Little Dot MK III SE: power output and what it will drive

The Little Dot MK III SE is a desktop amplifier at $540. It delivers 2.5 W into 32Ω and 800 mW into 300Ω, which ranks it 35 of 280 for raw power among the sources in this database.

Measured at 100 dB SPL it has comfortable headroom on 565 of the 567 dynamic and planar headphones catalogued here and enough but not generous on 2. Balanced OTL. Note that the 600Ω figure in the factory table is the pre-amp output, not the headphone jack.

The shop listings these figures stand on quote 2.5 W into 32Ω, 1.8 W into 120Ω, 800 mW into 300Ω. The rest of the table is worked out from those.

The published figures describe the balanced output. A single-ended jack on the same unit will put out less — usually about half the voltage and a quarter of the power.

Derived rows hold output voltage steady, as an amplifier does (method).

One caveat about the source. None of the addresses below is a Little Dot document. The figures here stand on ShenzhenAudio, a retailer and Headfonics, a review site, which are transcriptions of the factory table rather than the table itself. A transcription is usually faithful and may well be exact here — but it can carry an old revision, and nothing on this site would notice if it did. Find these numbers on Little Dot's own site and send the link; this paragraph comes off.

Source: shenzhenaudio.com, headfonics.com, soundphilereview.com.

Easiest to hardest to drive, with headroom at a 100 dB SPL peak.

The manufacturer does not publish an output noise figure for this source, so there is no hiss estimate here. If you have a measured figure, the hiss calculator takes it.

The manufacturer does not publish an output impedance for this source. Without it, nothing here can say how this source will behave with a multi-driver in-ear.

With a measured figure, the checker works out the consequence.

Of the 280 sources here, 36 do everything the Little Dot MK III SE does as a headphone output: reach 100 dB on every headphone it reaches. The cheapest of them is the Schiit Magni Heresy at $99, against this one’s $540 — $441 less.

The cheaper one also publishes an output impedance, which the Little Dot MK III SE does not — so on the paperwork it is ahead, not merely level.

This counts the headphone output only; inputs, converters, the volume control and the build are outside it.

Compared with its closest rivals: vs Bottlehead Crack (OTL kit) · vs Little Dot MK II · vs Schiit Valhalla 2 · vs Schiit Valhalla 3 · vs Soncoz SGA1.

Compare any two or match your own headphones. Every Little Dot source here.