Interesting. The original model? I have the original Utopia and I never felt it was lacking anything.
What do you feel is lacking and what setups gave you more than the Bliss?
My alternative tube setup (LTA MZ3 to be exact) sounds better with Utopia to my ears than the Bliss. The presentation is more engaging and holographic that I consider one of the Utopia's strong suits. Mid bass is a little richer and a tad warmer which balances the tonality of the OG version.
Utopia isn't about power, it's all about synergy. It simply sounds better with tubes without losing the speed clarity and energy that it's so good at.
Found one headphone I don't think gets 100% out of the Bliss, the RAAL CA-1a. I find I get more bass slam when I hook those up to my 48wpc 300B tube amp or my 100wpc Anthem AVR. The bass really scales with power on those. Mids and treble however, I feel I get 100% out of the Bliss.
And this is coming from someone who thinks the Bliss gets damn near close to 100% out of the Susvara and Expanse, two hard to drive sets.
Found one headphone I don't think gets 100% out of the Bliss, the RAAL CA-1a. I find I get more bass slam when I hook those up to my 48wpc 300B tube amp or my 100wpc Anthem AVR. The bass really scales with power on those. Mids and treble however, I feel I get 100% out of the Bliss.
And this is coming from someone who thinks the Bliss gets damn near close to 100% out of the Susvara and Expanse, two hard to drive sets.
Stock cable. Have tried both with and without Mitch's filters. Prefer it with the filters. With or without I find I get less sub bass on the Bliss compared to my speaker amps. This is no slight against the Bliss, I mean I'm asking it to compare to 50-100W speaker amps that weigh 50lbs each...
Just pointing out that the RAAL ribbons actually can draw more than the ~12W or so the Bliss puts out. I think this is a pretty rare case though and for 99% of headphones the Bliss is more than enough, like I was saying, even on the hard to drive Susvara/Expanse I feel like I get everything out of them using the Bliss.
Stock cable. Have tried both with and without Mitch's filters. Prefer it with the filters. With or without I find I get less sub bass on the Bliss compared to my speaker amps. This is no slight against the Bliss, I mean I'm asking it to compare to 50-100W speaker amps that weigh 50lbs each...
Just pointing out that the RAAL ribbons actually can draw more than the ~12W or so the Bliss puts out. I think this is a pretty rare case though and for 99% of headphones the Bliss is more than enough, like I was saying, even on the hard to drive Susvara/Expanse I feel like I get everything out of them using the Bliss.
With the upgrade or 3rd party cable from DHC, you can get +7 to +8 dB, and bass is supposedly much better. I have no upgrade cable either. Lots of people prefer CA-1a on speaker amps/taps. I have no experience with this. I expect that cable will make Bliss and Envy good enough for me.
With the upgrade or 3rd party cable from DHC, you can get +7 to +8 dB, and bass is supposedly much better. I have no upgrade cable either. Lots of people prefer CA-1a on speaker amps/taps. I have no experience with this. I expect that cable will make Bliss and Envy good enough for me.
Bliss is definitely "good enough" with the CA-1a, the two sound amazing, it's just that extra little bit of sub bass that's missing. Not a huge deal and I wouldn't have even known if I hadn't also tried it on my speaker amps. Love my Bliss.
One other situation I suspect the Bliss may fall just a little bit short is with estats and a transformer box, for the same reason ribbon + transformer box does. Have an SRD-7 MK2 and an SR-007MK1 on the way to test that suspicion.
With the upgrade or 3rd party cable from DHC, you can get +7 to +8 dB, and bass is supposedly much better. I have no upgrade cable either. Lots of people prefer CA-1a on speaker amps/taps. I have no experience with this. I expect that cable will make Bliss and Envy good enough for me.
Worth noting this is an unusual headphone, the driver impedance is like 0.1Ohm or something like that. So going from a 1Ohm cable to a 0.1Ohm cable would change the total impedance by 450%. It actually makes a big difference in this case vs other headphones.
Can't comment on it actually adding that much bass, I haven't tried them. I will be demoing them soon tho.
Anyway, sorry to get off topic here, just wanted to say there is in fact some very rare cases where the Bliss will not be getting everything out of the headphone. Emphasis on very rare, it's an excellent amp.
Multiple sources have said that the upgrade Star 8 cable for Raal ribbon headphones give such a volume boost. DHC also notes/claims the same for their upgrade cable for Raal.
And yes, this is not a usual amount of volume change with normal headphones or cables, I agree.
The RAAL CA-1a with its unusual low impedance 0.18[ohm] is probably very sensible to amplifier output impedance and cables. This is what is happening and why the volume "boost" (but I would prefer to say that some cables "attenuate" less than others):
This is called a voltage divider where:
Vin = amp output voltage.
Vout: effective voltage applied to the headphone.
R1: cable impedance.
R2: headphone impedance
here:
Vout = Vin * (R2)/(R1+R2)
So when R2 >> R1 like with high impedance headphones (300 [Ohm]) the influence of the cable is almost null and Vout ~= Vin, but when the R2 is so low that approaches to R1 (like with the Raal and also with some IEMs) then Vout < Vin and using different cables can change the output volume at noticeable levels. For example when R2 is close to R1, then Vout is close to Vin/2
I just got the bliss in. I have it set to low impedence. Pc -> yggdrasil og a2 -> xlr -> holo bliss -> xlr out to Susvara. I've read people saying at -30db it's very loud. However for me it is extremely quiet like whispering.
I checked my pc settings and I have nothing limiting the volume. I tried another amp connected to the yggdrasil and it's good to go. Can someone help me figure out what I'm doing wrong with the bliss?
Are you sure about -30 dB? When I had my old Bliss, I had it turned up more than that, I think, for my Abyss 1266 Phi, which I believe is less power-hungry than the Susvara. I can't remember for sure, though.
Are you sure about -30 dB? When I had my old Bliss, I had it turned up more than that, I think, for my Abyss 1266 Phi, which I believe is less power-hungry than the Susvara. I can't remember for sure, though.
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