What's the actual behind the scenes purpose of beyerdynamic making so many different ohms headphones?

Submitted by aTraceMayBe t3_123hg05 in headphones

After extensive googling over several months I can't land on a satisfying answer.

Many say the discrepancy between the different ohms models of the DT series is too little to matter, while others in forums and in videos like this maintain the sentiment that the dampening factor affects sound appreciably. What about people like one from this video that says it's okay to buy the low ohms ones? And yes I know sensitivity/efficiency matters at the end of the day.

If what the person in the second link says is right, that low ohms headphones can be used just as well with high power sources, what's the deal with beyer not just perfecting a low ohms headphone and making the user infer the need to simply have the volume knob and gain set to low on their amp no matter how powerful the driving stack is? Unless their wrong and damping factor does matter, though it's funny I've only ever head people talk about damping factor when it comes to these beyers, which are low-mid price range.

Weird to not hear it discussed (at least to my knowledge) with actual super high end cans which can vary in how hard they are to drive, yet still sound excellent regardless of how easy/hard it is to do so (again only from what I know.)

I guess what I'm trying to ask is why you don't see other manufacturers do this besides beyer, it's just a cloud of confusion for a laymen such as myself. Doesn't it cost beyer more money to have different assembly lines for the ohm differences if the difference appears small, or is it maybe creating an illusion of choice panic?

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[deleted] t1_jdunyl7 wrote

[deleted]

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libeako t1_je0f2w7 wrote

>higher Ohm models

higher impedance types

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szakee t1_jduob21 wrote

> it was normal for Studio headphones to have high impedance

it was because the output imp of source devices. it wasn't "normal", it was a must.

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mmry404 t1_jdv0rt3 wrote

Nice to see people having questions! We should all try to up our knowledge

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TravAndAlex t1_jdxyg4s wrote

Steve Guttenburg of CNet explained:

“The impedance of a headphone is largely determined by the driver’s voice coil, and for Beyerdynamic’s high-impedance models the voice coil’s wire is super-thin, just 0.018mm, half the thickness of a human hair. Beyerdynamic’s Senior Product Manager Gunter Weidemann explained…

The thinner wires have more windings (layers of wire) on the voice-coil than the lower-impedance Beyerdynamic headphones, which have thicker and heavier, easier-to-manufacture voice coils. The lower moving mass of the 250- and 600-ohm headphones’ voice coils is lighter than the 32-ohm models, and the lower mass is part of the reason high-impedance headphones sound better. The smaller diameter of the 600-ohm voice coil wires allows the wires to fit tighter, so there’s less air between the windings, and that makes the electromagnetic field of the voice coil stronger. All of that reduces distortion for the high-impedance versions compared with the low-impedance headphones.”

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hurtyewh t1_jdux7an wrote

Likely due to professional use cases which translate well enough to consumer needs. The sound quality from my anecdotal experience is meaningfully improved when moving from 32ohm to 80ohm, a bit from 80ohms to 250ohms and mostly inperceivably from 250ohms to 600ohms. The reason would be the difference in voice coil mass and density and at least makes intuitive sense. The unit variation is also very notable with those models and matters much more.

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35mmpistol t1_jdw1cpk wrote

My understanding is that it's rooted in studio settings where your using amps outputted to a dozen headphone ends, and you'd just send stupid power to 'all of them at once' and you needed headphones that could handle the higher power. So if you had one headphone plugged in, instead of 6, your headphones don't explode from excess power delivery/

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-This could be completely and utterly wrong. I don't know.

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AntOk463 t1_jduz069 wrote

The reason I used to belive was they all sound similar, but higher impedance models are able to take in more power and produce a better sound. The frequency response would be the same for all models, but the higher impedance one is able to get better detail and clarity. But they are all about equally hard to drive, the 80 Ohm need more power than you expect and the 250 Ohm need less than you expect, so that reason is gone.

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solid12345 t1_jdxvofc wrote

Not sure why people seem to think they all sound the same. My DT990 if properly amped rivals the likes of $1000 headphones that the lower ohms just can't touch.

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oballzo t1_jdvqwp1 wrote

I too think it's rather confusing. Why not make like 2-3 impedances? It feels like they have like five. 2 would be low impedance for ease of drive off of mobile devices (which struggle with high impedances), high for being able to use higher output impedance amps. Maybe a medium impedance option, but no more than that.

The way it currently stands, it feels like one is supposed to be the 'best', but that's not really the case, is it?

Then again, it seems like if you had access to any amp you could find, low sensitivity transducers offer the best. Most ToTL are low sensitivity, and when Audeze changed the 4 to 4z, many seemed to find a reduction in sound quality.

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