Audiophilepure

Like many more affordable options, the TA-84 doesn’t have a power button on the front, and you have to reach behind it to power it on and off. Take care not to accidentally press your hand on the hot tubes that can reach over +70C. They won’t immediately burn you like hotter-running large power tubes, but you can hurt yourself by pulling your hand back instinctively.

The back also houses switches for gain toggling and switching between the DAC and AUX RCA inputs. DROP specifies the gain of the TA-84 as 16dB, but my own measurements show that the voltage gain is around +18dB on low and +20dB on high gain. With a Sennheiser HD6XX, this meant that I was around midnight on the volume control for most of my listening.

https://pt.audio/2025/05/04/lta-velo-headphone-amplifier-review/#google_vignette

While there is no dearth of choices in the $2-3,000 price point, equivalents to the $2,100 Velo are rather scarce. There’s plenty of solid state choices, but just a few more standard OTL tube amps and only a handful of the most affordable transformer-coupled designs. In general, a pure OTL design will tend to sound a bit thinner and more upper-midrange focused than the ZOTL technology from LTA, whereas a transformer-coupled amplifier will often be thicker, and darker. This leaves us in the company of quite clean sounding tube amps which generally cost more or hybrid or solid state amps that sound particularly smooth. 

All of this is to say that I think the LTA Velo stacks up quite nicely at its price point. Given the design considerations and how much good sound is on offer, the Velo to my ears and eyes is a welcome exception to the “products must always get more expensive” mantra. While you won’t necessarily be pairing the absolute hungriest planar magnetic headphones with it, it pairs very well with most dynamic and planar headphones, from Audeze to Focal, and plays all of them with that signature LTA balance of good tone, pleasantly warm-of-neutral frequency balance and dense harmonic structure. Definitely worth a listen if you’re in the market for a tube headamp in this price range.