Sennheiser: what they publish

This page does not review anything Sennheiser 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.

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.

• Published per mW — 2: the maker prints a decibel figure per milliwatt, which is what the database stores
• Converted from per volt — 23: the maker prints a figure per volt, converted here with dB/mW = dB/V − 10·log₁₀(1000/Z)
• Unit not stated — 1: the maker prints a decibel figure with no reference unit, so it is shown as printed and flagged rather than quietly converted
• Not published — 2: no sensitivity figure in anything the maker published

The hardest of the 28 to drive is the Sennheiser HD 600: 6.6 mW and 1.41 V for a 100 dB SPL peak. Their impedances run from 16 to 300 Ω, which matters because the voltage a headphone wants rises with impedance while the power falls.

261 of the 280 sources here reach 100 dB on all 28, and the cheapest of them is the Generic CX31993 dongles at $12. “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, 68 stay under the threshold of hearing on all 7 of their in-ears. The one to watch is the Sennheiser IE 500 PRO at 126 dB/V — the more sensitive the in-ear, the more of the amplifier’s own noise you hear.

Their lowest impedance is the Sennheiser IE 300 at 16 Ω, so a source wants an output impedance at or below 2.0 Ω to satisfy the one-eighth rule on everything they make. 134 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.

Most of what this site says about Sennheiser came from them, with the rest derived and labelled as derived.

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.

All 156 manufacturers · What the spec sheets actually say · Download the whole database