this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
45 points (86.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43806 readers
836 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I believe you’re correct. DACs obviously can’t determine volume at all, but amps can try to use the impedance to create an estimate.
This probably isn’t accurate though. If you really want a good estimate, you would have to calculate it with current voltage output and the specs of the headphones/IEMs in question.
I’m just a hobbyist too, but my headphones are extremely inefficient so I’ve spent some time looking into this. Too bad we don’t have oratory here
I guess it might be possible to calibrate an amp for true volume if you calculate it, assuming such a feature exists (I never actually owned a dedicated amp, much less a fancy one, so I have no clue if such a feature exists), also I assume that overtime headphone efficiency will reduce as the permanent magnet gets weaker if exposed to high heat (no idea if forgetting the headphones in a car in summer would be hot enough to make a meaningful difference though) or dropped repeatedly (though I'd wager the headphones will stop working before the magnet itself in such case).
Some amps do indicate how much power they’re outputting. The little portable dac/amp Qudelix 5k is $100 and does this. I think it also has fields for impedance and sensitivity, wherein it calculates SPL (dB), but I don’t actually have one so I’m not confident.
That's pretty cool.