Audeze CRBN: how much amplifier do you need?

The Audeze CRBN is an electrostatic headphone. It does not connect to a normal headphone output at all — it needs a dedicated energiser that supplies a high bias voltage, so every power figure on the rest of this site is irrelevant to it. No dongle, amplifier or player will drive it, whatever its wattage.

That is the whole answer, and it is worth stating plainly because "how many milliwatts do I need" is the wrong question here. What you need is a matching energiser from the same ecosystem.

The two numbers that decide everything

Impedance200 Ω
Sensitivity (not published by the maker)97.0 dB
TypeElectrostatic
BrandAudeze
Moderate — a decent dongle is plenty

Electrostatic specifications are quoted differently and are not comparable to dynamic or planar headphones. They are listed here only so the database is complete.

Where these figures come from

Audeze publishes no sensitivity figure for this model.

Source: audeze.com.

What is printed there, and what it is worth

As it is labelledAs printedToleranceStandard
Frequency response20Hz - 40kHznot printednot printed

Audeze prints 20Hz - 40kHz for the Audeze CRBN, under the heading “Frequency response”. Source: audeze.com.

No tolerance is printed with it, and that is the whole problem. “20Hz - 40kHz” says nothing about how loud this headphone actually is at 20 Hz: it could be thirty decibels down there and the sentence would still be true. A range only means something with a ±dB figure beside it, and of the 490 models whose maker prints a range, 58 print that figure.

What these numbers are worth, maker by maker, is set out in the frequency response audit. No measurement is published here — only what the maker printed.

Similar headphones

Or open the comparison tool to put any two models side by side, or browse all 578. Or see every Audeze headphone in the database, and how much of what this site says about them came from Audeze’s own documents.

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