Thieaudio Hype 10: how much amplifier do you need?

The Thieaudio Hype 10 is 18Ω with a sensitivity of 87.6 dB/mW, which is 105.0 dB/V. To reach 100 dB SPL — genuinely loud, louder than most people listen — it needs 17 mW, or 0.56 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. 251 of 280 sources here have enough headroom. The cheapest portable source that does the job is the FiiO SnowSky Tiny A at $22.

Sensitivity here is in dB per milliwatt. Why the unit matters.

Thieaudio, as the shop reproduces it, publishes this as 105 dB/Vrms — a figure per volt, not per milliwatt. At 18Ω the two differ by 17.4 dB, so the 87.6 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 17 dB easier to drive than it is — which is roughly the difference between a dongle being enough and not being enough.

One caveat about the source. Almost everything in this database comes from a document the maker published. This entry does not: the figures above stand on someone else's product page — Hangout.Audio, a retailer — and not on any page Thieaudio publishes. Shops usually copy the factory table faithfully and this one may well be exact — but a shop can also carry an old revision, and if Thieaudio changes the number there is nothing here that would notice. It is the weakest provenance on this site, which is why it is written on the page rather than left in a footnote.

Thieaudio does have a site, and it is where these figures ought to be. The product pages carry a “Technical Details” tab that renders empty, and three of the four models in this database — Hype 2, Hype 10 and Phantom — return 404 from the catalogue altogether. The maker has a page and publishes nothing on it.

Source: hangout.audio. How this data was built.

Most people listen between 75 and 85 dB; the 100 dB row leaves room for peaks.

The 15 cheapest of the 280 sources here that reach 100 dB SPL into 18Ω with at least 10 dB of headroom and no known hiss or output-impedance problem with these headphones. All 280 sources, judged for these headphones.

Hiss. At 105.0 dB/V these are sensitive enough to reveal a source's own noise floor. The noisiest source in the database, the Schiit Mjolnir 3, would put its hiss at roughly 13 dB SPL in these headphones — clearly audible in quiet passages. Check your own source.

Output impedance. At 18Ω these want a source output impedance below 2.25Ω to satisfy the one-eighth rule; 35 of the 192 sources that publish one miss it. Check yours here.

Compared with its stablemates: vs Hype 2 · vs Hype 4 · vs Hype 4 MKII · vs Monarch MK3 · vs Monarch MKII · vs Monarch MKIV · vs Oracle MKII · vs Origin · vs Prestige LTD.

Compare any two or browse all 578. Every Thieaudio headphone here.