[HiFiDJ]

Of course, personal taste will come to play when choosing a DAC/AMP of your liking, but I don't think they would choose something that undeperforms his new flagship.

If you've compared the rme to other things in its price range I think you'd be able to quite clearly tell it's not an over performer regardless of your preference.

 

[adrianm]

Fair. This is your opinion. But Im sure that Yamaha engineers considered that the RME ADI 2 DAC matched the level of transparency, low distortion and power to showcase the YH5000 capabilities. Of course, personal taste will come to play when choosing a DAC/AMP of your liking, but I don't think they would choose something that undeperforms his new flagship.

I think they are trying to showcase you can buy their expensive headphones and not need an expensive chain to go along with it, making it more efficient than say, Susvara. Being so much cheaper, one could even forgive not quite totl performance. They're not the only manufacturer to do this. It's also a bit of a trick as once you hear a better chain you will want it anyway.
I can tell you for a fact that the Meze Elites , being super efficient scale up considerably with a better dac, and even amp. Remains to be seen if the D8k LE can scale up more or not. I got the feeling that Susvara did tbh.

You should try the pros as well. The og and the pro are tuned so different to not even sound like they are made by the same company tbh. The pros have a much better flow to them and imo have the best (not most, but best) bass reproduction in the business (ahead of sus, 1266, Shang sr, x9k, etc)

I think he did own the Pros.

 

[Tano]

If you've compared the rme to other things in its price range I think you'd be able to quite clearly tell it's not an over performer regardless of your preference.

I did compare it to a lot of gear. It's not an overperformer in terms of pure sound quality, you can get the same or a similar SQ performance at a cheaper price. It overperforms just everything in terms of features, that's maybe one of the reason because the engineers chose it.

 

[Tano]

I think they are trying to showcase you can buy their expensive headphones and not need an expensive chain to go along with it, making it more efficient than say, Susvara. Being so much cheaper, one could even forgive not quite totl performance. They're not the only manufacturer to do this. It's also a bit of a trick as once you hear a better chain you will want it anyway.
I can tell you for a fact that the Meze Elites , being super efficient scale up considerably with a better dac, and even amp. Remains to be seen if the D8k LE can scale up more or not. I got the feeling that Susvara did tbh.

The tendency now is making easy to drive headphones so you won't need to sit beside a power plant to enjoy your music, and I think that's a good thing, at least for me. They might have used the RME to show it.
Once you get a good glimpse of what the headphones can do, now can use the DACs/AMPs/DAPs of your preference.

In my experience, the D8K Pros and the LE sounds good just from pretty much everything that I've tried, so I have the feeling that the Yamahas, sharing the DNA with the Finals, would pair great with most gear.

 

[SolarCetacean]

This whole amp debate is getting tiresome. First, I consider it a fault of the headphone if it doesn't scale down well with equipment. If a headphone requires a TOTL chain to sound good, I consider that a mark against the headphone. If my high-end amp breaks, I'd still like to enjoy my TOTL headphone on a lesser amp. Designing around TOTL gear to me is like designing an application assuming that the user will only ever give it clean and correct inputs. Designing for crappy amps is part of design hardening and should be part of any engineering endeavor.

Second, the ADI-2 is generally regarded as a neutral-ish amp. That's a good thing when developing a headphone, because the designers presumably want to hear the headphone itself, not necessarily the amp. The built-in PEQ on the ADI-2 also helps the designers easily check various aspects of the headphone design, like how well it responds to EQ. Some drivers just don't react well to EQ, and even the best drivers will have weird regions of the FR where EQ produces unexpected results.

Finally, given that a number of reviews have already mentioned how transparent the Yamaha is to amps (plus statements from Yamaha engineers themselves of needing to hold back on some aspects of design to avoid being too transparent), I doubt there will be any issue of it not scaling to higher-end amps. This whole "oh no, they designed it on that?!" reaction just looks like ridiculous pearl-clutching and hand-wringing to me.

 

[betula]

The ADI-2 most of all is a great (d/s) DAC that even as a standalone DAC performs at the level of it's price range. The fact that you have a plethora of options from hardware EQ to several DSPs and also a basic headphone amp really makes it a bargain. The amp section only though is not really in the performance league the price would suggest. It is a basic add-on to a great DAC.

Most new headphones are designed with all sorts of gear in mind, hence their sensitivity is high and they are easy to drive. I doubt anyone will come out with another flagship headphone that requires a chain like the Susvara does. My Meze Elite sounds like a 'good' headphone on pretty much anything as it is easy to drive them loud enough. With some better amps and DACs though from 'good' they can turn into 'excellent' or even 'spectacular'. This allows the manufacturer to sell more headphones, because folks can enjoy them even from entry level gear, but their scalability is undeniable and other folks who have the ears and budget can decide how much the sonic improvements are worth to them as they climb the DAC/amp ladder. (Some self-proclaimed YouTube apostles also promote the most basic DACs and amps saying you will never need anything more than those, which puts further pressure on manufacturers to create easy to drive headphones and talk less about scalability. Easy to drive is good, denying or belittling scalability is bad.)

I don't think anyone said Yamaha designed the 5000SE on the ADI-2. I am pretty sure they used several amps and DACs from all price ranges, like every other headphone developers do. Yamaha just happened to demo the 5000SE somewhere with an ADI-2.
The amount of superficial misinterpretations I read on the last 3 pages regarding each other's comment guys is scary.

 

[sp33ls]

In the last few months ive left the world of Planars, as ive owned or own them all.

No dynamic driver love?
I've been on the planar train, and while they have some serious strengths, they just weren't as good at getting me emotionally involved with my music.
Went back to dynamic drivers (ZMF), and am finally in this state where I am listening and enjoying the music more than the sound. I've hit a very happy point with this hobby, which, can be hard for many.

The tendency now is making easy to drive headphones so you won't need to sit beside a power plant to enjoy your music, and I think that's a good thing, at least for me. They might have used the RME to show it.

Exactly. The ADI-2 is a great little d/s DAC but certainly not what I would choose to show off a headphone like the 5000SE.

All this talk about RME had me wanting to add my two pennies. I swapped out my desktop R2R DAC with an RME Babyface Pro FS interface because I like the added functionality and feature set with this interface. For listening, I'll sometimes just use the phones jack directly and it sounds great. Other times, I send the signal to my Neurochrome HP-1 (an amazing little piece of engineering) for more dedicated listening.

When it comes to desktop DACs connected to PCs, it's good to remember the importance of driver-level optimization and proper handling of clocks -- more so even than fancy capacitors, chips, etc.
I'm not calling out other manufactures, but what I can say is that RME is the master in this domain as professionals rely on their gear for actually recording and producing a lot of the very music which got us into this hobby.
Without going on a rant, I'm just trying to say that RME understands how to engineer great, reliable gear.
I'm quite satisfied with this little piece of RME kit here.

 

[eskamobob1]

the importance of driver-level optimization

This is basicaly irrelivant if using aiso

 

[Tano]

This whole amp debate is getting tiresome. First, I consider it a fault of the headphone if it doesn't scale down well with equipment. If a headphone requires a TOTL chain to sound good, I consider that a mark against the headphone. If my high-end amp breaks, I'd still like to enjoy my TOTL headphone on a lesser amp. Designing around TOTL gear to me is like designing an application assuming that the user will only ever give it clean and correct inputs. Designing for crappy amps is part of design hardening and should be part of any engineering endeavor.

Second, the ADI-2 is generally regarded as a neutral-ish amp. That's a good thing when developing a headphone, because the designers presumably want to hear the headphone itself, not necessarily the amp. The built-in PEQ on the ADI-2 also helps the designers easily check various aspects of the headphone design, like how well it responds to EQ. Some drivers just don't react well to EQ, and even the best drivers will have weird regions of the FR where EQ produces unexpected results.

Finally, given that a number of reviews have already mentioned how transparent the Yamaha is to amps (plus statements from Yamaha engineers themselves of needing to hold back on some aspects of design to avoid being too transparent), I doubt there will be any issue of it not scaling to higher-end amps. This whole "oh no, they designed it on that?!" reaction just looks like ridiculous pearl-clutching and hand-wringing to me.

Bravo. Could not explain it myself better.

 

[doctorK53]

This whole amp debate is getting tiresome. First, I consider it a fault of the headphone if it doesn't scale down well with equipment. If a headphone requires a TOTL chain to sound good, I consider that a mark against the headphone. If my high-end amp breaks, I'd still like to enjoy my TOTL headphone on a lesser amp. Designing around TOTL gear to me is like designing an application assuming that the user will only ever give it clean and correct inputs. Designing for crappy amps is part of design hardening and should be part of any engineering endeavor.

Second, the ADI-2 is generally regarded as a neutral-ish amp. That's a good thing when developing a headphone, because the designers presumably want to hear the headphone itself, not necessarily the amp. The built-in PEQ on the ADI-2 also helps the designers easily check various aspects of the headphone design, like how well it responds to EQ. Some drivers just don't react well to EQ, and even the best drivers will have weird regions of the FR where EQ produces unexpected results.

Finally, given that a number of reviews have already mentioned how transparent the Yamaha is to amps (plus statements from Yamaha engineers themselves of needing to hold back on some aspects of design to avoid being too transparent), I doubt there will be any issue of it not scaling to higher-end amps. This whole "oh no, they designed it on that?!" reaction just looks like ridiculous pearl-clutching and hand-wringing to me.

I got up 5 am in Japan right now, found this discussion, and you wrote everything I was going to write.
As an actual owner (one of only two in this thread), at least I can say it is sounding very good with my UD-505(dac) and at-bha100(tube+ss hybrid amp), both are around 1000$. I don't know how it sounds if my YH-5000SE is connected to the most expensive amp/dac, but it is not my concern because they are not affordable with my budget.
I believe that a good consumer audio must sound good with other good gears, not necessarily with expensive gears. Remember, spending more than 1000$ to a pair of headphones (or, amp, dac, power supply, even cables!) is crazy in the rest of the world.

 

[adrianm]

Remember, spending more than 1000$ to a pair of headphones (or, amp, dac, power supply, even cables!) is crazy in the rest of the world.

And yet there's people with 1mil+ systems, and even 100k+ headphone systems. Just like they can't invalidate your experience, you can't invalidate theirs .That's pretty much all there is to it. I started out with a Fiio E10k and Audiotechnica M40x 8 years ago and got to my current setup (with more stuff I deem "upgrades" on the way) because It was worth the expense to me, and because I got to a point where I could sort of afford it. Not because I won the lottery, want to brag on reddit, or look down on people. And I'm sure most people with high end gear are the same way. This stuff isn't exactly a babe magnet lol.

 

[stacey]

@adrianm
Different use cases for different people. While you may see value in a summit fi setup, personally I’m happy with a basic Topping or DAP. And there’s a lot of people out there that are completely happy with their Bluetooth TWS sets. The nice thing about the Yamaha is that you don’t need high end source gear to get the most out of it. And that appeals to a lot of people.

 

[adrianm]

@adrianm
Different use cases for different people. While you may see value in a summit fi setup, personally I’m happy with a basic Topping or DAP. And there’s a lot of people out there that are completely happy with their Bluetooth TWS sets. The nice thing about the Yamaha is that you don’t need high end source gear to get the most out of it. And that appeals to a lot of people.

I get it, different people look for different things. I'm also happy with my Airpods pro 2. But the price is clearly summit-fi. When I'm stationary, especially when using an open back headphone, I want something with summit fi performance (that also fits my tastes).
As for discussions on chain quality... If you check initial reviews, half of them say it has a very small soundstage and no bass, half that it has a huge soundstage and great bass.
It's way too polarizing for the chain not to be a factor. I'm happy to hear that it scales, but zoning in on where it lands compared to other flagships is proving difficult. Hopefully Canjam will clear things up more.

 

[ddlo]

I get it, different people look for different things. I'm also happy with my Airpods pro 2. But the price is clearly summit-fi. When I'm stationary, especially when using an open back headphone, I want something with summit fi performance (that also fits my tastes).
As for discussions on chain quality... If you check initial reviews, half of them say it has a very small soundstage and no bass, half that it has a huge soundstage and great bass.
It's way too polarizing for the chain not to be a factor. I'm happy to hear that it scales, but zoning in on where it lands compared to other flagships is proving difficult. Hopefully Canjam will clear things up more.

i tried yh-5000se on hpa4, an auris tube amp (didn't check what DAC e-earphone was using though. they're all hook up to macbook playing local hi-res/lossless files) and even my btr7 bluetooth dongle on my several visits to the shop. the impression was pretty consistent across different amps. but these experiences were from a casual listener and from a pair of headphones with no sound isolation at all (yet there're quite a bit of noise you could expect in the shop). so my experience might not be a very reliable reference

 

[doctorK53]

A review has come on MajorHifi.
This sentence matches my current impression very well:

" I spent a lot of this review just shaking my head at the relentless detail and clarity I was hearing, even in the midst of the extra impact and sophisticated color it was throwing into the mix"

https://majorhifi.com/yamaha-yh-5000se-review/