Audiophiles please chime in here

OK so both of my sons, and my neice are ipod addicts.  I personally have never enjoyed music through earbuds, no matter how good.  I have my eyes on buying them the klipsch image one headphones for their ipod.  They are similar to the famous bose noise cancelling, but they are klipsh.  I do love me some klipsch.

OK so I'm reading around and it looks like the sensitivity of these headphones are 110db/mw.  That is loud!!  An ipod puts out 30mw per channel. 

So the basic rule is that it takes 10x power to increase the loudness to double, meaning that if the headphones create 110db with the first mw, then 120db with 10 mw.

does this sound right?  This headphones are going to absolutely be louder than hell.  Klipsch speakers generally speaking do not distort, and will handle all the power you want to throw at them.

Anybody post your opinions or facts on this subject.

https://www.klipsch.com/image-one-on-ear-headset

the headphones...

  Speakers are rated at "X"db @ 1w @ 1meter.  Looking at the link you provided, it doesn't designate that the 110db rating is any different, so I seriously doubt they could be too loud with 30mw pushing them. There's no way a set of even the best headphones could push a SPL meter to 110db from 3 feet away even if it was hooked to a 200wpc power source.

 Feeding these things less than 1/10th of a watt would seem to be very safe as far as worrying about blowing eardrums.

 Also..........having owned a pair of Forte's I can assure you that Klipsch speakers will distort like any others. But since they are so efficient, they are less subject to being underdriven. You can make a $10,000 pair of speakers sound very avg by driving them, or attempting to drive them, with a weak amp or receiver.

 I just realized I'm wrong about the rating. HP's are rated at "x"db/mw. So they may indeed play very loud. Your math appears to be correct. Still, it's hard to imagine someone strapping a 120db+ right to their head.

 There's one other factor involved............just noticed that the impedance of the HP's in question are 32 ohm's. Technically, the equation for determing a drivers sensitivity is "x"db @ 1w @ 1m. But that value is usually determined using an 8 ohm load so it's hard to know how they rated these. 

 But the bottom line is.........these are most likely a quality set of HP's that will be driven fine by an ipod.

Thanks for the comments... I am buying the klipsch earbuds for a few people for christmas.  that is when I will listen to them for the first time.  They sell very well for $100 earbuds, that has to tell you something