Which headphones of Drop's currently available?
I have some rewards points to burn but there's no obviously good options on Drop right now for headphones Contenders Ultrasone - maybe? I don't own any Ultrasones, so curious. Looks like garbage travel headphone which could be useful also. Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro. - Maybe? I have the DT 880 Good price point, really uncomfortable headphones but could be interesting to try the upgraded version. E-MU - strong contender but $400 is a bad price point for what it is. Which of the above would you choose and why? Nothing else on Drop is relevant to my interests, because Already own 6xx 820 800 s Ether cx Garbage / Consumer grade Meze 99 - garbage bass canons, hard pass No gaming headphones obviously Sennheiser wireless - no to wireless/bluetooth Hifiman - I have 2 of drop hifimans and they make really bad cheap shit on Drop, hard pass on HE-R7DX Aeon - I own the closed, Drop refuses to address #padgate so no reason to buy open Beyerdynamic 177x - wireless, nope Too similar 8x / 560s...
Mar 28, 2024
@maximumsid you do realise the Fiio E10K can only put 183mW into this headphone? You're going to get a lot of clipping distortion because it would run out of current and would drive the headphone into clipping. 183mW is less than 5% of ideal.
Neither headphones are designed to work well with phones. You can doubt all you want, but if you do the maths, the numbers won't match up.
Let me make this clearer for you. The HD6XX has a sensitivity of 103dB, and a efficiency of 97dB. The He4xx has a sensitivity of 93dB and efficiency of 78dB. It is much harder to drive without clipping.
What makes it even worse is the current tilt, since it's of low impedance (only 35 ohms), it's very easy to get the volume required but you would be current capped because you won't be making full use of the voltage swing.
Now that we're on the same page, let me explain the good news and what clipping means to a planar like the He4xx. Now that I re-read my previous posts, I realise I probably didn't have an appreciation of the output quality either as I didn't do any calculations. But based on my calculations, with the E10K outputting 183mW at 35ohms, the maximum volume you can get is about 91dB, this is higher than your average listening volume (I do hope so, sustained 85dB leads to hearing damage). So you're going to get clipping in two scenarios: 1) clipping of dynamics and 2) clipping of harmonics. However this doesn't take into account the current cap so potentially it could be worse.
For a dynamic transducer (like your 598 or M50) they tend to have a impedance bump in the mid-bass region (the hump on the HD6XX is almost double that of the headphone's rating), and clipping can make the sound muddy or loose. But for planars, they generally have a flat impedance response, you'll get a lot of clipping distortion with the E10K but clipping does not impact your sound that much, because your amp can provide a headroom above your average listening volume. Yes, you'll get an improvement with a better amp, but the scaling won't be night and day like a dynamic headphone.
My advice would be to keep the E10K for now but look into upgrading your amp in the future. Without anything else to compare to, it's really difficult to make the judgement "this sounds shit".
Secondly, after re-reading your posts, I went to r/Headphones, and went to their AMP + Headphone combo calculator spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/191U0Q__6ieKyiKHI-_wTt-8j6wd2A3cpddE0_ieuxgI/edit#gid=0
After putting the specifications, it said that I can drive HE4XX at 102 dB (Fiio is 200mW @ 32 ohm). It also said that Fiio couldn't drive my earlier M20x [47 ohm, 97 dB sensitivity] (I think it considers 120 dB to be loud enough), but M20x was perfectly fine with phones and PC.
So I guess 102 dB is significantly beyond what is loud enough for me, I don't listen to headphones on high volume, as I have a small room in an apartment I (practically) live alone in, with a river outside, so I don't get environmental noise. I live in India, and very few amp/DAC brands are available here (only Fiio is easily and officially available), so 9/10 suggested amps are unavailable.
So again, I am very certain about 102 dB being more than loud enough (if that's the correct calculation, or even 91db should be 'enough' in my case). How much it impacts dynamics and harmonics will need to be seen (heard), and I'll keep looking for an amp in case it doesn't sound 'right'. Also, totally didn't know about the planar vs. dynamic impedance response, thanks for explaining that one. :)
The ideal headroom is actually 115dB, this is the reference level (though some people do prefer up to 120dB). The key thing to note is that the headroom is not the same as your listening volume. Your brain interprets the listening volume as an average volume over time, however even when you listen at, say, 80dB, some waveforms can push up to 115dB for a split second, but your brain combines all the soft and loud parts of a passage and works out the average volume from that. It really depends on the type of music you're listening to, i.e. if you're listening to Nightwish, there's not going to be much chance for clipping.
Most of the clipping you're going to experience are harmonics. Harmonics is associated with the timbre of an instrument, it's what makes a guitar sound different to the piano even when they are at the same pitch. Harmonics drop in amplitude over the frequency response, so when it clips it's hardly audible, but it affects the overall output from your headphones. You can think of it as something you don't hear directly, but affects the presentation of the sound you hear.
I would trust whatever the calculator gives you, I ran my own maths against it and got the same result every time. If you really wanted 115dB, my calculations says you'll need 4,528mW, which is massive!
That said though, where did we determine that these are 93dB/V? The spreadsheet calculator seems to imply that the HE400i is 93dB/mW. InnerFidelity's numbers show the HE4XX being harder to drive, but not so much that I could see them being almost 15dB/V less sensitive than what the sheet shows for the 400i. Hifiman is great about being useless here, only providing 93dB to go on, with no actual test method.
4.5W seems ridiculous to properly drive these though. If we assume Hifiman spec's these things /V, then you need over 28W to drive a HE6 to 115dB. I know they're inefficient, but...
Assume /mW and 8W drives a HE6 over 122dB. Much more believable.
Personally, I like to use 118dB. Technically I'm really only interested in hitting 115dB, but if an amp gives a peak headroom of 115dB, it's going to have more distortion. Measurements I've seen generally show an exponential growth for distortion from roughly 50% of maximum output.
I believe NwAvGuy has done some testing that shows peaks reaching close to 115dB, but I'm not sure what volumes he played at. But he was well aware about the 85dB threshold.
I know some of Hifiman's stuff has been notorious for being really inefficient, but their "efficient" models being that incredibly far behind everyone else is confusing. There's nothing "efficient" about sub-80 dB/V figures. And like I said, 28W to 115dB!?
Hopefully that is the case. It really shouldn't be a necessity to run 2W+ to get sufficient levels out of something being nearly pushed as portable.
Audeze and Monoprice specs have large planar drivers at 96-103 dB/mW. Hifiman has always been one of the less efficient options, but I can see 93 dB/mW being correct.