ShureAONIC 3
headphones
New retail price (MSRP)
$219
Used market: $170*
Specifications
3 of 7 values have a recorded sourceExpert Audio Engineering Commentary
Tonal profile
The single-armature Aonic, successor to the SE425 in Shure's line. One driver means no crossover, which makes 26 Ω an unusually well-behaved load for a pure armature design.
What the datasheet actually says
Quoted verbatim from the manufacturer’s own page, with the date we checked it. We state what is printed, not what anyone intended by it.
«Sensitivity at 1 kHz — 108 dB SPL/MW»
«MW» is the SI symbol for megawatt. Read literally, Shure would be quoting the output at one million watts into a 26 Ω armature. It is a capitalisation slip for «mW», milliwatt — and Shure's own documents prove it: the SE215 and SE846 guides on the same server print «107 dB SPL/mW» and «114 dB SPL/mW» in lower case. All three Aonic guides — 3, 4 and 5 — carry the upper-case form. We record milliwatts. The reason this is worth writing down is that a reader comparing an Aonic sheet against an SE sheet has no way to know, from the documents alone, whether two different quantities are being quoted.
checked 8/5/2026Setups using this gear
* Estimated with the depreciation fallback (~78% retained value).