This page does not review anything Kiwi Ears 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.
| Model | Impedance | Sensitivity | Source of the figure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airoso | 18 Ω | 110.0 dB/mW | Published per mW |
| Astral | 23 Ω | 105.0 dB | Unit not stated |
| Belle | 32 Ω | 103.0 dB | Unit not stated |
| Cadenza | 32 Ω | 110.0 dB/mW | Published per mW |
| Cadenza II | 18 Ω | 106.0 dB | Unit not stated |
| Chorus | 32 Ω | 103.0 dB | Unit not stated |
| Halcyon | 29 Ω | 109.0 dB/mW | Published per mW |
| KE4 | 28 Ω | 102.0 dB | Unit not stated |
| Orchestra II | 15 Ω | 110.0 dB/mW | Published per mW |
| Orchestra Lite | 16 Ω | 112.0 dB | Unit not stated |
| Quartet | 32 Ω | 110.0 dB/mW | Published per mW |
| Stardust | 13 Ω | 107.0 dB | Unit not stated |
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.
| Model | As printed | Tolerance | Standard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airoso | 20Hz - 20kHz | not printed | not printed |
| Astral | 10Hz - 22kHz | not printed | not printed |
| Belle | 20Hz-20kHz | not printed | not printed |
| Cadenza | 20Hz-20KHz | not printed | not printed |
| Cadenza II | 10Hz–29KHz | not printed | not printed |
| Chorus | 20Hz-20KHz | not printed | not printed |
| Halcyon | 10-42kHz | not printed | not printed |
| KE4 | nothing printed | — | — |
| Orchestra II | 20Hz-20KHz | not printed | not printed |
| Orchestra Lite | nothing printed | — | — |
| Quartet | 20Hz-20kHz | not printed | not printed |
| Stardust | 20Hz–40kHz | not printed | not printed |
Kiwi Ears prints a frequency range for 10 of all 12 models here whose sheets have been read, and nothing for the other 2.
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 Kiwi Ears with the majority: of the 490 models across this database whose maker prints a range, 58 print the tolerance.
The rows are not even called the same thing twice: 3 different headings across 10 models (“Frequency Range”, “Frequency Response”, “Frequency Response Range”).
No measurement is published here — only what was printed. The whole count, maker by maker, is in the frequency response audit.
The hardest of the 12 to drive is the Kiwi Ears KE4: 0.63 mW and 0.13 V for a 100 dB SPL peak. Their impedances run from 13 to 32 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 12, 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, 59 stay under the threshold of hearing on all 12 of their in-ears. The one to watch is the Kiwi Ears Orchestra Lite at 130 dB/V — the more sensitive the in-ear, the more of the amplifier’s own noise you hear.
Their lowest impedance is the Kiwi Ears Stardust at 13 Ω, so a source wants an output impedance at or below 1.6 Ω to satisfy the one-eighth rule on everything they make. 129 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.
| Product | Into 32Ω | Output impedance | Output noise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kiwi Ears Allegro Mini | 30 mW | not published | 3.0 µV |
| Kiwi Ears Allegro Pro | 68 mW | not published | not published |
Power decides whether it gets loud enough, output impedance decides whether it tilts the response of a multi-driver in-ear, and the noise figure decides whether you hear hiss with sensitive ones. All three fit on one line of a spec sheet; most of the industry prints one of them.
Kiwi Ears publishes a power figure at a stated load on 2 of 2, output impedance on 0, a noise figure on 1. Of the 8 power figures this site displays for them at 32, 150, 300 and 600 Ω: 2 printed by Kiwi Ears at that exact load, 6 worked out by holding output voltage steady across loads.
Rather less than half of what this site says about Kiwi Ears came from them. The rest is arithmetic, and it is marked as arithmetic on every page.
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.