Audiophilepure

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“Before I talk about sound, I want to lay bare my preferences. I was at a meet a last year, and a guy there had a moded HD800 there with a few high powered tube amps (I don’t remember the names of the amps, sorry). They added a lot of warmth to the HD800, but I missed the deeper, tighter bass you can get with SS amps, and all the warmth seemed to be fighting with the natural signature of the HD800, and not working with it. Listening to it on my SS setup wasn’t any better. It was cold and ruthless. The guy called me back over and told me he wanted me to hear something. He broke out a hybrid amp (again, I don’t remember the name) and had me give it a listen. It was perfect. It was very linear, with very tight and deep bass, while adding just a touch of smoothness to the sound. To me, instead of trying to make the headphone something it wasn’t, it complimented the HD800, adding to the strengths of the headphone while smoothing out the rough edges. It made no effort to change the sound. Now, I am not saying this to dump on OTL tube amps, and I know, with different tubes, you can alter their sound quite a bit, but I want to be clear on what kind of sound I favor.”

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“You might lose a little in terms of ultimate fidelity but that’s more than compensated for by the well-balanced, musical sound. We just enjoy listening to music more when it’s fed through this box.”

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“Matt enthusiastically preferred the Pass to the Mjolnir. Matt and David sometimes differed in their reactions, a matter of taste, but keep in mind the Mjolnir was designed to emulate a classic triode circuit, which saturates a bit as things get loud. Single tone tests on the Mjolnir show predominance of 2nd and 3rd harmonic. However, harmonic distortion is a funny beast, sometimes it can manifest itself as presence, sometimes as warmth, and often as fat bass, very dependent on the material, so I’m not surprised at the sometimes apparently contradictory reactions depending on the musical source. Distortion is compression, it can subjectively soften dynamics, but when it’s enhancing a range, that range can seem louder and counter intuitively dynamics can appear to increase.”

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” I appreciated the fact that the Prism Sound Callia has a volume control, which meant that I could connect it directly to my power amplifiers and not have to use a preamplifier. But I missed having a remote control to adjust volume—and the way my system is now configured, DACs work best for me when connected via Ethernet to the host computer rather, than the Callia’s USB input:.

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“Micro processor controlled relais eliminate all possible pops and clicks when turning the unit on or off. This headphone protection circuit makes sure that you won’t harm your headphones when connected with said pops. I came across many headphone amplifiers that don’t have this circuit implemented, which is a shame.”

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“A really good OTL design makes your transducers sound like they are direct-coupled to the music, and that is precisely what the Feliks Audio Euforia does to your headphones. For some, I can see that being too much of a good thing; and they will want an amplifier with more guts, more drive, more volume, and more distortion. OK, at the limits, it goes for refinement rather than edginess, and this might not be my first choice for thrashing out old Guided By Voices albums. On the other hand, the sound of the system with the Euforia in place is so sophisticated and dynamic, I might not want to put those old GBV albums on the playlist; it won’t make ‘Hardcore UFOs’ from Bee Thousand[Scat] sound awful, but the lo-fi quality of the album is not enhanced by being played with refinement. And that’s what the Euforia does so well – make music sound refined. ”