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SMSL M500 DAC and HP Amp Review

Why is lower impedance better?
Damping factor is higher.
In other words you want you output impedance to be as low as possible. So you don't loose power into lower loads, also with dynamic headphones, or with headphones that have variable impedance for example like Sennheiser hd600/hd650/hd800 you are not getting any variation in their frequency response.
With headphone amplifiers output impedance in my opinion should be not greater than like 1-2ohms.
Of course you will probably get fine with something that is lower than say 10ohms, but not with every headphone.
For example Dan Clark headphones are known for their very low impedance.


ps. sometimes higher output impedance is desirable, for example something like Bottlehead Crack being OTL tube design has very high output impedance and pairing it with something like Sennheiser hd800 you get some bass boost, which could be nice, but on the other hand you can do similar thing with just EQ.

But general rule of thumb is output impedance should be as low as possible, and nowadays it is really not a problem to find such amp.
 
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