Elysian Acoustic Labs: what they publish

In this database5 headphones
Figures from their own material5 of 5
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This page does not review anything Elysian Acoustic Labs makes. It counts one thing: how much of what this database says about their products came out of their own documents, and how much had to be worked out or left blank.

Where each sensitivity figure came from

ModelImpedanceSensitivitySource of the figure
Annihilator22 Ω99.4 dB/mWConverted from a stated voltage
Annihilator 202622 Ω99.4 dB/mWConverted from a stated voltage
Apostle 202610 Ω97.0 dB/mWConverted from a stated voltage
Pilgrim9 Ω100.5 dB/mWConverted from a stated voltage
Pilgrim Noir8.3 Ω102.2 dB/mWConverted from a stated voltage

Impedance is almost always printed. Sensitivity is the one that goes wrong, because a decibel figure means two very different things depending on whether it is per milliwatt or per volt — about five decibels apart at 300 Ω and eighteen at 16 Ω. The conversion is here.

  • Converted from a stated voltage — 5: the maker prints a level at a stated drive voltage, converted here to per milliwatt

What they print, and what it is worth

ModelAs printedToleranceStandard
Annihilator20hz - 45khznot printednot printed
Annihilator 202620hz - 45khznot printednot printed
Apostle 202620Hz~ 40kHznot printednot printed
Pilgrim10hz~20khznot printednot printed
Pilgrim Noirnothing printed——

Elysian Acoustic Labs prints a frequency range for 4 of all 5 models here whose sheets have been read, and nothing for the other 1.

Not one of those ranges comes with a tolerance in decibels. Without a ±dB figure a range says nothing about how loud the headphone is at either end of it, which puts Elysian Acoustic Labs with the majority: of the 490 models across this database whose maker prints a range, 58 print the tolerance.

Every range stands under the same heading: “Frequency Response”.

No measurement is published here — only what was printed. The whole count, maker by maker, is in the frequency response audit.

What reaches 100 dB on all 5

The hardest of the 5 to drive is the Elysian Acoustic Labs Annihilator: 1.1 mW and 0.16 V for a 100 dB SPL peak. Their impedances run from 8.3 to 22 Ω, which matters because the voltage a headphone wants rises with impedance while the power falls.

280 of the 280 sources here reach 100 dB on all 5, and the cheapest of them is the Apple USB-C dongle (EU) at $9. “Reaches” means the maker’s own published power figure is enough at that load; it is not a judgement of how it sounds.

On hiss the count is smaller, because most of the industry does not publish a noise figure at all: of the 83 sources here that do, 79 stay under the threshold of hearing on all 3 of their in-ears. The one to watch is the Elysian Acoustic Labs Pilgrim Noir at 123 dB/V — the more sensitive the in-ear, the more of the amplifier’s own noise you hear.

Their lowest impedance is the Elysian Acoustic Labs Pilgrim Noir at 8.3 Ω, so a source wants an output impedance at or below 1.0 Ω to satisfy the one-eighth rule on everything they make. 122 of the 169 sources that publish an output impedance manage that.

These counts use figures the source makers published themselves. A product that publishes nothing is not counted as a pass anywhere above, which is why the three numbers differ so much. The collection matcher runs the same arithmetic over whatever you actually own.

What the paperwork adds up to

Almost everything this site says about Elysian Acoustic Labs came from them. That is not the normal case and it is worth saying out loud.

The rule used here is the same for every maker and is described on the manufacturer index. Every figure behind it can be opened on the product page it came from, with the document it came from linked.

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