so this is why:
yes i agree: the amp you tried are nothing special and according to the amps that you are refering to: he1000 sound better straight from hugo , and i guess the dave amp section even more!
i actually think that Audioanalyse A50 doesn t even exist..
eq wise, i use dirac in my speaker setup, getting big improvement
i like sometimes he1000 with the loudness of my lux550ax, much easier than boost 3db or 6db on 50hz from the dsp, but i actually prefer change headphone when i listen to music that need it ,
like electronics, or i change source using the turntable if i want a warmer sound
i would like to know how you measure the fr of the headphone, and how you know you are "linearizing" them, and not just let them play as you like , so adding your personal coloration and in this i can see why people like to adjust the sound according to my fi and there is nothing bad in it
so why buy he1000, you can just get a cheper headphone and equalize them or "linearize" as you like!
again: for everybody reading
free to get an hugo, it s a great dac, i m using it from when it s out and i still dont feel the needs to upgrade or whatever, but saying it s the best match amp wise for he1000, he6. hd800, lcd2, lcd3, it s a wrong and misleading message
I halfways expected that you would call the listed amps «nothing special». Why are you saying the Audioanalyse A50 doesn't exist? Are you accusing me of lying? If so, say it loud and clear, please! I'm sure it isn't produced anymore, but that doesn't mean it has never existed.
Well, most of the Hugo users who swear by adding amps don't add any more «special amps» and nevertheless find the sound clearly better with the amp. Testing about 25 headphone amps during my headphone-listening career should suffice to come to a definitive conclusion, especially when the result is so clear every time. It's a cheap trick postulating the amps you've tried as the only ones satisfying high demands. Actually I really wonder what you think about the fact that Rob's own approach is the very same as mine, for the same reason, the only difference being that he has chosen a smooth and full sounding headphone and renounces equalizing. BTW, I'm not imitating Rob, I've practised the direct path long before I owned Chord gear and cared about the company (you may find corresponding old posts). He sais: «Some people like harmonic distortion.» That's exactly what applies in this case in my book, and it fully corresponds to my experience. For instance after replacing a Conrad Johnson PV6 preamp with a carefully hand-populated switched attenuator I was very disappointed at the start, because the music now sounded like coming from a bad amp. This was during my speaker-builder years, and I had just found a very satisfying crossover-network tuning for the
two-way system with homegrown fiberglass tweeters. Well, at least so I thought, before the preamp swap. It has to be noted that the fourth-order filters I preferred make the tonal balance particuarly sensitive to imperfections. It soon turned out that more and finer fine-tuning was necessary, and the culprit was the now missing forgivingness from the tube amp. This was one of the several occasions that has tought me: The purer the signal, the more critical the tonal flaws in the chain, of which the sound trasducer's tonal balance may be the most critical in most cases. In any event, after days or weeks of dealing with the now preamp-less speaker system the sound had become better than it ever was – thanks to the purer signal, I'm sure.
I'm not saying the Hugo be the best DAC or amp for the HE1000, just that adding an amp will corrupt the signal and make it impossible to get the best out of it. This under the premise that you want optimal accuracy and transparency and do some adjusting of the tonal balance by other means than amplifier colorations. The Hugo alone delivers enormous clean power up to «ultraviolet» and above, I for one almost exclusively use the range between light blue and dark blue – and this with a 6 dB padding from the equalizer. That said, I normalize all my recordings during crossfeeding (indispensable for my ears), so some of them would possibly require a higher setting in the original state (while with a minority it's the opposite).
For equaliizing my headphones I mostly use Inner Fidelity's graphs as a rough guideline, but always look at other sources s well – it's good to have a wide range of measurements at your disposal. It wouldn't make any sense to measure them myself once again. However, now's the point where the great work begins. Equalizing headphones to your own ears can only be done by careful and extensive tuning. And that takes weeks and months in my case (that's nothing compared to my speaker tuning!) – because it's easy to find further improvements every second day, at least at the beginning. Nowadays the periods where I don't make any have become quite long, and they have become comparably minute. It's a good and a bad thing to have four pairs of headphones of almost identical quality at my disposal. The bad thing is that it's easy to get dissatisfied with the one headphone's tuning again due to the things the other one does better. The good thing is that this ongoing «competition» brings a lot of good inspiration among them or their EQ curves, resp. You can get some ideas of the constant quest for improvements from the several EQ curves published in my «Default» picture gallery. The latest curve, valid since a few weeks, looks like
this. Yes, the deviation from the one from early February is rather small, but audible and essential to my ears. Note that it applies to a
modified HE1000 with Silver Dragon cable driven by a DAVE. The curve for a Hugo would imply a subtle tilt in favor of low frequencies. I'm aware that not everybody has the necessary patience for this tuning work. So if you'd like a simpler way to get virtually the same (without the individualizing),
SonarWorks promises to deliver it (no personal experience with it, though).
So why do I have four relatively expensive headphones (the two electrostats are partly DIY, have airplane plywood housings trimmed for minimal inner reflections with angled Lambda and Signature Pro drivers) instead of one cheaper pair if I equalize anyway? This question shows that you have no idea of careful equalizing, and your statements above look like alibis instead of detailed descriptions of your equalizing attempts. In any event as if you were using bass and treble controls, more or less. That's not what I call linearizing a headphone to make it compatible with the direct drive and the corresponding unforgivingness to tonal flaws. You have never equalized two headphones to make them sound as similar as it gets, right? In fact that's my constant quest – in my attempt to make my quartet sound as neutral and natural as possible to my ears. But as successful as I feel by doing so meanwhile, they don't sound the same. Far from it. Each pair has its unique characteristics and qualities, despite very similar tonal balance. All in all I value the HE1000 the most. It's the most accurate and acoustically most open headphone for me. That makes it all the more prone to suffer from its own tonal flaws (in its original state and unequalized). It's a pity that the misconception this post is about hampers its sonic potential to quite a considerable degree – to its supporters and the ones who believe them. You've asked how I know that my settings lead to a neutral tonal balance. I don't really know for certain, but neutrality as a theoretical ideal in practice for me is just another word for a sound as smooth and nevertheless as biting as possible if the recording calls for it. Of course the timbre of acoustic instrument is the most important test criterion, particularly large classical orchestras. Without existing frequency-response curves I would have to err much longer in my trial-and-error attempts than I already have, so I'm thankful for this guideline, which I don't follow blindly, though. The Inner Fidelity curves are just a rough interpretation of the perceived tonal balance and moreover quite misleading, as the high-frequency drop-off most graphs show seems to be a desired characteristic, and since the curves are called «normalized», they should actually show a much more even treble (this just as an example for the limited reliability).
So what are your power-requirement arguments worth? I see nothing but assumptions, no facts about the Hugo and «weaker» amps being unable to properly drive the HE1000 without exessive harmonic distortion due to operation at their upper limit, causing dynamics or peak limitations. It's all deduced from your listening impressions alone. My own listening habits with Hugo and DAVE effectively exclude an operation at the upper limits (note the blue to dark blue), but I don't know how loud you listen. Well, even if I turn the volume up to levels which I'd never listen to for longer than a few seconds or minutes (let's say at ultraviolet), the sound doesn't change one bit, I get the full spectrum down to the lowest lows and the highest highs in its full glory, exemplarily clean and transparent and as dynamic and controlled as it gets. No amp I attach to it can do the same to the same degree.
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