Thank you. I was once naive and bought the ab1266 with what I thought was more than enough power to blow my eardrums. It could, but had no bass till I replaced it with some ridiculous amps that arched my ikea desks. I sold most my gear a while back and minimized to a he6se/fiio r7. Want to get back into TOTL stuff and dont want to make the same mistake again, losing money buying and selling amps. I was hoping that since its from hifiman, it must have some sort of synergy at minimum. 1k for R2R/class A to drive susvara does seem a little too good to be true. Prelude seems to be a better option disregarding price, but i really want to stay away from trying to fit large stacks on my desk. Maybe the shanling EM7 or EH3 will be better, but then again those are new and have no more info than the serenade does
But from personal experience, there exist tiny DAP with low power output, that have more linear power than giant amps. It all comes down to the capacitors, the amp and how everything is implemented.
Also the power output varies depending on how much power you draw from the capacitor. So some capacitors only provide linear power when you draw a lot of power, others only provide linear power when you do the opposite, depending on what type of capacitor it is and so on.
Analog Amps for example always draw the same amount of power from the capacitors and the volume control happens by lowering the volume afterwards with resistors (who also influence the sound, so the performance could change depending on the volume. Digital Amps do draw less power at lower volumes and more power at higher volumes, so with digital amps you need to take much more care about the capacitors than with analog amps.
But if you use the Gain Switch on Analog Amps, they do draw more power and could change the sound while digital amps, in reality, don't have an gain switch. Its just a digital remapping of the volume steps.
As you see, there are several aspects to it.
Do you have an Digital or Analog Amp. If you have an Analog amp, do you control the volume on the DAC or on the Amp? What Gain does the Amp run on and so on.
If you have an analog amp, you want to run them, in general (there are exceptions), on Low Gain and use an high input signal (high volume) on the DAC side. The higher the volume is on the amp side, the more power does the amp draw from the capacitors and so driving them harder at their limit which will cause them to be no longer able to provide linear power (also it heats them up which further changes their performance).
But if the Amp has too much power, which means you have insanely big capacitors, you don't want to drive them on low power because you're then not drawing enough power from them to make them perform well.
Its very complicated and a world for itself, that is why Sony implemented 21 wound capacitors (which is insane) in an 250mW DAP, so it does provide linear power at all volumes and gains. The more power you have, the more complicated does it get. So often times, the amp with less power will perform much better unless you really crank the volume to make you deaf. But big numbers on paper do sell well.
The 1300mW TA-ZH1ES for example sounds much thinner and weaker and has no bass whatsoever at lower volumes, compared to the 250mW NW-WM1 Series, even though it has much more power. You need to draw enough power from the capacitors to make it sound well. Which is not an issue as 1300mW is not an insane amount of power, so you can go to highter volumes, but yes. With some amps, its the exact opposite. The higher you push them, the worse they will sound and just start to distort and so on.
There are some amps (Like THX AAA) that can cope insanely well with varying capacitor power which is one of the reasons why i always recommend them (Especially the S.M.S.L SH-9 which uses the best THX AAA Amp that exists) but some people prefer an non-linear performance...
As much as i hate it to say, there is not much way around testing several products. But as a rule of thumb, more power doesn't automatically sound better. Cheap devices that are made simple often sounds better when they have more power because the higher power forces the maker to use better capacitors, but nothing speaks against using good capacitors with lower power devices (the best proof is the WM1 Series)
