Gadgetory

so after hours perhaps even days of painstaking research you finally decided on a pair of fancy headphones replace those crappy little earbuds that came with your smart phone and good for you but unfortunately actually using them often isn't a matter of just plugging your cans into a headphone jack you see nicer headphones often need more power in order to operate properly due in part to their high impedance which is a measure of how much something resists electrical current high impedances allow headphones to be built in ways that can result in better overall sound quality but they also mean that they often need an amplifier in order to drive them properly if your headphones don't get enough power not only will they be too quiet to enjoy but they also won't sound right in different frequencies meaning you've just paid a lot of money for nice headphones that won't sound nearly good enough to justify their cost but how do you know if an amp is even necessary typically many cheaper headphones or headphones that are designed specifically to work with portable devices such as smartphones will have lower impedances usually 35 ohms or less making an additional amplifier unnecessary in most cases but once you start getting to 50 ohms and higher amplifiers can make an audible difference and north of 100 ohms you'll definitely need one if you're wondering how much impedance your headphones have this can usually be found pretty easily on your product packaging or a spec page so if it turns out that you need an amplifier what should you pick other than following the usual steps of checking online reviews and manufacturer reputations a good place to start is to determine not only your headphones impedance rating but their efficiency or sensitivity which is a measure of how many decibels the headphones will output per milliwatt or millivolts if your headphone specs don't give a number it's easy to look up efficiency or sensitivity ratings for lots of popular models online once you've got one of these numbers you can enter it along with your impedance rating on one of a handful of freely available headphone power calculator online a few of which will be listed in the video description down below you can then tell how many milliwatts you need to get your headphones up to a certain level of loudness a good idea is to assume 110 decibels which is about 10 lower than the threshold of pain after you've gotten this number just have a look at whether the power output of the amp you like is at least that high this will be listed as how many milliwatts it can put into a certain number of ohms so make sure the power output is sufficient for your headphones impedance many amps spec sheets will say things like this model can put 40 milliamps into 300 ohms to give you a better idea of exactly how much juice it can provide it's also a good idea to get something a little more powerful than the calculator says that you need as many headphones can have variable impedances depending on whether you're listening to low or high frequency sounds for example popular models of Sennheiser headphones are known to have impedance spikes in the lower frequencies again you can look up impedance graphs for lots of headphones online to see if they're significantly different than what's listed on the box and choose an amplifier accordingly the last main specification you should be looking at is the amplifiers output impedance which is separate from your headphones impedance rating a good rule of thumb to follow is you want to make sure that your amps output impedance is at least eight times lower than your headphones impedance so if you've got a 200 ohm set of headphones you want an amplifier with an output impedance of no more than 25 ohms okay Luke I get it it's super important to get the right amp but what about the right DAC I mean it's even in the video title come on man well a digital analog converter can be helpful in certain circumstances a DAC takes the digital signal from your computer whether it's an mp3 or flat file or whatever and converts it into an analogue signal that your headphones can then turn into sound your computer has a DAC built-in to allow you to plug in headphones or speakers but some cheaply implemented Dax can pick up electrical noise from inside your PC which can result in hissing crackling static all that kind of stuff right to your headphones or speakers so if you're experiencing these symptoms or weird sounding audio in general an external DAC that's outside of the electrically noisy environment that is your computer it can definitely help but if you aren't suffering from these symptoms you probably don't need an external DAC especially as onboard motherboard audio has improved quite a bit over recent years but some audio files do claim that a nice DAC can open up the sound stage on nicer headphones especially open backed ones so if you really want to explore high-end hi-fi it can be something worth considering and although all this sounds like a lot of unpleasant math a little work can go a long way in making sure you get that transcendent listening experience that you've always wanted speaking of great experiences fresh books is on a mission to make freelancers less stressed and more organized through their easy-to-use tool for crafting and sending professional invoices in seconds fresh books also helps you track your hours so when it comes time to create set invoice you know exactly what you did when you did it who you did it for all that kind of stuff and you can even accept deposits for that work through their platform so you get paid on your schedule they also have a tool to manage your expense reports their mobile app lets you take a picture and then that's pretty much all you have to do it handles the rest getting started on fresh books is extremely simple even if you're not a numbers person and they say especially if you're not a numbers person you can try fresh books for free for 30 days by going to fresh books calm forward slash tech quickie and entering tech quickie in the how did you hear about us section alright guys like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it check out our other channels like Lana's tech tips and the much-ballyhooed channel super fun also if you guys are interested in the shirt that I'm wearing the like gold-plated tech quickie shirt thing this will be available not yet but soon so watch that description down below also if you want to see those links for the power calculator things also in the description down below leave suggestions for other tech wiki's that you want us to see or make videos about I can talk sometimes let us know in the comments down below and I'll see you next time