sorry if you’re seeing this expecting impressions,
rather, i wanted to know your experienced with this unit for those who have either downgraded from it or upgraded to it. Id love to hear what you guys have to say about it, be that negative or positive.
im swapping it for my Singxer SA-1 which is currently my daily driver and i will be using my Soloist with the Ares 2 like i did with my SA-1. expecting alot, will run the Drop 800, OG Clear and æon 2 off of it. no biggie if it doesnt turn out to meet my expectations
a while back i actually ended up buying an amplifier in the same pricerange as the soloist but what improvement i noticed with my ears didnt justify the upgrade, im excited to see if that changes with the Soloist out the Ares 2
cant recall wether or not you’re of mod status but if you feel the post is unnessesary, redundant or otherwise not needed feel free to delete it. thanks for the provided thread ill have a look. hope your day is going well
I would definitely say get the super charger. Without it the amp is great tonally but the noise floor, resolution, and control it has with the super charger makes it easily one of the best amps I’ve ever heard. Strictly for headphones I’ve never found anything close. Without the supercharger, the noise floor bugged me a little bit in high gain power amp mode but after getting the super charger the noise floor is lower than my a90 in high gain full volume.
yeah i read your post on the other thread just now, it seems overall those who do have it are liking it, im intrigued and its definitely something i’ll consider if the Soloist by itself can impress me, looking forward to it!
it may be the wrong question to ask but how much would you say it improved with the super charger if you could put a percentage on it?
Resolution, massive, I’ll say 30% better.
Bass control, massive, like 75% better.
Noise floor is straight up nonexistent with it. 1,000,000% Like seriously, it’s gone. Not like barely noticeable or hard to hear at the the right time. Gone. Now that being said, you can still get hum from dynamics by feeding them too much power but planars don’t even blink. Just turn the gain down for dynamics and you’re fine.
holy crap. those are big claims! almost seems unbelievable, is it more noticable with certain headphones?
with resolution are you refering to details being more pronouned? Are the improvements just as noticable on all gain levels? just asked my local dealer if they would be able to order it for me, if not i may still get it
thanks for writing!
I based it all off the he6se v2 and he1000se in high gain power amp mode feeding the most power I could which also brought the noise floor to maximum. Both really resolving headphones that aren’t gonna get held back by the amp so it was very noticeable. The bass and sub bass control on the he6 with the super charger was nothing short of incredible. I do listen at pretty loud levels (don’t yell at me) where the sub bass is getting into headphone shaking territory and it was just so much more well defined I started listening to bass test tracks to confirm what I was hearing. The resolution difference wasn’t quite as big but it seemed to improve the sense of stage size by giving that perfect amount of reverb to sound natural and it’s pretty nice. The noise floor it just changing the frequency from 50-60hz to like 170khz so you can’t hear it at all. It was like an "oh, they solved noise floor. " kind of reaction and I guess that’s pretty incredible in its own right and definitely worth mentioning. Didn’t blow my mind but noise is just gone.
hmm. fair enough. i dont think ive got headphones that comes close to benefitting from the best of the best likethose kind of headphones, i could guess untill im blue in the face but i suspect it may be that those are just notoriously hard to drive, at least the HE iirc. ill be running my soloist mainly off of my dynamic headphones, the Drop 800 and the clear, the aeon 2 as well which is planar but not really something that is talked about as needing a ton of gain on amps, but hey, idk, if i really do end up liking the soloist i may get it anyway. have you tried any dynamic headphones with it? if the return process at this shop is alright then i may try it out regardless, just to test it
I don’t have a ton of dynamics at the moment. Quite a few lent out. T1.2 is incredible on this amp. Dt990 600ohm balanced mod sounds fantastic. Hd800s is great and honestly one of the best pairings I’ve heard for it. 177x go is probably my weakest power requirement dynamic and they seem super fast and punchier than I’ve ever heard them and these things are the easiest to notice the hum from having too much power so they stay on low or medium gain. I do not like nighthawk carbons or og on this amp. Not a good pairing imo. Grado sr80x is fun and oddly spacious on the soloist. And I think that’s all I’ve tried dynamic wise.
really cool, excited to hear my drop800 now. ive heard the 800s on the rme adi2 before but i cant say i was all that impressed with it. how is the performance out the single ended? im thinking since the drop800 comes without xlr
Single ended is fine if you don’t need crazy power. The power drop on the he6 was crazy, tried it for the first time last night and didn’t have a good time. It’s fine on the 177x and im sure it’ll be fine with the 8xx but I’d warn that super warm headphones are hit and miss on the soloist. I definitely prefer more neutral or v shaped tuning in headphones paired with this amp.
I guess now that I think of it I just hate overly warm headphones maybe lol
the v6 vivids that come in it are definitely a v shaped tuning. but it’s not like eq, its so much better than eq can accomplish and it pairs really well with some companies tunings, hifiman being easily the best imo. beyers are great too and it makes me want a beyerdynamic planar…a beyerplanar…the v shape isn’t world breaking on really any headphones but it’s there.
