Too quiet on the European front...

I almost disappeared down a rabbit hole when trying to make sense of an apparently nutty design decision in Pioneer’s XDP-30R portable music player, which I reviewed for this issue, but which we have since discovered is not going on sale in Australia. Could the two things be connected? Because the strange behaviour led me, perhaps inevitably, to European Union bureaucracy.

Let’s back up a step. In my now spiked review (we’ll put it online at avhub.com.au/pioneer30R, should you be interested), I had whinged a little about how the Pioneer’s output could well be too low for some higher impedance, lower sensitivity headphones. The maximum headphone output into an open circuit for this unit was 0.427 volts RMS (at 1kHz; I’ll use that for all my measurements in this article).

Now, Pioneer is a very competent company, and in just about every respect its digital audio players are sweet, sweet devices. Its engineers know a hundred times more about headphones than I’ll ever know. It can measure electrical output more effectively than I can. It would be aware that there are such things as low sensitivity, high impedance headphones. So why