Amplifier Matcher

Enter your headphone specs above to see matched amplifiers.

The whole curve, not just the top of it

The four products above are one point on a curve. Here is the curve. These are the 70 of the 280 sources in this database that publish all three figures — a power rating at a stated load, an output impedance and a noise figure — ranked by how many of the 567 non-electrostatic models they suit on all three axes at once. That is the same test the tool above runs, computed in advance against the whole catalogue.

The 210 sources that are not here are not here because something is missing from their documentation, not because they failed anything. That is the single most important sentence beside this table, and it is why the count is 70 and not 280.

The median of the 70 suits 546 of the 567 models; the range runs from 567 down to 32. The cheapest product on the list is the JadeAudio JA11 at $20, which suits 545 of them. 54 of the 70 clear 500 models, and the cheapest of those is the same product. At the bottom, the Schiit Valhalla 3 costs $499 and suits 32 — a reminder that price and this number are only loosely related, because the three axes pull in different directions and a design can be built to win one of them.

A low number in the fourth column is not a bad product. A valve amplifier with a high output impedance is doing on purpose what the one-eighth rule penalises, and it was never meant for a 16 Ω in-ear; a desktop amplifier with an audible noise floor in in-ears may be flawless with the 300 Ω headphones it was designed around. What the column measures is breadth — how much of a catalogue of 567 very different headphones one product can cover — and breadth is not quality. It is also measured entirely on figures the makers chose to print, which is the only ground this site will stand on.

Why three axes and not one

Every other tool in this hobby matches an amplifier to a headphone on power. Run that over this database and the answer is almost always yes, which is what makes it a useless question. The weakest source in this catalogue — the Steinberg UR22C — still reaches 100 dB on 512 of the 567 models here. The median source reaches 565 of them. The Apple USB-C dongle (US), which costs $9, clears 547 of them.

85 of the 280 sources here have enough power for every non-electrostatic model in the database, and the cheapest of them costs $99 (Schiit Magni Heresy). If power were the question, this page could be one sentence long and the answer would be “buy the hundred-dollar one”.

Output impedance is what actually disqualifies

169 sources publish an output impedance. Apply the one-eighth rule to the headphones each of them can already power, and only 72 lose nothing at all. The rest lose some of the catalogue, and a few lose nearly all of it: