Moondrop PARA: how much amplifier do you need?

The Moondrop PARA is 8Ω with a sensitivity of 80.0 dB/mW, which is 101.0 dB/V. To reach 100 dB SPL — genuinely loud, louder than most people listen — it needs 100 mW, or 0.89 V across the drivers.

That is a demanding load — not impossible from a portable source, but you want a good one. 103 of the 280 sources have comfortable headroom, 27 are marginal and 150 fall short.

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.

Moondrop publishes this as 101 dB/Vrms (@1kHz) — a figure per volt, not per milliwatt. At 8Ω the two differ by 21.0 dB, so the 80.0 dB/mW above is that published number converted, not a different measurement.

This is the conversion that online calculators skip. Quote the per-volt number as if it were per-milliwatt and this headphone looks 21 dB easier to drive than it is — which is roughly the difference between a dongle being enough and not being enough.

Source: moondroplab.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 8Ω. “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 101.0 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 9 dB SPL in these headphones — faintly audible in a silent room. The hiss calculator lets you check your own amplifier's noise figure.

Output impedance. At 8Ω these want a source output impedance below 1.00Ω to satisfy the one-eighth rule. 50 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.

Volume is not the test. Plenty of weak sources will play these loud enough. What runs out first is control on bass peaks, where the current demand spikes well above the average figures in the table. If it sounds loud but soft, that is what you are hearing.

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