Kiwi Ears KE4: how much amplifier do you need?

The Kiwi Ears KE4 is 28Ω. Its maker prints a sensitivity of 102.0 dB and never says whether that is per milliwatt or per volt, so this page reads it as per milliwatt — on that reading it needs 0.63 mW to reach 100 dB SPL, or 0.13 V across the drivers. If the figure is really per volt, it needs far more.

That puts it in the easy category. A phone, a laptop headphone jack or the cheapest USB dongle will drive it to painful levels. Of the 280 sources in the database, 280 have at least 10 dB of headroom and another 0 have enough. The cheapest portable source that does the job is the Apple USB-C dongle (US) at $9.

This maker printed a decibel figure and no reference unit, so the number above is shown exactly as printed. Everything below reads it as per milliwatt, which is the commoner convention on a sheet that omits the unit — if it is really per volt, this headphone is about 16 dB harder to drive than the rest of this page assumes. The converter explains the difference.

Kiwi Ears publishes a sensitivity of 102 dB and does not state whether that is per milliwatt or per volt — the spec sheet simply stops at the number.

Both readings are given here so you can judge for yourself. If that 102 dB is per milliwatt, the figures on this page are right as they stand. If it is per volt, the real sensitivity is 86.5 dB/mW — 16 dB lower at 28Ω — and everything above understates what these need by that much. The per-milliwatt reading is the one shown, because it is the more common convention on a spec sheet that omits the unit; treat it as an indication rather than a specification.

Source: kiwiears.com. How this data was built.

Most people listen between 75 and 85 dB. The 100 dB row is the one worth planning around: it gives you headroom for dynamic peaks without designing your system for a volume that would damage your hearing in under fifteen minutes. The safe listening calculator puts numbers on that.

Every source in the database, judged at 100 dB SPL into 28Ω. “Headroom” is how much power is left over above what the headphone needs — 10 dB means ten times the required power, which is what you want for dynamic peaks.

Hiss. At 117.5 dB/V these are sensitive enough to reveal a source's own noise floor. The noisiest source in the database, the Schiit Mjolnir 3, would put its hiss at roughly 26 dB SPL in these headphones — clearly audible in quiet passages. The hiss calculator lets you check your own amplifier's noise figure.

Output impedance. At 28Ω these want a source output impedance below 3.50Ω to satisfy the one-eighth rule. Of the 192 sources that publish one, 35 miss it, the worst being the Bottlehead Crack (OTL kit) at 120.0Ω; the other 88 publish no output impedance at all, so they cannot be checked either way. Above that threshold the source starts shaping the frequency response. Check yours here.

Worked out in advance against its own stable: vs Cadenza · vs Halcyon · vs Orchestra II · vs Orchestra Lite. Each of those pages counts the sources that drive one and not the other.

Or open the comparison tool to put any two models side by side, or browse all 578. Or see every Kiwi Ears headphone in the database, and how much of what this site says about them came from Kiwi Ears’s own documents.