Review on Enhanced Signal Boosting with Peripheral/PAC LD10 Line Driver by Aaron Ethridge

The LD10 does exactly what it's supposed to do: it takes headphone level input and amplifies it to line level. On both of my machines, the Bluetooth audio on my Motorola T605 is too quiet to sound good when plugged into the aux inputs on either of the main units. (Even if I crank the phone's media volume all the way up, a pop-up appears that says "Warning you are hearing noise levels that are damaging to your ears.") I've tried a few other "headphone amp" products. , but they're really only for (er) headphones, so they only amplify part of what the LD10 does. This is the real thing. A word of warning: it comes with the gain controls set to maximum, so it's likely to "overwhelm" the line input of the main unit you're plugging it into if you don't remove it completely. First. I set the dials so that with the phone's media volume at around 70%, the volume on the main unit on the aux input is about the same volume as a clean FM radio station at the same volume. even. I also made sure that the output isn't distorted when my phone's media volume is set to 100%. In my case, this means that the gain controls on the LD10 are set at about 25% of their maximum value. (At higher settings I have experienced distortion, as I have in some of the other reviews mentioned.) (Remember that all audio equipment has optimal input levels and the optimal level listed is almost never "maximum".) This amp is slightly larger. than I thought, but that's not a problem. Also, both car head units I connect have an extra +12V available, so I connected the LD10 directly to +12V and ground from the head unit, so I didn't have any problems with ground loop noise. (That high-pitched squeak sometimes happens while driving.) I've only had the LD10 for a few days so time will tell how well it holds up, but I've used other PAC brand modules in the past and haven't had any problems with them .