Can my motherboard power 80 Ohm?

[Toolers]

I’ve bought the beyerdynamic dynamic 770 pros and am wondering if my msi z390 motherboard can power the headphones enough or if I need an amp. I haven’t been able to find anything online so I’m here

[rice guru]

MSI boards should be fine to power 80 ohm 770's just make sure to buy from amazon or some store with a good return policy in case it's not satisfactory.

[emosun]

i dont see why not. tecnically the board wouldnt even have to make a single watt to output sound to any speaker

[8tg]

80 ohms is fine-ish on most devices, your average iPod or laptop, most phones, etc

a desktop audio setup won’t have any problems with them.

At worst they won’t be exactly as loud as they possibly could be.

 

[H713]

Much of this depends on your desired output level and how capable the MSI motherboard really is. 

 

Almost nobody bothers to measure the performance of motherboard audio outputs. Most people don't have the equipment to do it, and those who do have bigger fish to fry. The best we can do is guess based off whatever sparse information is given in the motherboard datasheet.

 

80 ohms is a pretty easy load by most standards, but you could still run into issues if the output amplifier on the motherboard is particularly anemic, or if there are noise issues (very often a grounding issue).

[CTR640]

Just because it's 80ohm, doesn't mean your motherboard will be enough. It comes down to sensivity too. You can have a 32ohm headphone but if sensitivy is very low, it won't help. The best is to test it yourself.

 

I have a MSI motherboard too and its onboard audio is a piece of junk in terms of providing enough power.

[geo3]

On 12/21/2021 at 3:17 AM, 8tg said:

At worst they won’t be exactly as loud as they possibly could be.

That's not true. A lack of power can kill the bass before it starts affecting the higher frequencies.  

[Psittac]

6 hours ago, geo3 said:

That's not true. A lack of power can kill the bass before it starts affecting the higher frequencies.  

I'm not a person for charts, rather one for experience.  And I'm not good at A/B testing but through my limited selection of equipment I have been able to notice a certain loss of "richness" with lower class product's.  I haven't sat down to test what part in the chain it is but I know it's real. In this limited experiment I noticed such a thing even after adjusting for total volume.  And I've heard that something like my very difficult to drive dt880pro 600ohm sounds like garbage on an amp that isn't powerful enough, supposedly at lower volumes.  I really want to figure this out, I've heard that if an amp doesn't have enough juice on tap to go from one note to another it can distort the signal.  I think that's what I'm doing tonight, I'm going to put my 880-600 to the test with onboard vs single ended digital vs toroidal transformer at casual listening volumes

[geo3]

1 hour ago, Psittac said:

I'm not a person for charts, rather one for experience.  And I'm not good at A/B testing but through my limited selection of equipment I have been able to notice a certain loss of "richness" with lower class product's.  I haven't sat down to test what part in the chain it is but I know it's real. In this limited experiment I noticed such a thing even after adjusting for total volume.  And I've heard that something like my very difficult to drive dt880pro 600ohm sounds like garbage on an amp that isn't powerful enough, supposedly at lower volumes.  I really want to figure this out, I've heard that if an amp doesn't have enough juice on tap to go from one note to another it can distort the signal.  I think that's what I'm doing tonight, I'm going to put my 880-600 to the test with onboard vs single ended digital vs toroidal transformer at casual listening volumes

It's really not complicated. Lower frequencies require more power to reproduce, thus suffer more when power is insufficient. 

[Psittac]

35 minutes ago, geo3 said:

It's really not complicated. Lower frequencies require more power to reproduce, thus suffer more when power is insufficient. 

yeah after that post I decided to do a test and posted my result's in the audio section.  Basically all aspects of my headphones became more alive when going from onboard to external though I did have some difficulties.  Also it was a very extreme situation, higher end onboard vs power amp with extremely difficult to drive headphones

[Psittac]

On 12/21/2021 at 2:43 AM, Toolers said:

I’ve bought the beyerdynamic dynamic 770 pros and am wondering if my msi z390 motherboard can power the headphones enough or if I need an amp. I haven’t been able to find anything online so I’m here

What I learned in my test is that any decent onboard audio device should without a doubt drive an 80ohm headphone with reasonable sensitivity.  I tested my dt880 pro 600ohm headphones with onboard and the volume was certainly there.  What I did gain from switching to an external amplifier was, I guess, dynamic range and fullness throughout the spectrum.  Though I can say that it was a tall order for the onboard audio, I wanted to push the limits to see what is happening to a far lesser degree with far easier to drive headphones.  And it was the same as that earlier experiment I did where there is always something to gain when upgrading.  But I can safely say that you would be happy with dt770-80 with onboard audio on a z-series board.

[H713]

10 minutes ago, Psittac said:

What I learned in my test is that any decent onboard audio device should without a doubt drive an 80ohm headphone with reasonable sensitivity.  I tested my dt880 pro 600ohm headphones with onboard and the volume was certainly there.  What I did gain from switching to an external amplifier was, I guess, dynamic range and fullness throughout the spectrum.  Though I can say that it was a tall order for the onboard audio, I wanted to push the limits to see what is happening to a far lesser degree with far easier to drive headphones.  And it was the same as that earlier experiment I did where there is always something to gain when upgrading.  But I can safely say that you would be happy with dt770-80 with onboard audio on a z-series board.

This does not necessarily translate to 80 ohm headphones. 600 ohm loads are in some ways easier to drive than 80 ohm loads. 

 

With high impedance headphones, the power is usually limited by the maximum output voltage of the amplifier. Even if the output driver could swing all the way to the rails, with +/- 5 V rails you're limited to about 20 mW into a 600 ohm load. 

 

At low impedances, like with 32 ohm (or even 16 ohm) headphones, it's the maximum output current that is the limitation. For example, if the output amplifier current limits at 50 mA, the maximum output power into 32 ohms will be roughly 40 mW. 

 

Headphones in the 80 - 150 ohm range are more likely to work well with cheap headphone amplifiers as they're somewhere in the middle. You can get a reasonable amount of output power on +/- 5 V power rails, and you can get a reasonable amount of output power without having to resort to a really high-current driver. 

 

Sensitivity affects how much power you need. Impedance (assuming it's flat) affects the design of the output amplifier required for a given power level. 

 

 

Loudspeakers, for example, are very low impedance devices - often dipping below 4 ohms. You can get a useful amount of power out of +/- 24 V power rails, but the peak output currents may approach 6 amps. Now, this in itself isn't a nightmare for an output stage, as with a purely resistive load. With a typical output stage, the maximum output current of 6 A will only be seen when V_CE is near-zero. Where things get challenging is with reactive loads. With a purely reactive load, the current waveform will be shifted 90 degrees, meaning that the maximum current occurs with an output voltage of zero. This means lots of power dissipation in the output devices. Now, at 24 V, that just means a big heatsink.

 

Things get really tricky in big amplifiers, however, due to secondary breakdown. Power transistors, like those in a linear power amplifier, typically have very large die areas. As the collector-emitter voltage increases, the current can be focused on a small part of the base-emitter junction, resulting in extreme local heating which can quickly destroy the transistor. This is a big part of the reason why class G and class H amplifiers became common during the 1980s and 1990s for large power amplifiers - it reduces the collector-emitter voltage.

 

So what about FETs? Unfortunately, it isn't much better. Most power MOSFETs commonly used for switching power supplies are constructed by paralleling massive numbers of very tiny MOSFETs on a single die. At high voltages, the gate-source voltage must be very close to the gate threshold voltage. Unfortunately, that gate threshold voltage has a negative temperature coefficient. The result of this is predictable - one (or a few) individual tiny FETs begins to hog all of the current, resulting in local heating and failure of the device. 

 

Lateral MOSFETs do not have this problem, and they became very popular during the 1980s and early 1990s, but they are now quite expensive.

 

This, incidentally, is why it can be somewhat tricky to design amplifiers that are good at driving both low-impedance and high-impedance loads. The transistors used in headphone amps typically have very small dies, so secondary breakdown isn't as big of a concern, but power dissipation is. 

 

Headphone amplifiers often deal with it by designing relatively beefy amplifiers (beefy by headphone standards doesn't cost all that much) and having switchable gain settings. This is WAY beyond what motherboard manufacturers are willing to do. When you realize what the budget for the headphone amp on a $200 motherboard is (I'd guess about 50 cents, maybe less), you start to see why they suck for certain types of headphones.