For the most part I think they possess a frequency response many will find a pleasing variation on ‘mostly neutral.’ I do have one issue with them though: I couldn’t pin down exactly what it was, but listening to these headphones for extended periods of time, regardless of volume level, caused me higher than usual levels of fatigue. I typically listen quietly outside of reviews, but for reviews I will listen at all sorts of volume levels to see how a headphone responds. With the Arya’s I couldn’t stand to listen at high volumes for more than a few minutes, and at lower volumes I could do about an hour or two max before I had to take a break. Swapping amps helped alleviate this somewhat, though oddly, while I felt high-powered tube amps sounded especially excellent with the Arya, the amps that seemed to alleviate this fatiguing quality didn’t have anything in common I could really discern. Some were tube, some solid state, mixture of high and low powered and with many different impedances. The problem was much alleviated by playing files with high degrees of resolution, little compression and using a good DAC. Well-recorded classical music did quite well here, though the issue never completely went away for me.
This fatigue could have something to do with the transient response of the headphone or what has been dubbed the ‘Ortho Wall’ by some in the headphone community, a kind of 4khz ringing most planar magnetic drivers exhibit which has to do with the resonant qualities of the driver construction. Whatever the cause, I’ve found that I tend to be particularly sensitive to this quality in planar magnetic drivers. Some friends of mine who listened to the Arya’s who have not historically been sensitive to this Planar-Magnetic quality told me they felt the Arya was not fatiguing over extended listening sessions, so I’ll leave you to make of that what you will
