nikkicallaghan Posted October 20, 2015 Share Posted October 20, 2015 not quite sure I'm putting this correctly but, for headphones for portable devices do I ideally need to get something with a low ohms rating or is it the other way round or doesn't matter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GaryNattrass Posted October 20, 2015 Share Posted October 20, 2015 Low impedance 50-70 ohms tends to be better and I use sony 7506 and sennheiser HD25's with mine. The headphone amps on I-pad and I-phone are not very powerful so higher impedance will give very low levels. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chelgrian Posted October 20, 2015 Share Posted October 20, 2015 Low impedance 50-70 ohms tends to be better and I use sony 7506 and sennheiser HD25's with mine. The headphone amps on I-pad and I-phone are not very powerful so higher impedance will give very low levels. I used 70Ω Sennheiser HD 25 with mine and it's perfectly capable of producing ear shattering levels. I'm told it's perfectly OK with 250 Ω Beyers as well but haven't tried it. However an iPad is definitely not capable of driving my 300 Ω Sennheiser HD650 to any reasonable level. Unfortunately it's not quite as simple as the impedance of the headphones it also depends on the sensitivity of the drivers in the headphones. The impedance issue is one of holes in the market 'Beats' filled. They realised that they could sell very mediocre headphones for extremely inflated prices if they made them low impedance, usually 32 Ω, and very sensitive in order to get high levels out of the low power amps in phones and tablets. Why would you ever have high impedance headphones? Well it helps control distortion the ratio of the output impedance of the amplifier and the impedance of the drivers in the headphones is called the damping factor and the higher the ratio the more control of unwanted resonant movements you get. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sandall Posted October 20, 2015 Share Posted October 20, 2015 Why would you ever have high impedance headphones? Well it helps control distortion the ratio of the output impedance of the amplifier and the impedance of the drivers in the headphones is called the damping factor and the higher the ratio the more control of unwanted resonant movements you get.High impedance (over 400, but usually 600 ohm) are, or at least were when I knew about such things, standard with broadcasters, as you can plug them into a programme line without shorting it out. Low impedance (32 ohm & below) ones came in as flimsy little items supplied with Walkmans, portable CD players, & later mp3 players, so the makers could get away with the puny output stages that could run off 4 (later 2) 1.5V batteries. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GaryNattrass Posted October 21, 2015 Share Posted October 21, 2015 We used 2k Beyer DT100's in broadcast too as you can plug a lot of them in without too much loss of signal. It also stopped people pinching them! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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