Emotiva Basx A-100 headphone amp review w Senheisser HD600
Jul 10, 2017 20:47:17 GMT -5
LCSeminole, saturnx, and 4 more like this
Post by garbulky on Jul 10, 2017 20:47:17 GMT -5
Garbulky's Basx a-100 Headphone Amp Review!
Note: If anybody is familiar with my reviews, you'll know that they are pretty darn long. So if you want to just skip to what's really pertinent, just go to "The short bit section". It's all the way at the bottom. If you want to just hear about the sound go to "the listening my god man!" section in the middle.
Note 2: This review is purely subjective. Means it's my opinion. It comes with all the pros and cons of subjective review. The testing method is entirely simply listenig to it. That's it.
Note 3: Since Emotiva's ad team decided to not gush poetic about this headphone amp, I am forced to. Hence this long review! Onward!
Introduction:
Setup:
PC->Musiland Digital Times via BNC -> DC-1 -> Mini-x resistors bypassed -> Sennheiser HD600
This headphone amp was a long time coming. I've been waiting for a headphone amp that could take my HD600s and throw them around with ease. So it took me at least seven years to find an amp that I was willing to buy.
During that time I tried a Xenos 3HA, Asus Xonar Essence ST, XDA-2, USP-1, Mcintosh preamp, Adcom preamp, and the Emotiva DC-1 (the best till now).
All these amps bring something to the table. But all of them made my senheissers sound like headphones with all the cons that you associate with it - namely a limited headspace, dynamics, bass, and a sound that can't fully envelop or immerse you.
THE LONGEST THREE DAYS....
.....and finally it is here in my hands! First I noticed that though it is the dimensions of the DC-1, it is taller - which is fine with me. But I thought it would be exactly the same chassis just longer. So it's a little different and it is longer.
The mini-x isn't a light amp. But it's also not heavy. I was able to lug it around to B'zilla's house where he didn't mince words. "That's amazing," he said during a fun listening session.
The build quality is exactly what you'd expect from old school Emotiva. This is their absolute entry level amp running at a "don't-take-it-seriously" $230.
The volume knob also feels nice and solid.
Well it looks great inside.
Opening the case
You can see that pretty much every bit of space there is in there is taken up with electronics.
You have a nice torroid.
Not mentioned in the specs is the capacitance.
That's two 10,000 mf capacitors for a total of 20,000 mf capacitance. Both the torroids and capacitance are very nice for a headphone amp.
The RCA jacks are standard connectors not Tiffany connections and the speaker posts are standard, not the type of the XPA-1's. Which is fine. You got to cut corners somewhere.
Here you have a nice solid heatsink. It does have a fan that never turned on. The mini-x ran cool to the touch.
Here are the dropping resistors Emotiva talked about. You can also see the resistor bypass pins that use jumpers to bypass. The jumpers come not installed by default keeping the resistors in the path.
An interesting and brilliant design choice. This means that if you have regular impedance headphones the resistors drop the humungous output of the mini-x to give you 250- 400 miliwatts. With them engaged they could drive the HD600's as loud as I could handle.
But let me cut to the chase, you don't want that. You really don't. You want the resistors out of the path. Just take my word for it. You then get the direct drive from the amp which is all of its power. Which does substantially increase the noise floor, which luckily isn't a problem for high impedance headphones like my HD600's at 300 ohms. It likely won't be a problem for hifi man headphones either that require gobs of power to sound good.
First Listening and my first mistake!
I used this amp purely as a headphone amp.
My first listening was with the resistors engaged. And it sounded better than the DC-1. More solid sound. Lots of power. Very nice soundstage. Etc. What I expected really. And I thought, well why bother with the jumpers. The thing sounds great!!
Well as you might guess that was my mistake with the mini-x. Leaving well enough alone.
Luckily, after some time, I got antsy.
"Could it possibly sound better?" I asked myself.
So I went to bypass the resistors. So that was where Emotiva's wariness of having calls about burnt headphones came in to play. Which in fairness is a very real possibility.
I discovered that it wasn't the easiest thing to get to it. First the smaller screws in the back were a real #@! to unscrew. You have to press very hard with your screwdriver to avoid stripping of the screw.
Then the jumper pins themselves are installed sideways right at the front squeezed between a bunch of other stuff. What that meant was I dropped the jumpers a few times. As a precaution I held the circuit board at the back to brace it while I appilied pressure to push the jumpers in.
Interesting trivia: Keith has mentioned that these are series resistors which in some way provide more resistance at low impedance than high impedance. Allowing the resistors real purpose (low impedance headphones) to be brilliantly utilized.
And there they are! You can see the resistors which are hefty three watt resistors.
Resistors Bypassed, Jumpers engaged!
UNLIMITED POWER!! YES!!
The Listening (AKA My God, Man!)
Bypassing the resistors using the jumpers made the HD600's come all kinds of alive. Just plain opened them up wide the h**l open!
Previously I had problems with the HD600 sounding slightly closed in or the bass not really extending that low or the treble being a bit too laid back for me.
Pshhhh
The A-100 just completely kicked those problems not to the curb but probably to the next street somewhere.
Let me just say my jaw was on the floor that first day. This headphone amp is unlike any other I've listened to. It's not just in another level, it's in another building entirely! This is definitely high end sound I am hearing.
Huge seamless soundstage that extended away from my ears. Tremendous traensparency with zero grain, zero hestiancy, tremendous speed and organic nature. Let me just say this one more time. Can we say EXTREME resolution!
And for the first time I started preferring my HD600 to my beloved Axiom m80 speakers - which are GREAT performers imo.
You hear people talk about "the headpones take out the room" but the coloration caused by them doesn't really make them sound superior. Before there's no way I would consider headphones as a suitable alternative for my critical listening and enjoyment. Well now it does make complete sense.
And I know because I've had these headphones for the most part of a decade.
The kind of transparency and dynamics these are capable of was astounding. It really did feel like unlimited power. So let's take the two separately.
Dynamics:
I could write so much about dynamics here. So let me use a few examples. In the bass the powerful dynamics could create it so that the bass could be low, punch but also small in size. Or it could be huge in size and low with the less or more punch. So songs that I thought were huge in the bass sounded very clear and the bass was definitely there but I realized the HD600's were just loafing on the bass. it wasn't as big as I was led to believe. But then there were songs where the bass instruments were just enormous. Sometimes you could have more than one bass instrument and the HD600 would preserve the size in the low bass. It was uncanny that magic trick.
In terms of the mid range and treble, the dynamics were even more tremendous in its portrayal. That same preservation of perspective in dynamics applied here. For instance you could have several very loud instruments but they'd be changed in very minute ways in terms of dynamics where it wasn't all just more "loud." It was all different kinds of loud. And it goes from zero to hero like I haven't heard before. Snap! Pow! All without going in to that "harshness" that you get when headphones go loud and smear just a tad. That's what it's like.
Holding out for a hero - the glee version had large dynamic swings with the whip which just popped.
Resolution:
First the HD600's imaged completely different. They imaged very close to speakers now. Not like before or with any other headphone I've heard. So when people spoke on the screen it nailed their positions.
Bass extension went very low , very very tight. So low that some songs like My All with Mariah Carey which I expected it to test the limits of the bass just sounded like the HD600 was loafing! So did Cross Roads on Bone Thugs and Harmony. Mid range air, treble air off the charts. The word I'm looking for is superlative. When I said it's reproduction was high end, I wasn't kidding.
No grain whatsoever. The presentations veered right in to holographic in a very natural organic way.
Room ambience etc all spot on.
I did some listening to frequency response and interestingly it was not as even as I expected in the bass. While the mid range and treble sweeps sounded very even. Once it hit about 50 hz the sound level dropped off a bit. Having said that it had some strong 30 hz response going down to 25 hz audibly- just less than the rest of the frequency range.
But...in listening the bass was just powerful. Way more bass than I expected headphones to be able to do (very clean too). The growl, the texture all preserved. It also went lower than my speakers did with some really nice impact!
The resolution means that you could appreciate both lo-fi and hi-fi records. There's way more information than you expect from lo-fi records that you might have previously written off. Also once again, it showed me that mp3's are more capable than I previously knew. Yes lossless files sounded better but the amount of detail mp3's are able to bring is pretty impressive.
You can also tell the differences in the recording techniques or the subtle equalizations the producer makes. I.e. you can hear the sound signature of the recording process to a level that I didn't realize.
Also the left to right stitching the soundstage together was seamless. I haven't heard that level from speakers and I have heard some extraordinary sound from the Thiel CS5i which is time aligned.
Bringing it all together:
What do you get when you get extreme dynamics combined with extreme resolution top to bottom? Well truly superb sound. A great example is this track.
When B'zilla was listening to it and the thunder came in, I saw him jump. rain is all around you. Then he made the comment that he could hear the thunder roll away in the distance. Much further than he expected The rain also felt very real. There is a car that drives by about 1:05 and it is just a seamless left to right transition. But it's not just left to right as the direction the car is taking is slightly different.
Scott Bradley's Postmodern Jukebox Wake me up
Here is a good example of a lot of instrumentsplaying loudly. The resolution brings out every instrument very clearly. On my speakers I don't hear the violin quite as clearly or the double bass. The harmony's between the two singers are clearly separated and you can follow the different harmonies.
At 1:46 the drummer hits a hard whack. I never noticed that before. I'm sure if I go back and listen I'll notice it now. But on the HD600 it simply brings it all out right there on the first listen.
When the mariachi guitar comes in at 2:20, he starts off strumming then does a palm muting technique. The difference between the two was very easy to hear. Then the syncing rhythms between the mariachi guitarist and the bass player was more apparent than the many many times I'd heard this song.
On classical music....well geez. You are kind of in heaven here with all kinds of goodness going on with the soundstage. Live recitals? Oh my! Opera singers? DYNAMICS!
On to "turning it up". This amp BEGS you to turn up the volume at the expense of your hearing. You won't be able to resist. It will knock you upside the head in "pump it up" songs. The bass in those songs just had me grooving so very much. So there you go.
More than anything else, every song I've heard has sounded different in signature - a pretty good indicator of high resolution in the reproduction.
MOVIE LISTENING:
Value:
Well I thought the best product Emotiva made was between the XPA-1 gen 2 and the DC-1. But turns out this possibly outdoes both because of its extreme value as a headphone amplifier.
This is a $1000 (or more) headphone amplifier and that's with it being priced conservatively imo. If it was a $1000 I would have simply started saving up for it. There is a headphone amp like this unit ....and it's the Schitt Ragnarok putting out 1700 mwatts at 300 ohms. Which coincidentally is also so powerful it's a speaker amp at the same time. Its price is $1700. The $230 Mini-x puts out 1300 mwatts at 300 ohms.
Polite refrain
Emotiva's ad team takes the path of admirable restraint and says "if you found the sound of other amplifiers lacking then you need to check out the Basx."
KeithL summed it up in one line "I think you'll be impressed".
Well both those lines are the kings of understatement!
The manual is a bit more forthcoming.
" Because this classic output circuit design is powered by the advanced circuitry of the A-100, with its extremely low noise and distortion, the end result is a smooth yet detailed sound signature rarely available anywhere else - at any price".
That's more like it! Because they are right here. And it just so happens to be found in a $230 headphone amplifier!
I bought it hoping for it to be a stop gap between the Schiit Jotunheim because I wanted the balanced drive. But politely put, the competition for this unit is the Schitt Ragnarok imo.
EMOTIVA WHAT'S GOING ON?
You mean to say that Emotiva sat on developing the mini-x in to this headphone amp for so long? Right now it is DOMINATING the market in terms of sound quality and value.
I'm glad you guys listened to the fans that previously modded it to drive the headphones from the speaker outputs. It also shows you how versatile the Emotiva amp circuitry is if it can be worked in to a headphone amp.
THIS IS SCREAMING
....For an entire line based on this. Just make sure to hold on the extreme power of this product.
Example - just go directly to a flagship unit.
A set of balanced CLASS A monoblock mini-x A-100's headphone amps with a switch at the back for toggling the resistor on and off. And let it be a sliding class A bias like the XPA-1 L's so you don't sacrifice the power.
You want to go slightly more complicated? Introduce three gain levels for your amp like Schiit does.
Price the monoblock pair at between $600 to a 1000. Then the ENTIRE HEADPHONE MARKET IS EMOTIVA'S OYSTER. It sounds niche...but I promise you everybody in that niche group would simply buy your product hands down.
EXTREME VALUE SETUP:
Here it is:
DC-1 $500 -> Mini-x $230 -> Senneisser HD600 (or similar resolution phones) ($285 on Amazon - seriously?!).
Total price: $1015. Buying used on the DC-1 brings it under a grand.
That's it. That's what it takes to rival and beat in most places my speaker setup that costs close to $4000. That's insane.
THE SHORT BIT!
The Basx A-100 redefines the headphone amp market. Offering performance completely unheard of at this price range.It's true value is above a grand imo. This is a headphone amp of superlatives because it is a transformational piece of gear. Your headphone listening will transform.
If you have a HD600 set of headphones this amp was made for it. Just make sure to bypass the dropping resistors for a serious upgrade in sound quality. Everything about the sound reproduction was top notch beyond what I thought was possible. It is redefining in terms of extremely fast and large dynamics and extreme resolution.
A DC-1, mini-x and an HD600 will bring you real no messing around high end sound for a grand and I can't think of a better value than this setup. I imagine other good quality DACs will give you a similar experience too.
Highly recommended for any owners of suitable headphones. If you are thinking about it, just click buy. Tell me I'm wrong!
Note: If anybody is familiar with my reviews, you'll know that they are pretty darn long. So if you want to just skip to what's really pertinent, just go to "The short bit section". It's all the way at the bottom. If you want to just hear about the sound go to "the listening my god man!" section in the middle.
Note 2: This review is purely subjective. Means it's my opinion. It comes with all the pros and cons of subjective review. The testing method is entirely simply listenig to it. That's it.
Note 3: Since Emotiva's ad team decided to not gush poetic about this headphone amp, I am forced to. Hence this long review! Onward!
Introduction:
Setup:
PC->Musiland Digital Times via BNC -> DC-1 -> Mini-x resistors bypassed -> Sennheiser HD600
This headphone amp was a long time coming. I've been waiting for a headphone amp that could take my HD600s and throw them around with ease. So it took me at least seven years to find an amp that I was willing to buy.
During that time I tried a Xenos 3HA, Asus Xonar Essence ST, XDA-2, USP-1, Mcintosh preamp, Adcom preamp, and the Emotiva DC-1 (the best till now).
All these amps bring something to the table. But all of them made my senheissers sound like headphones with all the cons that you associate with it - namely a limited headspace, dynamics, bass, and a sound that can't fully envelop or immerse you.
THE LONGEST THREE DAYS....
.....and finally it is here in my hands! First I noticed that though it is the dimensions of the DC-1, it is taller - which is fine with me. But I thought it would be exactly the same chassis just longer. So it's a little different and it is longer.
The mini-x isn't a light amp. But it's also not heavy. I was able to lug it around to B'zilla's house where he didn't mince words. "That's amazing," he said during a fun listening session.
The build quality is exactly what you'd expect from old school Emotiva. This is their absolute entry level amp running at a "don't-take-it-seriously" $230.
The volume knob also feels nice and solid.
Well it looks great inside.
Opening the case
You can see that pretty much every bit of space there is in there is taken up with electronics.
You have a nice torroid.
Not mentioned in the specs is the capacitance.
That's two 10,000 mf capacitors for a total of 20,000 mf capacitance. Both the torroids and capacitance are very nice for a headphone amp.
The RCA jacks are standard connectors not Tiffany connections and the speaker posts are standard, not the type of the XPA-1's. Which is fine. You got to cut corners somewhere.
Here you have a nice solid heatsink. It does have a fan that never turned on. The mini-x ran cool to the touch.
Here are the dropping resistors Emotiva talked about. You can also see the resistor bypass pins that use jumpers to bypass. The jumpers come not installed by default keeping the resistors in the path.
An interesting and brilliant design choice. This means that if you have regular impedance headphones the resistors drop the humungous output of the mini-x to give you 250- 400 miliwatts. With them engaged they could drive the HD600's as loud as I could handle.
But let me cut to the chase, you don't want that. You really don't. You want the resistors out of the path. Just take my word for it. You then get the direct drive from the amp which is all of its power. Which does substantially increase the noise floor, which luckily isn't a problem for high impedance headphones like my HD600's at 300 ohms. It likely won't be a problem for hifi man headphones either that require gobs of power to sound good.
First Listening and my first mistake!
I used this amp purely as a headphone amp.
My first listening was with the resistors engaged. And it sounded better than the DC-1. More solid sound. Lots of power. Very nice soundstage. Etc. What I expected really. And I thought, well why bother with the jumpers. The thing sounds great!!
Well as you might guess that was my mistake with the mini-x. Leaving well enough alone.
Luckily, after some time, I got antsy.
"Could it possibly sound better?" I asked myself.
So I went to bypass the resistors. So that was where Emotiva's wariness of having calls about burnt headphones came in to play. Which in fairness is a very real possibility.
I discovered that it wasn't the easiest thing to get to it. First the smaller screws in the back were a real #@! to unscrew. You have to press very hard with your screwdriver to avoid stripping of the screw.
Then the jumper pins themselves are installed sideways right at the front squeezed between a bunch of other stuff. What that meant was I dropped the jumpers a few times. As a precaution I held the circuit board at the back to brace it while I appilied pressure to push the jumpers in.
Interesting trivia: Keith has mentioned that these are series resistors which in some way provide more resistance at low impedance than high impedance. Allowing the resistors real purpose (low impedance headphones) to be brilliantly utilized.
And there they are! You can see the resistors which are hefty three watt resistors.
Resistors Bypassed, Jumpers engaged!
UNLIMITED POWER!! YES!!
The Listening (AKA My God, Man!)
Bypassing the resistors using the jumpers made the HD600's come all kinds of alive. Just plain opened them up wide the h**l open!
Previously I had problems with the HD600 sounding slightly closed in or the bass not really extending that low or the treble being a bit too laid back for me.
Pshhhh
The A-100 just completely kicked those problems not to the curb but probably to the next street somewhere.
Let me just say my jaw was on the floor that first day. This headphone amp is unlike any other I've listened to. It's not just in another level, it's in another building entirely! This is definitely high end sound I am hearing.
Huge seamless soundstage that extended away from my ears. Tremendous traensparency with zero grain, zero hestiancy, tremendous speed and organic nature. Let me just say this one more time. Can we say EXTREME resolution!
And for the first time I started preferring my HD600 to my beloved Axiom m80 speakers - which are GREAT performers imo.
You hear people talk about "the headpones take out the room" but the coloration caused by them doesn't really make them sound superior. Before there's no way I would consider headphones as a suitable alternative for my critical listening and enjoyment. Well now it does make complete sense.
And I know because I've had these headphones for the most part of a decade.
The kind of transparency and dynamics these are capable of was astounding. It really did feel like unlimited power. So let's take the two separately.
Dynamics:
I could write so much about dynamics here. So let me use a few examples. In the bass the powerful dynamics could create it so that the bass could be low, punch but also small in size. Or it could be huge in size and low with the less or more punch. So songs that I thought were huge in the bass sounded very clear and the bass was definitely there but I realized the HD600's were just loafing on the bass. it wasn't as big as I was led to believe. But then there were songs where the bass instruments were just enormous. Sometimes you could have more than one bass instrument and the HD600 would preserve the size in the low bass. It was uncanny that magic trick.
In terms of the mid range and treble, the dynamics were even more tremendous in its portrayal. That same preservation of perspective in dynamics applied here. For instance you could have several very loud instruments but they'd be changed in very minute ways in terms of dynamics where it wasn't all just more "loud." It was all different kinds of loud. And it goes from zero to hero like I haven't heard before. Snap! Pow! All without going in to that "harshness" that you get when headphones go loud and smear just a tad. That's what it's like.
Holding out for a hero - the glee version had large dynamic swings with the whip which just popped.
Resolution:
First the HD600's imaged completely different. They imaged very close to speakers now. Not like before or with any other headphone I've heard. So when people spoke on the screen it nailed their positions.
Bass extension went very low , very very tight. So low that some songs like My All with Mariah Carey which I expected it to test the limits of the bass just sounded like the HD600 was loafing! So did Cross Roads on Bone Thugs and Harmony. Mid range air, treble air off the charts. The word I'm looking for is superlative. When I said it's reproduction was high end, I wasn't kidding.
No grain whatsoever. The presentations veered right in to holographic in a very natural organic way.
Room ambience etc all spot on.
I did some listening to frequency response and interestingly it was not as even as I expected in the bass. While the mid range and treble sweeps sounded very even. Once it hit about 50 hz the sound level dropped off a bit. Having said that it had some strong 30 hz response going down to 25 hz audibly- just less than the rest of the frequency range.
But...in listening the bass was just powerful. Way more bass than I expected headphones to be able to do (very clean too). The growl, the texture all preserved. It also went lower than my speakers did with some really nice impact!
The resolution means that you could appreciate both lo-fi and hi-fi records. There's way more information than you expect from lo-fi records that you might have previously written off. Also once again, it showed me that mp3's are more capable than I previously knew. Yes lossless files sounded better but the amount of detail mp3's are able to bring is pretty impressive.
You can also tell the differences in the recording techniques or the subtle equalizations the producer makes. I.e. you can hear the sound signature of the recording process to a level that I didn't realize.
Also the left to right stitching the soundstage together was seamless. I haven't heard that level from speakers and I have heard some extraordinary sound from the Thiel CS5i which is time aligned.
Bringing it all together:
What do you get when you get extreme dynamics combined with extreme resolution top to bottom? Well truly superb sound. A great example is this track.
When B'zilla was listening to it and the thunder came in, I saw him jump. rain is all around you. Then he made the comment that he could hear the thunder roll away in the distance. Much further than he expected The rain also felt very real. There is a car that drives by about 1:05 and it is just a seamless left to right transition. But it's not just left to right as the direction the car is taking is slightly different.
Scott Bradley's Postmodern Jukebox Wake me up
Here is a good example of a lot of instrumentsplaying loudly. The resolution brings out every instrument very clearly. On my speakers I don't hear the violin quite as clearly or the double bass. The harmony's between the two singers are clearly separated and you can follow the different harmonies.
At 1:46 the drummer hits a hard whack. I never noticed that before. I'm sure if I go back and listen I'll notice it now. But on the HD600 it simply brings it all out right there on the first listen.
When the mariachi guitar comes in at 2:20, he starts off strumming then does a palm muting technique. The difference between the two was very easy to hear. Then the syncing rhythms between the mariachi guitarist and the bass player was more apparent than the many many times I'd heard this song.
On classical music....well geez. You are kind of in heaven here with all kinds of goodness going on with the soundstage. Live recitals? Oh my! Opera singers? DYNAMICS!
On to "turning it up". This amp BEGS you to turn up the volume at the expense of your hearing. You won't be able to resist. It will knock you upside the head in "pump it up" songs. The bass in those songs just had me grooving so very much. So there you go.
More than anything else, every song I've heard has sounded different in signature - a pretty good indicator of high resolution in the reproduction.
MOVIE LISTENING:
Value:
Well I thought the best product Emotiva made was between the XPA-1 gen 2 and the DC-1. But turns out this possibly outdoes both because of its extreme value as a headphone amplifier.
This is a $1000 (or more) headphone amplifier and that's with it being priced conservatively imo. If it was a $1000 I would have simply started saving up for it. There is a headphone amp like this unit ....and it's the Schitt Ragnarok putting out 1700 mwatts at 300 ohms. Which coincidentally is also so powerful it's a speaker amp at the same time. Its price is $1700. The $230 Mini-x puts out 1300 mwatts at 300 ohms.
Polite refrain
Emotiva's ad team takes the path of admirable restraint and says "if you found the sound of other amplifiers lacking then you need to check out the Basx."
KeithL summed it up in one line "I think you'll be impressed".
Well both those lines are the kings of understatement!
The manual is a bit more forthcoming.
" Because this classic output circuit design is powered by the advanced circuitry of the A-100, with its extremely low noise and distortion, the end result is a smooth yet detailed sound signature rarely available anywhere else - at any price".
That's more like it! Because they are right here. And it just so happens to be found in a $230 headphone amplifier!
I bought it hoping for it to be a stop gap between the Schiit Jotunheim because I wanted the balanced drive. But politely put, the competition for this unit is the Schitt Ragnarok imo.
EMOTIVA WHAT'S GOING ON?
You mean to say that Emotiva sat on developing the mini-x in to this headphone amp for so long? Right now it is DOMINATING the market in terms of sound quality and value.
I'm glad you guys listened to the fans that previously modded it to drive the headphones from the speaker outputs. It also shows you how versatile the Emotiva amp circuitry is if it can be worked in to a headphone amp.
THIS IS SCREAMING
....For an entire line based on this. Just make sure to hold on the extreme power of this product.
Example - just go directly to a flagship unit.
A set of balanced CLASS A monoblock mini-x A-100's headphone amps with a switch at the back for toggling the resistor on and off. And let it be a sliding class A bias like the XPA-1 L's so you don't sacrifice the power.
You want to go slightly more complicated? Introduce three gain levels for your amp like Schiit does.
Price the monoblock pair at between $600 to a 1000. Then the ENTIRE HEADPHONE MARKET IS EMOTIVA'S OYSTER. It sounds niche...but I promise you everybody in that niche group would simply buy your product hands down.
EXTREME VALUE SETUP:
Here it is:
DC-1 $500 -> Mini-x $230 -> Senneisser HD600 (or similar resolution phones) ($285 on Amazon - seriously?!).
Total price: $1015. Buying used on the DC-1 brings it under a grand.
That's it. That's what it takes to rival and beat in most places my speaker setup that costs close to $4000. That's insane.
THE SHORT BIT!
The Basx A-100 redefines the headphone amp market. Offering performance completely unheard of at this price range.It's true value is above a grand imo. This is a headphone amp of superlatives because it is a transformational piece of gear. Your headphone listening will transform.
If you have a HD600 set of headphones this amp was made for it. Just make sure to bypass the dropping resistors for a serious upgrade in sound quality. Everything about the sound reproduction was top notch beyond what I thought was possible. It is redefining in terms of extremely fast and large dynamics and extreme resolution.
A DC-1, mini-x and an HD600 will bring you real no messing around high end sound for a grand and I can't think of a better value than this setup. I imagine other good quality DACs will give you a similar experience too.
Highly recommended for any owners of suitable headphones. If you are thinking about it, just click buy. Tell me I'm wrong!