Audient Horizon 8P vs Audient ORIA

Both are audio interfaces, $3500 against $3500. This page puts them side by side on the only three things a maker can be held to — power, output impedance and noise — and then asks the question that actually matters: which headphones do they treat differently?

On raw power they are level: each reaches 100 dB on 566 of the 567 non-electrostatic models here.

Every published figure, next to each other

SpecificationAudient Horizon 8PAudient ORIA
Power into 32Ω986 mW979 mW
Power into 150Ω278 mW385 mW
Power into 300Ω140 mW210 mW
Power into 600Ω71 mW123 mW
Output impedance10 Ω50 Ω
Output noisenot publishednot published
Price$3500$3500
Headphones it reaches 100 dB on
out of 567
566566

A figure marked not published is missing from the maker’s own material, which is not the same as being good or bad. Where one of these two publishes a number and the other does not, the comparison on that axis cannot be made at all — and saying so is more useful than guessing.

Where each power figure comes from

LoadAudient Horizon 8PAudient ORIA
32 ΩDerivedDerived
150 ΩDerivedDerived
300 ΩDerivedDerived
600 ΩPublishedPublished

Both makers publish a power rating, which is less common than the table above makes it look: of the 280 sources here, 209 publish a figure at at least one load and only 2 publish one at all four. Audient Horizon 8P publishes at 600 Ω; Audient ORIA at 600 Ω. Every other row is worked out from those — between two published loads, or beyond them holding voltage constant, which understates rather than flatters.

The two publish at the same loads, which is the one case where the rows of this table can be read straight across.

What each of these labels means, and why a derived figure is still worth printing, is set out in how this data was built.

The headphones that tell them apart

On power they are interchangeable across this whole database: there is no headphone here that one reaches 100 dB on and the other does not.

51 headphones are left alone by the Audient Horizon 8P under the one-eighth rule but coloured by the Audient ORIA (AKG K612 Pro, Audeze LCD-3, Audeze LCD-4, 48 more).

566 of the 567 models here reach 100 dB on both. That is a power count and nothing more; whether either source suits a given headphone also depends on the two lines above.

Headroom and hiss on 8 models, both sources

The counts above say how many models the two treat differently. This says by how much. The same 8 headphones appear on every page of this kind, ordered from the easiest to drive to the hardest, so a row can be read across pages as well as across columns. Headroom is at a 100 dB SPL peak.

The widest gap on the list is the Audio-Technica ATH-R70X: Audient ORIA has +20 dB of headroom there against +18 dB. 2 dB is about 1.6 times the power, which matters for peaks rather than for how loud the music sits.

The hiss columns are empty for Audient Horizon 8P and Audient ORIA because neither maker publishes no output noise figure. That is a gap in the specification, not a quiet amplifier, and it is left blank here rather than filled with a plausible number.

HeadphoneImpedanceNeedsAudient Horizon 8P headroomAudient ORIA headroomAudient Horizon 8P hissAudient ORIA hiss
Shure SE8469 Ω0.04 mW+39 dB damping+39 dB dampingnot publishednot published
Campfire Audio Andromeda 20209 Ω4.0 mW+19 dB damping+19 dB dampingnot publishednot published
Audeze LCD-2 Classic70 Ω0.79 mW+29 dB damping+30 dB dampingnot publishednot published
Beyerdynamic DT 1990 Pro (250Ω)250 Ω0.63 mW+24 dB+26 dB dampingnot publishednot published
HiFiMAN HE400se25 Ω7.9 mW+20 dB damping+20 dB dampingnot publishednot published
Audio-Technica ATH-R70X470 Ω1.6 mW+18 dB+20 dBnot publishednot published
Sennheiser HD 600300 Ω6.6 mW+13 dB+15 dB dampingnot publishednot published
HiFiMAN Susvara60 Ω50 mW+11 dB damping+13 dB dampingnot publishednot published

The gap in dollars, against the gap in numbers

These two cost the same, $3500, so price settles nothing. Out of the 567 models here, the Audient Horizon 8P leaves 51 models alone under the one-eighth rule — and on the other side there is no such advantage at all.

Everything in this paragraph counts only figures the two makers published. An advantage on an axis one of them leaves blank cannot be counted, and is not counted — how often that happens is its own page.

Both pages in full

Each has a page of its own with every power figure traced to what the maker published and a full headphone list: Audient Horizon 8P and Audient ORIA. Or put either against your own headphones in the source comparison tool.

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