Little Dot MK III SE: power output and what it will drive

The Little Dot MK III SE is a desktop amplifier at $540. It delivers 2.5 W into 32Ω and 800 mW into 300Ω, which ranks it 35 of 280 for raw power among the sources in this database.

Measured at 100 dB SPL it has comfortable headroom on 565 of the 567 dynamic and planar headphones catalogued here and enough but not generous on 2. Balanced OTL. Note that the 600Ω figure in the factory table is the pre-amp output, not the headphone jack.

The shop listings these figures stand on quote 2.5 W into 32Ω, 1.8 W into 120Ω, 800 mW into 300Ω. Everything else in the table above is worked out from those figures, and this table says which is which.

The published figures describe the balanced output. A single-ended jack on the same unit will put out less — usually about half the voltage and a quarter of the power.

Derivation holds output voltage steady between and beyond the published loads rather than output power, because that is what an amplifier actually does. The full method is written up here.

One caveat about the source. None of the addresses below is a Little Dot document. The figures here stand on ShenzhenAudio, a retailer and Headfonics, a review site, which are transcriptions of the factory table rather than the table itself. A transcription is usually faithful and may well be exact here — but it can carry an old revision, and nothing on this site would notice if it did. Find these numbers on Little Dot's own site and send the link; this paragraph comes off.

Source: shenzhenaudio.com, headfonics.com, soundphilereview.com.

Ordered from easiest to hardest to drive. Headroom is measured at 100 dB SPL, which is louder than almost anyone listens — a small negative number means the source still plays loud, just without reserve for peaks.

These figures come from each manufacturer's own sensitivity rating. A handful of planars — the HiFiMAN Susvara and the Abyss AB-1266 in particular — are widely reported to need far more than their published sensitivity implies, so treat a bare pass on those as optimistic rather than settled.

The manufacturer does not publish an output noise figure for this source, so the hiss estimate that runs on every other page here cannot be run on this one. Rather than substitute a plausible number, this page leaves the question open.

If you know the noise figure from a measurement you trust, the hiss calculator takes it directly and tells you where that noise lands in your own in-ears.

The manufacturer does not publish an output impedance for this source. That is the one number that decides whether it leaves your headphones alone or acts as a tone control, so its absence matters more than it looks: without it, nothing here can tell you how this source will behave with a multi-driver in-ear.

If you find a measured figure you trust, the checker will work out the consequence for any headphone.

Of the 280 sources here, 36 do everything the Little Dot MK III SE does as a headphone output: reach 100 dB on every headphone it reaches. The cheapest of them is the Schiit Magni Heresy at $99, against this one’s $540 — $441 less.

The cheaper one also publishes an output impedance, which the Little Dot MK III SE does not — so on the paperwork it is ahead, not merely level.

This counts a headphone output and nothing else. Inputs, converters, microphone preamps, balanced outputs, the volume control, the case and the warranty are all outside it, and any of them can be the reason to buy the dearer box. What the count does say is that the three numbers a maker can be held to do not separate them.

Worked out in advance against its closest rivals: vs Bottlehead Crack (OTL kit) · vs Little Dot MK II · vs Schiit Valhalla 2 · vs Schiit Valhalla 3 · vs Soncoz SGA1. Each of those pages lists the headphones that tell the two apart.

Or put any two side by side in the source comparison tool, or run your own headphones through the amplifier matcher. Or see every Little Dot source in the database, and how much of what this site says about them came from Little Dot’s own documents.