Audio interfaces as headphone amplifiers

Audio interfaces are the most common headphone amplifier in the world, because anyone who records anything already owns one. They are also the category where output impedance goes wrong most often: a headphone output designed around 250 Ω studio monitors can sit at 50 Ω, which is fine for what it was built for and wrong for a multi-driver in-ear.

This lists every interface in the database by price, with what it delivers into 32 Ω and the output impedance its maker published — where one was published at all.

Sorted on one published figure

InterfacePriceInto 32 ΩOutput impedance
Zoom AMS-22$10020 mW10 Ω
Steinberg IXO22$11932 mWnot published
Audient EVO 4$12922 mW50 Ω
IK Multimedia AXE I/O ONE$13026 mW<0.1 Ω
Focusrite Scarlett Solo 4th gen$13931 mW50 Ω
Arturia MiniFuse 1$149139 mW10 Ω
Arturia MiniFuse 2$149139 mW10 Ω
PreSonus Studio 24c$14927 mWnot published
Universal Audio Volt 1$14984 mWnot published
Zoom AMS-24$15030 mW10 Ω
Steinberg UR24C$19480 mWnot published
Audient iD4 MkII$199112 mWnot published
Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 4th gen$19931 mW50 Ω
PreSonus Quantum ES 2$199106 mWnot published
Steinberg UR22C$19912 mWnot published

The table shows the first 15 of 65. The rest are in the full source list, where every figure is labelled with where it came from.

215 of the 280 sources in this database are not on this list because they are not audio interfaces. This one is a category, not a ranking threshold.

This is not a ranking of sound quality and cannot be. It sorts one number that manufacturers printed, and manufacturers do not print anything about how their products sound. Every row links to that product’s own page, where each figure is labelled with the document it came from.

Same database, different question