HiFlight

1. HiFlight: The soundstage is fantastic! Wide, deep, three dimensional. Overall music presentation is excellent. This is one of the reasons why I purchased it (others being the high quality of Decware products and excelent customer service and that I wanted to upgrade my headphone amp from a Total Bithead--which I still like, but now use less). Bass is authoritative and tight, mids and treble very good. All music genres that I threw at it, came out sounding fine. As one might expect, excellent recordings sounded excellent and poor recordings sounded poor. Last night, the soundtrack to Shaft, sounded so good my arms were covered with goosebumps. Headphones that I use most often with it are AKG 271s, Sennheiser HD-595, and Grado 325i. All sound fine with it. The voicing of the amp is rather tube oriented (fine by me) which does mean a bit coloured. This is not a neutral amp, but it sounds really, realy good--sort of like a tube amp. We aren't talking the euphonic bloom of a Dynaco ST70 or AMC tube amp which makes everything golden and nice and sounding pleasantly the same. This amp is more SET-like, more accurate, quick, and 3 dimensional. I like the way the Zen Head is voiced--it sounds good to my ears, tube-like, but also transparent. I have not used it on my home stereo kit as my cd player has a dedicated headphone amp/output and my preamp also has a headphone output. I use the Zen Head for my Philips Ipod clone (hard drive system and fm radio). For my laptop, I still use the Total Bithead as it has a DAC and can be powered by my computer via a USB port. I'm pleased with my Zen Head. I am glad that I purchased it. Cheers!