FiiO Q15 vs FiiO Q7

Both are portable amplifiers, $440 against $750. This page puts them side by side on the only three things a maker can be held to — power, output impedance and noise — and then asks the question that actually matters: which headphones do they treat differently?

On raw power they are level: each reaches 100 dB on 567 of the 567 non-electrostatic models here.

Every published figure, next to each other

SpecificationFiiO Q15FiiO Q7
Power into 32Ω625 mW550 mW
Power into 150Ω149 mW123 mW
Power into 300Ω85 mW65 mW
Power into 600Ω43 mW33 mW
Output impedance1.0 Ω1.2 Ω
Output noise3.1 µV2.8 µV
Price$440$750
Headphones it reaches 100 dB on
out of 567
567567

A figure marked not published is missing from the maker’s own material, which is not the same as being good or bad. Where one of these two publishes a number and the other does not, the comparison on that axis cannot be made at all — and saying so is more useful than guessing.

The headphones that tell them apart

On power they are interchangeable across this whole database: there is no headphone here that one reaches 100 dB on and the other does not.

23 headphones are left alone by the FiiO Q15 under the one-eighth rule but coloured by the FiiO Q7 (64 Audio Ocean, 64 Audio U18s, 64 Audio U6t, 20 more).

4 headphones stay below the audible-hiss threshold on the FiiO Q7 but cross it on the FiiO Q15 (AFUL Performer 8, Campfire Audio Chimera, Dunu SA6 MKII, 1 more).

567 of the 567 models here reach 100 dB on both. That is a power count and nothing more; whether either source suits a given headphone also depends on the two lines above.

Both pages in full

Each has a page of its own with every power figure traced to what the maker published and a full headphone list: FiiO Q15 and FiiO Q7. Or put either against your own headphones in the source comparison tool.

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