Just a quick copy/paste from the main review thread, hoping I have time to update with nice photo later, but wanted to make sure I got this up today while I was in town and this was on my mind.
I was selected to be on the Ananda loaner tour for North America and jumped at the chance to try them. I wanted to see whether the Ananda could replace my daily driver HE-400is or perhaps complement them in my music workflow. I’ve had a month with the headphones and was offered a discount on a new set if I wanted to purchase them after the tour in exchange for my honest opinion. Read on to find out whether I’ll be taking Hifiman up on that offer!
The Hifiman Ananda is a high-end headphone from, of course, Hifiman. I am a regular user of their HE 400i headphones. This review will examine the Ananda on some of its own listening strengths as well as comparing the sound to the HE-400i. First some background is in order so that you understand how I’m going to be judging these headphones. I’m an amateur musician, producer, and mastering engineer, and I’ve used the Hifiman HE-400i headphones as my primary monitoring solution for the past 3 years with excellent results for my own music as well as others’. I make and primarily work on electronic music and especially experimental electronic music (think Aphex Twin, Orbital, etc). Because I have a day job and most of my time spent listening to music is spent critiquing either my own work or someone similar, I do not have very much time to listen to music for pleasure anymore. We’re talking maybe once or twice a month I can set aside a few hours and break out my fun headphones or pull out my vinyl collection. When I do, my tastes range widely from classical into jazz, rock/metal/punk from the 60s to the present day (check out Amyl and the Sniffers and thank me later), with funk, soul, some early hip-hop, and of course a large variety of electronic music (including chiptunes, which I feel bears special mention). And I got a chance to play a little of all these on the Ananda. That said, though, 95% of the time I have headphones on it is to work on music, not listen passively, so I will be judging the Ananda from this view as well as from a casual listener’s view.
I’ll start with build and presentation before going into the sound. The boxes that Hifiman use for all their headphones are very nice and nearly the same, but Hifiman does up the ante a bit for their higher end models. The standard Hifiman box is a sturdy box wrapped in leather (or something like it) and with a soft top that has the Hifiman name and logo screened on it. The headphones come packed in foam cut to shape for the headphones and all their accessories. The Anandas come in a box much like my HE-400is, but the Anandas get a crushed velvet interior over the normal foam and the headphone’s name screened directly onto the box, which is enough to make you feel special. The Anandas come with plenty of cabling options with 3 sets of cables in the same reasonable size, one terminating in straight quarter inch plug, and two with straight and 90-dgree 3.5mm plugs. Everything is branded Neutrik and while they are not the prettiest cables I’ve ever seen, they are of the best quality I’ve seen included with a headphone.
I love the look of the headphones themselves. I don’t have a great description of what it is about them or why, but I think they look the part of a $1000 headphone. That’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself. However, I can add that the paint is a noticeable step up over my HE-400is and they are probably much easier to keep clean as there’s no chrome finish to attract fingerprints. I have only one complaint in regards to the physical design of this headphone, and that is the unadjustable headband. I have a small head, most adjustable headbands I bring only one click out from closed, if that. Here, my ears fit in the earcups fine, but after about 20 minutes I realized that there was no clamping force on the sides of my head at all and the full weight of the headphone was resting on the top of my head. In this way, they’re similar to my AKG Q701s, but the Anandas weigh significantly more. This is a disappointment for me because these weigh around as much as the HE-400i in my hands, but I can wear the 400i for hours before my head hurts (my ears will need a break before my head does), but the Anandas were hurting my head in about half an hour. . I’m sure this isn’t a problem for most users, but I also know it isn’t a problem for me with a different product from the same company, so I can’t avoid mentioning it.
The first thing that jumped out at me in a good way when I put on the Anandas was the bass. For electronic music, these headphones are very, very good. If I hadn’t heard the HE-400i before this set of headphones, I’d call the bass a revelation. The bass doesn’t go as deep as the 400i, and it rolls off faster than the 400i too, but believe me when I say you aren’t missing out on what these headphones fail to pick up and what they do present is the best bass I’ve ever heard, full stop. Most of the sound below 40 hz is just mud that isn’t well controlled in most mixes, so by having the headphone focus less on that it brings much more clarity to the midbass, and that is where these headphones shine. In comparison, the 400i goes deeper, so you do get more frequencies, but they are never as controlled as on the Ananda and picking up frequencies so low can pick up mistakes left in the mix by an engineer working on a lesser system.
From there, we’ll move up the frequency range where the Aananda has a pleasant, musical boost in the midrange that seems to bring out the attack on individual notes better and puts a bit more space around individual instruments up to around 1khz. The 400i is much flatter through here and has less space around the instruments but seems to have slightly more soundstage overall. I’d say the Ananda is a forward headphone, voiced close to the stage, where the 400i is voiced sitting middle of the hall for a more neutral presentation.
Then we come to the treble where the Ananda again has a pleasant boost and the HE 400i does not. But here, I think the Ananda goes a bit far and suffers for it (and this is the weakest part of the headphone for me). I already said this is a headphone voiced close to the music, so it lacks somewhat in soundstage, but the boost in higher frequencies adds to that, overfilling the remaining space around your head. Worse, while the boost in the midrange feels like it brings out detail and attack, the treble feels like it becomes less defined and blurs the instruments above around 3khz together. The timing accuracy remains great, though.
It’s not bad by any stretch of imagination. In fact, I didn’t find a single track where this headphone sounded bad, even tracks that I know sound harsh with similarly boosted treble on my Grados. I even did a good portion of my listening on YouTube, and there the compression artefacts on the audio were less noticeable and the music was more musical. I just found myself wishing it was more like the bass all the way up through the rest of the frequencies, tight, defined, and smooth. The headphone is smooth all the way from top to bottom, but not as smooth as the HE 400i because of the slight boosts in the midrange and treble. The headphone is tight from top to bottom in the timing domain, but the frequencies become less defined in the treble region.
For most of the review, I drove the Anandas off my daily driver Schiit Fulla v1. I know better can be had in the world of amps and dacs, but for something that is so small and so quick and easy to hook up, has no warmup time, and that I can cheaply replace if anything happens to it, nothing beats it. I had no desire to try running the Anandas directly out of my laptop or PC as I know the direct outs on both are tuned for gaming and so aren’t much fun to listen to. The Fulla did a fine job, but I wanted to try the Ananda with tubes before I sent it on to see if that helped with my criticisms of the treble. I broke out my Schiit Vali 2 for the first time in months and warmed it up, ran it out of my Modi (I’m still rocking the original) and gave the tube sound a spin. For my Grados and AKGs, tubes take the edge off and make those headphones a lot better, and I thought that meant tubes would pull back the treble on the Ananda. Unfortunately, tubes actually made cymbals on the Ananda go from forward to outright screechy. Everything got more defined, so instrument separation in the top end was a bit better, but the mid-range and treble also developed a harsh etch or edge to them. The tubes also pulled out a bit of that bass I loved so much. This had me stopping or skipping songs that were just unlistenable for the first time with this headphone. My HE-400is don’t like tubes either, I only tried them with the Vali 2 once and that was enough. They behaved similarly to the Anandas if memory serves. My guess is that the drivers behave differently with tubes than dynamic drivers do and maybe a higher quality tube amp can give these drivers what they need, but if you like me just want the tube sound sometimes and have one cheaper tube amp to try, skip it with the Anandas. It could also be that the drivers just expose any weaknesses in amp design and reminds us of why so many manufacturers stick to similar designs, but I don’t have a large enough sampling of amps to try and determine that.
None of this is a problem if you’re looking to listen to some music for fun (the treble isn’t bad, it’s just not AS GOOD AS the amazing bass), especially anything electronic. Just don’t use tubes. For the purposes of this review (a pleasure listening headphone), it’s a 4-star headphone (one star off for the unadjustable headband). But I said my personal goal was to see if this could replace a known good headphone in a studio environment focused primarily on critical listening. On that front, I can’t use this headphone – because it’s too good. The HE-400i is a neutral headphone, but most importantly it punishes bad mixes. The Ananda was less pleasing on material I knew had mix issues, but it was always fun to listen to it on the proper equipment. If I replace my HE-400is with Anandas, I’ll probably love my music more than I ever have, but I will not be able to make it sound good for everyone who doesn’t have a pair of Anandas laying around. This doesn’t impact my rating of the headphone in the slightest because Hifiman doesn’t advertise these as studio monitors (neither do they advertise the HE-400i as such, it just happens that that headphone is tuned just right for the job). But I did say I’d let you know if I would buy them. I need something more brutally honest with me, and the Anandas are not it, as much as I may love listening to the deepest of deep house on them.
