This was a great video! Would you consider continuing Tyll's legacy by starting your own wall of fame for headphones/amps/dacs? Very few reviewers consider this for obvious reasons because let's be honest it takes cojones am I right? ;)
Oh there is a symbol! My degree went a different way than deep circuit analysis and such. Hopefully the rest makes the concepts understandable to a lay audience.
Hi! Love your videos, question on this as it applies to two products you've given pretty good reviews to: I'm thinking about pairing og focal clears with the hifiman EF400 (they're both on a lovely sale). you might say this is much more power than the clears need, and yes, but I've heard-and you've reported-that they scale well. I've also heard that an r2r dac can help out the one slight weakness of the clears-timbre. Beyond this, I own other headphones that I think would pair well with the EF400 such as my HD600s and LCD-2Cs. To get to the point, although hifiman doesn't officially report the output impedance of the EF400, it has been independently measured as fairly high relative to other solid state amps. 18 ohms out of the 3.5 mm, 5.7 ohms out of the 6.4mm, 10.3 ohms out of the 4.4mm, and 9.85 ohms out of the XLR. The og clear's impedance is 55 ohms. Do you think this is a good pairing? Would there be an audible difference between the damping factor using the clears on the 6.4mm single ended vs the XLR (as I'd prefer to use a fully balanced system)? TL;DR: General thoughts on the significance of a damping factor of around 5 vs the stated goal of 8 or more when using og focal clears with a hifiman EF400?
Thanks for the kind words. The damping factor of 8 is a target for Beyerdynamic and Sennheiser quite often, but it's really just a rule of thumb and what they build their headphones too. Even at that, they sometimes break their own rules. Beyer's A100 amp has a 100-ohm output impedance for intended use with their 600 ohm cans, which of course means a damping factor of 6. The "correct" damping factor is the one that works for you. That said, I find my Radiance quite enjoyable on the EF400. I also enjoyed it on the Singxer SA-1 which allows you to bump the output impedance to around 11 ohms, I think. It didn't sound quite as tight but still sounds pretty enjoyable, IMO. About the EF400 specifically, it's hard to answer just about the difference output impedance will make between its balanced and single-ended outputs. The confounding variable is that the EF400 sounds WAY better from its balanced outputs than the SE inputs, as most balanced devices do around this price point.
This was helpful... I have a more specific question... When I bought my Maggie LRS I had a helluva time matching them with a proper amplification. Finally I drove to a Maggie dealer and he had me demo an LRS with a Hegel H160. This had a damping factor > 2k and 250 watts into 4 ohms and stable down to 2. What the dealer told me was since the Maggie dip down to 2.8 ohms and 86dbs this is an extremely inefficient speaker to drive and it's open baffle and requires very high end amplification for driver control and speed. Basically the damping factor and 2ohms stable was more important than total watt specs. The part that was confusing to me was that most amps are 4-8 ohms but many if it falls below 4 ohms it will trigger the thermal protection. He was right after about 5 different amps the Hegel provided the best pairing for the LRS with the best control and speed to handle what the LRS did best even though it didn't have the most power persay. I'm still confused that lower ohms makes it harder to driver for these amps as it's lower resistance which you would think would be less heat.
" I'm still confused that lower ohms makes it harder to driver for these amps as it's lower resistance which you would think would be less heat." - It does seem backwards, doesn't it? I think the confusion here is that the easy-ness of the driver to be driven when it dips below 2 ohms is that it means it's harder for the amp to keep up. When resistance goes very low the driver draws a large amount of current from the amplifier. Most amps are voltage amplifiers and not current amplifiers, so they can struggle to provide the amount of current the driver wants to pull when the driver wants to pull it. This is often a power supply issue as the power supply struggles to keep up with the rapidly changing current demand. Amps that are comfortable pushing large amounts of current when asked are usually more expensive and heavy, because the power supply is more expensive, has higher quality parts, and often large capacitors - and then the weight comes from the need to cool all that down with larger heatsinks. This explanation is a again a stripped-down, simplified one and an actual electrical engineer could go into far more detail as to why this is, but I hope this explains the basics well enough. Thanks for watching!
This needs more views!
This was a great video! Would you consider continuing Tyll's legacy by starting your own wall of fame for headphones/amps/dacs? Very few reviewers consider this for obvious reasons because let's be honest it takes cojones am I right? ;)
Thanks for that!
7:55 To be that guy, IEEE 315-1975 from 1993 under section 10 has audio devices, including headsets.
Oh there is a symbol! My degree went a different way than deep circuit analysis and such. Hopefully the rest makes the concepts understandable to a lay audience.
this is great
and should have many many more views 🙂
Hi! Love your videos, question on this as it applies to two products you've given pretty good reviews to: I'm thinking about pairing og focal clears with the hifiman EF400 (they're both on a lovely sale). you might say this is much more power than the clears need, and yes, but I've heard-and you've reported-that they scale well. I've also heard that an r2r dac can help out the one slight weakness of the clears-timbre. Beyond this, I own other headphones that I think would pair well with the EF400 such as my HD600s and LCD-2Cs. To get to the point, although hifiman doesn't officially report the output impedance of the EF400, it has been independently measured as fairly high relative to other solid state amps. 18 ohms out of the 3.5 mm, 5.7 ohms out of the 6.4mm, 10.3 ohms out of the 4.4mm, and 9.85 ohms out of the XLR. The og clear's impedance is 55 ohms. Do you think this is a good pairing? Would there be an audible difference between the damping factor using the clears on the 6.4mm single ended vs the XLR (as I'd prefer to use a fully balanced system)?
TL;DR: General thoughts on the significance of a damping factor of around 5 vs the stated goal of 8 or more when using og focal clears with a hifiman EF400?
Thanks for the kind words. The damping factor of 8 is a target for Beyerdynamic and Sennheiser quite often, but it's really just a rule of thumb and what they build their headphones too. Even at that, they sometimes break their own rules. Beyer's A100 amp has a 100-ohm output impedance for intended use with their 600 ohm cans, which of course means a damping factor of 6. The "correct" damping factor is the one that works for you. That said, I find my Radiance quite enjoyable on the EF400. I also enjoyed it on the Singxer SA-1 which allows you to bump the output impedance to around 11 ohms, I think. It didn't sound quite as tight but still sounds pretty enjoyable, IMO.
About the EF400 specifically, it's hard to answer just about the difference output impedance will make between its balanced and single-ended outputs. The confounding variable is that the EF400 sounds WAY better from its balanced outputs than the SE inputs, as most balanced devices do around this price point.
This was helpful... I have a more specific question... When I bought my Maggie LRS I had a helluva time matching them with a proper amplification. Finally I drove to a Maggie dealer and he had me demo an LRS with a Hegel H160. This had a damping factor > 2k and 250 watts into 4 ohms and stable down to 2. What the dealer told me was since the Maggie dip down to 2.8 ohms and 86dbs this is an extremely inefficient speaker to drive and it's open baffle and requires very high end amplification for driver control and speed. Basically the damping factor and 2ohms stable was more important than total watt specs. The part that was confusing to me was that most amps are 4-8 ohms but many if it falls below 4 ohms it will trigger the thermal protection. He was right after about 5 different amps the Hegel provided the best pairing for the LRS with the best control and speed to handle what the LRS did best even though it didn't have the most power persay. I'm still confused that lower ohms makes it harder to driver for these amps as it's lower resistance which you would think would be less heat.
" I'm still confused that lower ohms makes it harder to driver for these amps as it's lower resistance which you would think would be less heat." - It does seem backwards, doesn't it? I think the confusion here is that the easy-ness of the driver to be driven when it dips below 2 ohms is that it means it's harder for the amp to keep up. When resistance goes very low the driver draws a large amount of current from the amplifier. Most amps are voltage amplifiers and not current amplifiers, so they can struggle to provide the amount of current the driver wants to pull when the driver wants to pull it. This is often a power supply issue as the power supply struggles to keep up with the rapidly changing current demand. Amps that are comfortable pushing large amounts of current when asked are usually more expensive and heavy, because the power supply is more expensive, has higher quality parts, and often large capacitors - and then the weight comes from the need to cool all that down with larger heatsinks. This explanation is a again a stripped-down, simplified one and an actual electrical engineer could go into far more detail as to why this is, but I hope this explains the basics well enough. Thanks for watching!
@@wavetheorysound thanks WT this answer makes complete sense!