so after hours perhaps even days of
painstaking research you finally decided
on a pair of fancy headphones to replace those crappy little earbuds that came
with your smartphone and good for you but unfortunately actually using them
often isn't a matter of just plugging your cans into a headphone jack you see
nicer headphones often need more power in order to operate properly due in part
to their High impedance which is a measure of how much something resists
electrical current High impedances allow headphones to be built in ways that can
result in better overall sound quality but they also mean that they often need
an amplifier in order to drive them properly if your headphones don't get
enough power not only will they be too quiet to enjoy but they also won't sound
right in different frequencies meaning you've just paid a lot of money for nice
headphones that won't sound nearly good enough to justify their cost but how do
you know if an amp is even necessary typically many cheaper headphones or
headphones that are designed specifically to work with portable
devices such as smartphones will have lower impedances usually 35 ohms or less
making an additional amplifier unnecessary in most cases but once you
start getting to 50 ohms and higher amplifiers can make an audible
difference and north of 100 ohms you'll definitely need one if you're wondering
how much impedance your headphones have this can use usually be found pretty
easily on your product packaging or a spec page so if it turns out that you
need an amplifier what should you pick other than following the usual steps of
checking online reviews and manufacturer reputations a good place to start is to
determine not only your headphones impedance rating but their efficiency or
sensitivity which is a measure of how many dbb the headphones will output per
mwatt or molt if your headphone specs
don't give a number it's easy to look up efficiency or sensitivity ratings for
lots of popular models online once you've got one of these numbers you can
enter it along with your impedance rating on one of a handful of freely
available headphone power calculators online a few of which will be listed in
the video description down below you can then tell how many Ms you need to get
your headphones up to a certain level of loudness a good idea is to assume 110 DB
which is about 10 lower than the threshold of P
after you've gotten this number just have a look at whether the power output
of the amp you like is at least that high this will be listed as how many Ms
it can put into a certain number of ohms so make sure the power output is
sufficient for your headphon impedance many amp spec sheets will say things
like this model can put 40 milliamps
into 300 ohms to give you a better idea
of exactly how much juice it can provide it's also a good idea to to get
something a little more powerful than the calculator says that you need as
many headphones can have variable impedances depending on whether you're
listening to low or high frequency sounds for example popular models of
Sennheiser Headphones are known to have impedance spikes in the lower
frequencies again you can look up impedance graphs for lots of headphones
online to see if they're significantly different than what's listed on the box
and choose an amplifier accordingly the last Main specification you should be
looking at is the amplifier's output impedance which is separate from your
headphones impedance rating A good rule of thumb to follow is you want to make
sure that your amps output impedance is at least eight times lower than your
headphones impedance so if you've got a
200 ohm set of headphones you want an amplifier with an output impedance of no
more than 25 ohms okay Luke I get it
it's super important to get the right amp but what about the right deck I mean
it's even in the video title come on man well a digital analog converter can be
helpful in certain circumstances a DAC takes the digital signal from your
computer whether it's an MP3 or flak file or whatever and converts it into an
analog signal that your headphones can then turn into sound your computer has a
Dack built in to allow you to plug in headphones or speakers but some cheaply
implemented dacks can pick up electrical noise from inside your PC PC which can
result in hissing crackling static all
that kind of stuff right to your headphones or speakers so if you're
experiencing these symptoms or weird sounding audio in general an external
Dack that's outside of the electrically noisy environment that is your computer
it can definitely help but if you aren't suffering from these symptoms you
probably don't need an external deck especially as onboard motherboard audio
has improved quite a bit over recent years but some audio file do claim that
a nice Dack can open up the sound stage on nicer headphones especially
open-backed ones so if you really want to explore high-end high-fi it can be
something worth considering and although all this sounds like a lot of unpleasant
math a little work can go a long way in making sure you get that Transcendent
listening experience that you've always wanted speaking of great experiences
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Techquickie and entering Techquickie in the how did You Hear About Us section
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thing this will be available not yet but soon so watch that uh description down
below also if you want to see those links for the power calculator things
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