mW into 300 Ω, 8 W into 60 Ω
• THD + Noise: TBA
• Input Impedance: 94 kΩ
• Output Impedance Single Ended: 22 Ω on pre-amp
• Output Impedance Balanced: 44 Ω on pre-amp
• Output headphones Impedance: < 0.3 Ω
• Power Consumption: Idle <15 W
• Power Adapter: 100/240 V AC to 22-30 V DC
• Dimension (W x D x H) (In/cm): 8.6 x 8.1 x 2.0 inch / 21.7 x 20.6 x 5 cm
• Weight (kg/lbs): 1.8 kg / 3.97 LBS

HYPSOS

• Power input: 110-120 & 220-240V AC/50-60Hz (EU/US Version) 90 – 110Vac/50-60Hz (JP Version)IEC C14 power inlet, a fuse holder with power on/off switch plus two-stage EMI filter for low impedance load with better noise attenuation in low frequency applications
• Mains cable: US/EU/UK
• DC OUT cable: 5×2.5mm DC plug / 5×2.1mm DC plug Custom cables made to order at additional cost
• Output Voltage Range: 5-30 [V]
• Max Continuous Output Current (for V_out below 13,3V): 6 [A]
• Max Continuous Output Current (for V_out higher than 13,3V): l_out= 80[W] / DCout[V]
• Maximum Impulse Current: 9A
• Maximum Impulse Power: DC V_out*9A (270W for 30V)
• Max Continuous Output Power (for V_out below 13,3V): P_out = V_out[V] * 6[A]
• Max Continuous Output Power (for V_out higher than 13,3V): 80W
• Dimensions (without knob, feet and connectors) (W x D x H , mm / inches): 217.5 x 206.5 x 50.0 / 8.6 x 8.1 x 2.0
• Net weight (kg / lb): ~ 2,89 / ~ 6.2
• Primary winding fuse: IEC 5x20mm, 250V 3.15A, slown-blown for Japan version / 250V 2A, slown-blown for Europe, US version
• Secondary winding fuse: Littefuse 154004T, 4A
• Power consumption: 230VAC, 50Hz @ 12VDC out/: Idle – 6VA @ 15W load – 30,7VA @ 60W load – 98VA @ 80W load – 133,9VA