Not a spec calculator — a bluntness calculator. Enter what you already own and what you are eyeing next, and see roughly how much of the theoretical ceiling each purchase actually buys, based on the diminishing-returns pattern described above. This is an opinionated model, not a lab measurement — a gut-check, not gospel.
The model assumes quality climbs fast at first and then flattens — the same pattern described above, where roughly $500–800 buys around 90% of what any amount of money can get in headphone audio. It never reaches 100%, because in this hobby nothing ever fully does. The percentage is a deliberately simple illustration of a real pattern, not a measurement of any specific product.
The curve above is an opinion. This part is not: it is every source in the catalogue sorted into price bands, with the only three things a maker can be held to — how many headphones it powers to 100 dB, what output impedance it publishes, and what noise it publishes.
| Price band | Sources | Models the median one powers | Median output impedance | Median published noise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| under $50 | 12 | 553 | 0.5Ω | 2.35 µV |
| $50–150 | 53 | 561 | 0.7Ω | 1.7 µV |
| $150–400 | 87 | 563 | 1Ω | 1.6 µV |
| $400–1000 | 68 | 566 | 1Ω | 2.51 µV |
| $1000 and up | 60 | 567 | 0.3Ω | 3.35 µV |
Read the third column first. The median source under $50 already reaches 100 dB on 553 of the 567 models here; the median source over $1000 reaches 567. Every dollar past the first fifty is buying the last 14 models on the list and nothing at all for the other 553. It is worth knowing which ones those 14 are: they are headed by the Symphonium Titan, the Moondrop PARA and the Moondrop COSMO — 6 of the 14 are low-impedance in-ears, which is not where anyone expects to find the hard-to-drive end of a catalogue. That is the diminishing-returns curve, computed instead of asserted, and it flattens far earlier than the $500–800 this page talks about.
Output impedance is the number that decides whether an amplifier changes how your headphones sound. Across the 169 sources that publish one, its rank correlation with price is -0.14 — which is to say none. The cheapest source in this database that is clean under the one-eighth rule for every model in it is the iBasso DC03 Pro at $69. You cannot spend your way to this; you can only check it.
Noise is stranger. Across the 83 sources that publish a figure, its rank correlation with price is +0.34 — the expensive ones publish higher numbers, and among desktop amplifiers alone (28 of them) the figure is +0.47. Two honest caveats before anyone quotes that: a bigger amplifier has more gain and more output swing, so more microvolts at the socket is partly just physics, and makers publish that figure at a gain setting of their own choosing. What the number does not support is the opposite claim, the one the hobby makes constantly — that spending more buys a quieter noise floor. On published figures it does not: of the 20 sources over $1000 that publish a figure at all, none is quiet enough for all 222 in-ears here.
The cheapest source with power for the whole database costs $99 (Schiit Magni Heresy). The cheapest one clean on output impedance costs $69. The cheapest one quiet enough for every in-ear costs $149 (Topping L30 II). None of those three numbers is near the top of the price list, and that — not a curve — is the argument this page is really making.