Just spent some time measuring a recent brand new HiFiMAN Ananda from 2021. Not sure there were any revisions to this one, but I suspect not apart from the dust cover change Fang talked about years ago - at least compared to the previous one I evaluated. I do have an older one here at the studio as well so I’ll report back if I find any meaningful changes:
It still has the same excellent balance between fundamental and harmonic, the only weirdness there is the 1.5khz dip that you often see with HiFiMAN headphones. Interestingly, it’s very distinct on this one (driver mode?).
Also, for anyone who may have been confused about the bass response from seeing a drop-off on some other measurements or with a broken seal, sure enough it’s totally fine here.
To confirm this, here’s the on-head result in RED (only look at the bass here, it’s not taken at the ear drum and so the rest of the information won’t match):
Now let’s check out the air gap behavior:
Fs is nice and low, but of course the Ananda (and to a certain extent Arya) are counterexamples to the ‘slam’ question, making this not a sufficient condition for that quality. But nonetheless, I imagine they were able to achieve this due to the truly massive diaphragm size on these headphones.
Harmonic distortion (94dB):
Solid and well-controlled at 94dB. It does go up quite a bit at higher volumes, but this is totally unrealistic, and still not audible even if you did happen to listen loud enough to token this level at peak. This is due to the fact that it’s low order anyway (2nd and 3rd), and the significant auditory masking at this volume:
In general, the Ananda is still a fantastic headphone for the price in 2021.