Headphones in general benefit from greater power - in a DAP, in a dedicated headphone amplifier. Why? Because music is filled with contrasts of soft & loud, high & low, simple & complex. To convey well all this through a headphone, an amplifier needs power ‘in reserve’. An amplifier will typically offer a fraction of its capable power - but when the music kicks up, the amplifier has to ‘stand & deliver’. This means more power has to be immediately delivered.
LCD-X has a sensitivity of 103dB for one tiny milliwatt!
Why would one feels that this particular headphone would benefit or need more than 400+ mW is beyond me. A less sensitive device, such as Hifiman Edition X with a 92dB sensitivity, may! but I have an EDXS, and it goes pretty loud, pretty dynamic with a couple of hundred milliwatts.
However, sometimes, because of some side-effect issues, a bigger amp may be beneficial;
- If the headphone requires massive EQ
If you need to boost lower frequencies, specially bass, by a large amount (6dB and beyond), then you must use a preamp-cut by the same amount, to make sure your player does not go into digital overload. This preamp cut, means that you may require more gain. If the amp is fed with 6dB or more cut, then it may not reach it max. power, so an amp with higher power (and therefore higher gain) maybe beneficial.
I know a member is suggesting EQ profiles with very high preamp cuts on this very thread. Anyone using those profiles, would require a speaker amp to run his headphones!
- if the amp is only clean and transparent, at a fraction of its max. output.
I will not name, names! but there are headphone amps by some famous brands, with advertised few watts of output power, but their distortion starts to rise past a few tens of milliwatts. In such a case, the clean output range maybe limited, so a bigger (such amp) would have more of a transparent output power.
- Some amps can not drive low impedance loads.
Such amps are current limited, and/or have high output impedance. Connect a load of 20 ohms or less , and output power can drop rapidly. So although the amp may be able to output (say) 2W into 32 ohms, its output maybe a few hundred milliwatts driving a 16 ohm load.
None of the above situations apply to a Mojo2!
Mojo2 is a high performance device, it can happily drive 8 ohm loads or less, it has clean output for almost 99% of it half a watt max. output.
Now, LCD-X does need EQ bass boost and some midrange boost.
However, Mojo2 has its own tone controls! so using them, means no preamp cut at DAP level.
So you get your cake (half a watt) that you can eat ( i.e. use all of it).
goods!
