Pathos Aurium anyone?

[Tony1110]

Skylab seemed to like it with the LCD-3 but they're very different headphones. The one thing that puts me off giving the Aurium a shot is the poor resale value for amps that aren't well known.

 

[Barn]

Mine just arrived

  built like a tank lol
 
fed by audiolab M-DAC - Sennheiser HD800 Headphones.
 
now for a day of music.............

 

 

[Tony1110]

Let us know what you think. I'm still on the fence about this amp. I've parted with my Audezes and am thinking that it may be overkill with the Fostex TH-900.

 

[Barn]

well, after 6 hours of hammering my flac collection i have the following observations...
 
Drives the HD800's with ease .
 
Sounds fantastic................However, after plenty of A-B ing with the M-DAC, I really cannot hear much of a difference tbh ! ( i'm using the balanced XLR connections !)
 
The base maybe has a little more punch, not much though.
 
So while overall it's sounding great, to my ears,it's no big improvement on the M-DAC's headphone amp. 
 
Btw, if i wanted to try and run my HD800's in balanced mode, could i use  a 1/4 inch Stereo Jack to phono adapter -then something like this...
 
http://www.sonifex.co.uk/redbox/rbul2_ld.shtml
 
then get a XLR to HD 800 cable made?

 

[Tony1110]

well, after 6 hours of hammering my flac collection i have the following observations...

Drives the HD800's with ease .

Sounds fantastic................However, after plenty of A-B ing with the M-DAC, I really cannot hear much of a difference tbh ! ( i'm using the balanced XLR connections !)

The base maybe has a little more punch, not much though.

So while overall it's sounding great, to my ears,it's no big improvement on the M-DAC's headphone amp. 

Btw, if i wanted to try and run my HD800's in balanced mode, could i use  a 1/4 inch Stereo Jack to phono adapter -then something like this...

http://www.sonifex.co.uk/redbox/rbul2_ld.shtml

then get a XLR to HD 800 cable made?

Looks like it will do the trick, but why not buy a balanced amp in the first place?

Give the Aurium a chance to burn in. A lot of amps need a while to reach peak performance.

 

[Barn]

yea i know, i should have just bought a Sennheiser HDVA 600!
i might sell the pathos in the summer and do just that me thinks. 

 

[Tony1110]

yea i know, i should have just bought a Sennheiser HDVA 600!
i might sell the pathos in the summer and do just that me thinks. 

So you're not overly impressed then? Looking at the specs I'd say the Aurium was probably designed for orthos. That said, hybrid amps are known to work well with HD-800 too.

Anyway, I've just bought a Chord Hugo so I won't be purchasing the Aurium.

 

[treebug]

  yea i know, i should have just bought a Sennheiser HDVA 600!
i might sell the pathos in the summer and do just that me thinks. 

I wasn't all that impressed with the HDVA 600 with my HD800's. Had one on a demo, nothing particularly wrong with it, just didn't blow me away. Aurium much better imo.

 

[Barn]

did you run the HD800's balanced or single ended though ?

 

[treebug]

Single ended on the HDVA 600. Admittedly I didn't try balanced.

 

[Shaka]

Glad that there's finally some interest being shown in this amp.
Last year I demoed the HD800 with the Pathos Aurium and I really liked it. It sounded very smooth and detailed with the HD800 and it looks very beautiful and classy.
It didn't totally blow me away but I still liked it and thought it was reasonably priced.
 
A few months later I ended up buying the LCD-3's and am still trying to make up my mind about an amp/dac.
 
The Pathos is still on my list due to it's nice sound, reasonable price and gorgeous looks. I think you could probably also fine tune the sound to your liking by changing the tubes.
As my music listening will be using a computer as the source, I'm thinking about getting a Chord Hugo for DAC purposes and if I'm not totally satisfied with it's headphone amp performance then I may add the Pathos Aurium to it.
 
What DAC (if any) are current owners using with with their Pathos?

 

[Barn]

I'm running a Audiolab M-DAC  with mine, and i still can't hear any difference between the two! 

 

[Simon T]

Hi all,
 
I have just created a thread requesting for advices/opinions on the following set up (please refer this link for further details: http://www.head-fi.org/t/710817/need-technical-set-up-advice-opinion-sony-pha-2-pathos-aurium-lcd-3 ). Below is the main body of the thread:
 
Source                                              > Portable DAC > 3.5mm to RCA cable connection  > Hybrid Amp        > Headphones 
 
Mostly 24 bit FLAC music files
played either from laptop              > Sony PHA-2 > 3.5mm to RCA cable connection > Pathos Aurium > LCD-3 & others
or DAP (AK100 or Sony NW ZX1)
 
1. What issue can you foresee?
2. Do you think the final result/performance will be significantly hampered by the quite obvious bottleneck (PHA-2 >3.5mm to RCA cable connection)?
3. Any other suggestion?
 
Please let me know your opinion..
 
Thanks in advance
 
Regards
Simon T.

 

[Barn]

sorry, I'm a total tube amp noob lol,
how do you remove the tubes, do they just pull out or do you screw them out?

 

[Skylab]

You sort of gently rock the tubes back and forth as you are pulling them out. NOT twisting but a gentle back and forth as you also gently pull.