Meze ARTA: how much amplifier do you need?

The Meze ARTA is 225Ω with a sensitivity of 98.0 dB/mW, which is 104.5 dB/V. To reach 100 dB SPL — genuinely loud, louder than most people listen — it needs 1.6 mW, or 0.60 V across the drivers.

That is a moderate load. Most USB dongles handle it without complaint; the weakest phone outputs will run out of volume before they run out of quality. 277 of 280 sources here have enough headroom. The cheapest portable source that does the job is the Apple USB-C dongle (US) at $9.

Sensitivity here is in dB per milliwatt. Manufacturers often quote dB per volt instead and leave the unit off, which is the single most common reason online calculators give answers that are 10–15 dB wrong. The converter explains the difference.

Meze publishes this directly as 98 dB SPL/mW (at 1 kHz), per milliwatt, so nothing was converted.

The maker adds a power recommendation of its own: Minimum 200 mW output power (225Ω) recommended; 500 mW or greater recommended for ideal performance (this is a recommended AMPLIFIER output, not a headphone power-handling rating)

Source: mezeaudio.com. How this data was built.

Most people listen between 75 and 85 dB. The 100 dB row is the one worth planning around: it gives you headroom for dynamic peaks without designing your system for a volume that would damage your hearing in under fifteen minutes. The safe listening calculator puts numbers on that.

Every source in the database, judged at 100 dB SPL into 225Ω. “Headroom” is how much power is left over above what the headphone needs — 10 dB means ten times the required power, which is what you want for dynamic peaks.

Hiss. At 104.5 dB/V these are sensitive enough to reveal a source's own noise floor. The noisiest source in the database, the Schiit Vali 2+, would put its hiss at roughly 12 dB SPL in these headphones — clearly audible in quiet passages. The hiss calculator lets you check your own amplifier's noise figure.

Output impedance. At 225Ω these want a source output impedance below 28.12Ω to satisfy the one-eighth rule. 16 of the 280 sources here miss it, the worst being the Bottlehead Crack (OTL kit) at 120.0Ω. Above that threshold the source starts shaping the frequency response. Check yours here.

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