Sources that drive everything here

Every source here reaches 100 dB SPL on all 567 non-electrostatic models in this database, including the two most demanding of them — the Symphonium Titan, which needs 105 mW, and the Moondrop PARA, which needs 100 mW. They are sorted by price, cheapest first, which is the only ordering that tells you anything useful.

This list exists to settle an argument rather than to sell anything. If the cheapest product that drives every one of those 567 models costs what it costs, then power is not the thing your money is buying above that point — output impedance and noise are, and those are different lists. (Electrostatics are not in the count: they need an energiser rather than an amplifier, so no product on this page drives them and none claims to.)

The table shows the first 15 of 85. The rest are in the full source list, where every figure is labelled with where it came from.

195 of the 280 sources in this database are not on this list — not because anything is missing from their specifications, but because they do not clear the bar it sets. That is a different thing from the other lists here, where the usual reason for absence is that the maker never published the figure at all.

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.

Quietest sources for sensitive in-ears · Lowest published output impedance · Most power into 300 Ω · Audio interfaces as headphone amplifiers · Sources under $100 · Hardest headphones to drive · Most sensitive in-ears · Quietest desktop sources · What balanced actually gains · Portable players by power · Most power per dollar · High-impedance headphones