Headphone impedance

  • Thread starter Thread starter notCardio
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notCardio

I walk the line
OK, I'll show my ignorance again. Wouldn't higher impedance headphones just require more juice to drive them? I mean, there isn't anything inherently right or wrong with higher or lower impedance cans, right? Are dedicated headphone amps designed to drive primarily for one or the other, or are the headphone outs on home stereos or outboard mixers? If a certain model phones were made in two different impedances, why would you want one or the other, what's the determining factor?

Thanks
 
While impedance might make some difference, what is usually more inportant is sensitivity. This is a measure of the sound level produced for a given input.

For most headphone applications, the headphone amps provide more than enough output to produce good volume at usually less than 1/2 max level.

Ed
 
Cardioidpotent said:
OK, I'll show my ignorance again. Wouldn't higher impedance headphones just require more juice to drive them? I mean, there isn't anything inherently right or wrong with higher or lower impedance cans, right? Are dedicated headphone amps designed to drive primarily for one or the other, or are the headphone outs on home stereos or outboard mixers? If a certain model phones were made in two different impedances, why would you want one or the other, what's the determining factor?

Thanks
Click to expand...


In this case, you can think of headphones as if they were loudspeakers. 32 Ohm headphones allow you to strap 4 sets of phones in parallel across an 8 ohm amp. The far higher impedance phones let you use ampliers with higher impedance outputs, like 600 ohm systems.

Maximum output is possible when the headphone impedance matches the suggested load impedance of the amplifier. You can have some mismatches (since very few people run flat out), but there is a chance of blowing the headphones when you run a very low impedance headphones into a high powered amp, designed for higher impedance loads.
 
I'm still not gettin' it, so let me rephrase

OK, so higher impedance headphones would let you run more pairs at a time from any given single output. I understand impedance, but what I'm trying to get at is, is there any sort of standardization of range? Are all dedicated headphone amp outputs generally within a certain impedance range, or all mixer headphone outs, and are they different than standard home stereo receiver headphone outs? Is it like the +4 -10 thing, where there's a consumer range and a 'pro audio' range? Or maybe phones used in broadcast applications are different?

Maybe I'm just reading specs incorrectly and assuming something I shouldn't.

The specs for the Beyer Dt770's say 80 ohm / 250 ohm. GC has them in an ad and the model is DT770-80, so I assumed that they were the 80 ohm version. Like I said, maybe an incorrect assumption on several levels. Yeah, I could ask GC, but I think that those guys wouldn't really know and would lie to me if they thought they could get away with it.

Anyway, any more help would be appreciated.
 
They're usually in the 4 to 60 ohm range, except for broadcast phones, I believe, which are designed for around 300 ohms.
 
OK, so when the specs for the DT770's say 80 ohms / 250 ohms, does that mean there are two different models, one at 80, and one at 250 for broadcast, or because impedance varies with the load, is that a range?
 
Cardioidpotent said:
OK, so when the specs for the DT770's say 80 ohms / 250 ohms, does that mean there are two different models, one at 80, and one at 250 for broadcast, or because impedance varies with the load, is that a range?
Click to expand...
I don't know anything about the Beyer, so I don't know if it's available as two different models, or what.
 
At the risk of saying something blatantly wrong, I don't think it's going to matter whether or not the Beyer's are 80 or 250 ohms, unless you're running them from a very low powered amp -- in which case you'd want them to be 80 ohms. Obviously if there was no gain control on the headphone output, oyu'd want to be clear on the nominal intended ohm levels...

I used Koss Pro 4AA's in broadcasting, and they were only 8 ohms. I would think most headphone amps would have enough ooomph to run a few sets of 600ohm headphones, and you should enquire further to be sure, if you're going to have an extreme scenario. But otherwise, I'd just get the Beyer's regardless of the 80 or 200 ohms.
 
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