Your headphones need a language

Giella ∏ is an all analogue headphone amplifier with a single purpose: To give you a thrill when listening to music.

Therefore its design is simple, yet extremely refined. Like with all my products, the electronic components are measured and selected into tolerances that are impossible to buy. And the specific combinations used in Giella are chosen with hundreds of comparative listening tests. It’s all about listening and deciding what’s better and what’s worse. What makes the music more gripping and what makes it less.

Project Giella started with a circuit idea in 2014. The original design was simpler and about 2/3 as expensive as the final version. In the summer of 2020, I had tuned every part of the original circuit and couldn’t improve it any further. I enjoyed listening to music with it, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled. It just wasn’t good enough. So I redesigned it with a different set of components and the power supply used in my Moving Coil phono stage Entity. This new version of Giella was a completely different beast. After having spent a few months tuning it, I found myself using it every day.

When Giella was introduced in December 2020, I sent one of the first units to Pierre at Headonist, my dealer and headphone specialist in Paris. He absolutely loved how it sounded, but said that unfortunately it wasn’t quite able to drive his most current hungry headphones to sufficient volumes. Surprised I repeated his exact test – headphones, music and volume setting – and found that his criticism was correct. Giella struggled with low bass notes at high volumes into the most demanding headphones. So I resumed my work on the circuit and didn’t finish until I had created a new version, one that was both more powerful and more musical.

Giella ∏ was introduced in March 2021. Owners of the original version were offered an upgrade to the cost of the price difference between the two models. Almost everyone upgraded their Giella to version ∏. Two years later, the original model was discontinued, but the few units that exist can still be upgraded.

There’s no DAC or remote control feature in Giella ∏, because the absence of anything digital inside Giella helps it reach a new level of performance, without adding massive cost.

Giella ∏ can drive any pair of dynamic headphones, with outstanding musical quality. The better your headphones are, the bigger the difference will be when comparing Giella ∏ to other headphone amplifiers.

The only extra feature on Giella ∏, apart from controlling the volume and driving your headphones, is a left and right analogue output. These can be connected to a power amplifier and speakers. Giella will then function as a very high quality pre amplifier. A compact and very engaging system, perhaps for the office or the cottage, can be built around Giella.

Giella is Sami for ‘language’.

Werner Ero very favorably reviewed Giella ∏ for the Dutch magazine Music Emotion. Read the review here!

Giella ∏ was praised in the November/December edition of the French magazine Vinyle&Audio. Read the review here!

 

Version history

  • Version 1.0
    • Introduced in March 2021
  • Version 1.1
    • Introduced 7th of February 2023
    • New chassis ground parts and fastening torque
    • Sound improvement: Yes
    • Previous model upgradable: Yes
  • Version 1.2
    • Introduced 7th of February 2023
    • One important resistor added to the circuit, selected to a precision of +/-0.003%
    • Sound improvement: Yes
    • Previous model upgradable: Yes