Does High Gain setting damage headphones?

Quote:

Originally Posted by jjmai 

Just wondering if the "High Gain" setting on amps like Fiio E9 poses any damages to headphones (especially low impedance ones, or even IEMs), when used regularly.

Thanks in advance.

Not really.  This may be obvious, but it's not the gain that's potentially damaging but the signal itself.  Higher gain just means that it's amplifying the input by more (so it depends on the input level and the headphones).

I suppose on high gain, there's a higher chance you could accidentally push the volume setting too high...

Anyway, for pretty much all quality headphones and IEMs, you will damage your hearing before you damage the headphones from giving them too loud of an input.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mikeaj 
Anyway, for pretty much all quality headphones and IEMs, you will damage your hearing before you damage the headphones from giving them too loud of an input.

This definitely needs to be repeated. The only way to damage headphones from excessive amping is by not wearing them and turning up the volume way past ear-safe levels, assuming there's sufficient extra headroom on the amp - not every amp will have enough headroom, and assuming the headphone is efficient enough as well, as inefficient headphones will just feed off the extra volume and the more likely result would be clipping.

There's really no good reason to use high gain on low-impedance, efficient headphones btw as volume precision is lost.

Figured id input on practically the most useless way possible. Be carefull with the Fiio E7 and E9, they both have enough volume to make you literally deaf if listened to at max volume. (e7 when used as a DAC, and not amp obviously)

i don't think the high gain will damage anything unless u crank up the volume to crazy levels. anyways, u wouldn't need to use it on high gain unless the max volume is too soft, which is extremely unlikely.