I’ve owned the PM-1 for three years and have recently completed an (expensive) exercise of researching higher-priced options including Utopia, LCD-4, SR-009. I may not have used the best amps with each of them but I believe I have heard enough to assess their overall signatures.
Anyway, while each has some areas of excellence (IMO), I have found nothing as satisfying as my trusty PM-1s. I have just added an HA-1, purchased from Oppo Digital UK, which they classed as B-stock, although to me it’s as new.
Wow. I am so happy with this setup. Very musical, intimate and involving. I think this is where I stop. I’m using Hugo 2 into the HA-1 and Moon Silver Dragon headphone cable (single-ended at the moment). While I’ve wasted money during this journey and now have some expensive items to part with, overall I think it was worth it. For me at least, this may be end-game for desktop use. It’s nice to no longer be constantly planning what to try next.
Very impressed with Oppo gear. It’s superbly designed and built (unlike some other manufacturers!).
Tony
Tony,
I really appreciate guys like you, who open their wallets and do such expensive comparison tests. Your opinion is just
one opinion, of course, but it's a well-developed opinion.
You can still look forward to a 4x increase in power output (see the GIFs, below) from the HA-1, when you go to a balanced cable with the PM-1, but yes, the HA-1's amp section works wonderfully well with planar magnetic headphones and, frankly, its DAC section is better-suited to planar magnetics as well, in my opinion, as I find its DAC to be intolerably fatiguing with the likes of HD 800, for example.
The Hugo 2 + HA-1 amp + PM-1 must be astonishing. Well done!
The non-linear curves I've plotted reveal that the HA-1's amp section is actually throttled back when driving lower impedance headphones. This is done to keep it from overheating, but there's no denying it is still offering lots of power, even into 32 Ohms. The HA-1 is allowed to run at full throttle with 600-Ohm loads, however, where "affordable" headphones like the
600-Ohm version of the Beyerdynamic DT 880 can sound their best.
There aren't many headphone amps out there that can deliver 800 mW into 600 Ohms. That's a lot of motion-controlling power - yielding tighter bass and better dynamics. I have a pair of DT 880 600-Ohm, modified for balanced cables (Toxic Cables - Silver Poison), that sound amazingly good on the HA-1 - better than the HD 800, for sure - almost as detailed, but without the fatiguing, brittle treble and with much more bass energy, very tightly controlled, thanks to the 800 mW offered by the HA-1's 4-pin XLR jack. The DT 880 bass energy can be further improved by using Beyer's pleather pads instead of the velour pads - for a better seal. The result is not excessive bass energy - it's just right, in my opinion.
Of course, the DT 880 600-ohm is a far cry from the finesse and transparency offered by the PM-1 on balanced cables with the HA-1 - that's my best sounding desktop rig, too - hands down. But still, I thought it worth a mention for people who have an HA-1 and want to hear what it can do to transform an "affordable" headphone into something special - taking advantage of that 800mW into 600-Ohm power. (I had the DT880 balanced mod done by
BTG-Audio.)
Long live the HA-1's that are still in use. I really don't understand why they were discontinued.
Mike
