Little more to add: soundstage handling is phenomenal. Seems every bit as big as the OG Arya (though I am going from memory) without having some stuff seem exaggerated. Just massive and I think I want to say noticeably bigger than the Anandas. Significantly more controlled than I ever thought they were going to be for the price. Imaging doesn’t seem to have any downsides, in fact rear positioning is surprisingly good for a hifiman in the sub $1500 range. Tuning seems more along the lines of HEKv2 with a pretty noticeable bump in the bass and it’s very welcomed vs the traditional flat but very detailed bass hifiman usually has on the low end of their price range. I haven’t pinpointed where that bass bump is but I did have one song I listen to seem unusually punchy in a good way compared to most of the planars I have on hand. I was scared that my hopes were too high for these headphones but they’re doing exactly what I thought they would. They’re pretty incredible. They even sound really good on more reference tuned amps. Put them on my a90 and they still have plenty of character. On the burson soloist they’re just super fun. People not wanting to dive too far down the planar rabbit hole after being disappointed with lackluster bass in sub $1000 planars should give these a serious consideration. I am just dying to see the frequency response and waterfall graphs for these. Kinda seems like a hifiman for people that aren’t the biggest fan of the usual hifiman tuning. These are significantly better than Anandas. I kinda want someone with Aryas to do an A/B comparison. I think I like how these are tuned better than Aryas and the timbre is much more natural and not shouty while still having that sparkle and detail up high. The more I think about it these really seem like a baby HEKv2.
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