and yes, they dont add up like that. but power requirements = specs on paper + acoustic impedance from tuning (which is NOT listed).
Thats how you get transducers with super low impedance and very high sensitivity and yet arent super easy to drive. Or vice versa, looks hard to drive on paper but is actually easy.
I could not find any official statement of headphone manufacturers how do they measure the Sensitivity, but if it it taken from the driver it is totally useless value to state anywhere. It would be even less useful for the speaker system and would lead to a lot of costly mistakes for the buyers. SPL needs to be measured somewhere, for machinery for example there are standards saying from what direction and what distance you need to do the measurement so to later provide it obligatory in instruction for use (as it is safety related). For headphones I guess you do what you want
On the other hand did you measure the SPL of the theoretically easy to drive, but practically “hard to drive” headphones or they were just not “sounding right” at expected source power?
One extra pain the ass is uneven impedance across the frequency range area making the calculations less trustworthy
My phone. I don’t get a point of buying a dongle if it’s not to be used with a phone so yeah, I only test dongles with phone/tablet. Might be different on PC, gotta try it!
But I can tell you right now that on phone, they are lying. I had Zen Pro at 60% low gain, and that’s my easiest to drive IEM!
Tanya is indeed a very strange example and I don’t know how to explain that. Or maybe it gets loud but wrong sounding?
However Volume with 5 ohms is normally outside of operating range for most of amplifiers I know, where the power specs are really off (in direction to low values) what is declared for 16-300 Ohms. And it needs relatively large current in this range
It matters since phones USB output has current cap at 100mA and I don’t know really how efficient are those dongles? 40%?
And it draws current like crazy apparently
USB OTG is standardized and it allows to get up to 500mA or even more in power delivery mode, but it looks like phone manufacturers limit that value. 100mA was max for a device connected to USB in “non configured” mode and some devices do not exceed that. iPhones are even worse. I cannot find some more official information on that, but what I noticed in M15 was that with phone I have my volume at 60-70% for MEST as Nymz said, and on PC I had MEST at 12/100. I dont know how it is scaled though
I saw this hidizs s9 measurement exceeding 140mA from phone on one of @darmanastartes reviews, so there must be something to it (btw crazy power drain for such a small device)