I agree, a friend of mine told me that the Burson Voyager sounds great with the Tungsten, which means that the similarly powered Soloist GT should easily power the headphone too.
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yep the Voyager is a nice ampā¦ I have the Conductor GT and on the volume dial you get a pretty good level at just 50ā¦ they are built like a tank tooā¦
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Also of note is the Tube Amp Aegisā¦ I donāt think there is a headphone on the market that the Aegis doesnāt make them sound greatā¦ even IEMsā¦
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When I was reading through the tungsten thread on headfi one of the posters said the Soloist 3x GT worked well with it, which doesnāt surprise me.
I had the GT, itās a great amp that sounds excellent. The fan noise though pretty faint finally became too much for me. But I have my amp right next to my head 
for my amp I use the vertical stands and the fan is up against a PCā¦ so no noiseā¦ and then the amp only takes up a couple inchesā¦there is a button to flip the display while set up like that
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Ok, after six months, (placed order on December 23, 2023), I received my SS Tungsten on June 18th, 2024.
I have been burning them in for about 80 hours as of this writing - and listening to them too.
My setup:
ā¢ Gustard A26 DAC
ā¢ Burson Soloists 3XP with Supercharger 3A and the new V7 opamps.
ā¢ Balanced inputs and balanced outputs
ā¢ Other heaphones I use on this setup:
o Meze Empyrean, Hifiman HE1000 v2, DCA Aeon Closed X, AKG k702 (modified) (Austria edition)
ā¢ I have over 8,000 songs in FLAC format.
o Jazz, soundtracks, classical, house, hip-hop, reggae, beatless, lounge, rock, world, R&B, et, et, pretty much everything except K-pop & country.
Impressions:
- Driving the Tungsten is not an issue with my setup. Of all the headphones Iāve tried, the Tungsten is the only pair that Iāve had to use high-gain. Iāve been comfortably listening at levels between 40 and 70 out of a max level of 99 on the Burson. Yes, this is a lot of power/voltage.
- The sound is balanced and musical. Extremely enjoyable. They sound more realistic than any headphone Iāve heard ā am I listening to live music?? Details stand out. Bass is strong, clean and doesnāt bleed. Male and female voices come thru clean. Seperation is great. Details shine.
- Every genre sounds great. These are extremely enjoyable and comfortable to listen.
- I could not be more happy considering the value-to-performance and FUN the Tungsten (combined with the Burson and Gustard) offers.
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Congrats! Iām sure you are glad to finally have it!
That was a very long wait, I guess thatās what I have ahead of me since I just ordered it last month. His site did say 16 weeks at that point, though now I think it says 20 so who knowsā¦ It will be something to look forward to for the holidays! 
Iām sure your setup must sound pretty great, the V7s are getting excellent reviews, and I thought my GT was fantastic with ājustā the V6s and Supercharger.
Keep us posted with further thoughts after some time with the Tungsten, and it has some listening time on it. 
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Hi, just curious, as @GoldenSound mentioned the Midgard for quieter listeners, would 75 db - 80 max fall within that range? Would I lose some of the sound by using the Midgard as my amp instead of a more expensive Jotenheim for instance, if Iām listening at relatively low volumes? This is the only thread where I have seen some reasonable, less than 1K dollar amps being recommended for the tungsten. Are there other options? Ideally under 400 usd, the less the better.
Midgard will work fine.
The thing with tungsten is that more expensive amps, and in fact even amps with higher power ratings, usually will not be able to power tungsten better or get them louder.
Tungsten is limited by the max voltage output of the amp, and for the vast majority of headphone amps on the market, due to how the power rails are set up they will have 20V max output +/-10% and so regardless of whether an amp is 4W @ 32 Ohm, 6W @ 32 Ohm or 10W @ 32 Ohm, they will all almost certainly have the same max voltage output, there are hardly any amps on the market where this isnāt the case.
Basically we are waiting for manufacturers to release some amps that have a higher max voltage output. The 300 Ohm power spec is what you need to pay attention to for Tungsten. The 32 Ohm spec unfortunately tells us absolutely nothing
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I realize these two results are from different measuring devices (or techniques), but I donāt understand the apparent discrepancy. Can someone help explain, or alleviate my confusion? It looks to me from the first graph that the output at 3k is at the bottom of or below the lower bound of the preference range, while in the second itās above the bound, no?
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One is Harman, the other is DFHRTF baseline. Harman technically fits within the bounds. But also, different rigs = different ears/head = different response.
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Imo, the current Headphones.com HBK 5128 preference curve on the first graph is simply too forward in the upper mids. I think the folks who are making the decisions on these things at Headphones.com are doing the best they can with the info they have available btw. And they just havenāt got it quite right yet. This is just my opinion though. And Iām sure there are some others here who will probably disagree.
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Yes, weāre well aware of your concept, and thatās fine. Youāre allowed to have opinions/ideas that differ from whatās been established. But letās also ensure that discussion stays in its appropriate place on the forum, such as one of the specific threads we have on this topic. Just so itās all in one place.
EDIT: FWIW, I do also think we should bake in a 3khz adjustment like the most recent Harman OE research has, but thereās no actual data for that. Just a post-hoc adjustment.
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Hey there! I think there are some comparisons and tidbits that we couldnāt show at the time of this video that we can show now, and they might help clear things up.
For one, when this headphone is compared across rigs in a more apples-to-apples way (using Diffuse Field calibration), we get a result thatās a bit less strange.
Now this might still look like a problematic mismatch, but this is just showing how the headphone physically behaves differently when placed on these two heads, which is how we should be showing headphone measurements, because these differences exist across real humans!
If your head is more like the GRAS 43AG-7 with KB50xx pinna (in orange), then you might find Tungsten a bit too warm in the mids with a noticeable treble spike around 11 kHz. If your head is like the 5128, you might find the mids a bit less warm, and the treble spike lower in frequency.
Hope that helps!
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Yup, this illustrates what weāve been saying quite well. Interestingly this is an example where the HpTF variation isnāt all that strong - at least between these two heads. Kinda cool for the Tungsten IMO.
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Thank you for the replies, Resolve and listen_r. Iām still a bit of a newbie here, so I apologize if Iāve overstepped. And will try to keep my remarks as brief as possible. I think Spearthrower_Owl has raised an important question re the differences between the Harman curve and the current Headphones.com preference curve, which is not really answered well by the above posts or remarks on this subject.
Different heads will indeed measure differently, as both Resolve and listen_r indicate. But compensation is supposed to remove most of those differences by subtracting the subject or rigās measured HRTF characteristics from the raw in-ear stimulus (headphones, in this case). This is a concept that I think some still do not grasp or fully appreciate. And itās one of the main reasons we do compensation. Itās not a perfect system though, particularly when the sound source used for compensation (a diffused field, in this case) may be appreciably different than the measured stimulus (headphones). But it can at least get you somewhat closer to the ballpark (as listen_rās new graph above appears to illustrate).
Showing two DF compensated measurements doesnāt really get us any closer though to understanding why there are differences or discrepancies in the way the Harman target response curve and the Headphones.com preference curve relate to the measurements.
When we talk about two different heads in this type of context, I think itās also important to recognize and clarify that the GRAS 43AG used for some of the above measurements isnāt really āa headā with its own measurable DF HRTFā¦
https://www.grasacoustics.com/fileadmin-gras/Products/43ag_web-2.jpg
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Has anyone done a side by side comparison of the Tungsten with the OG Hifiman HE6? One can get a well maintained OG HE6 on the second hand market for roughly the same money minus the waiting time. And they both are very amp picky, although in different ways (voltage vs. current). Given that Tungsten is often referred to as āthe new HE6ā, it would be interesting to hear an actual comparison. @Resolve mentioned some similarities in the FR. It would be interesting to see also more subjective factors like comfort, detail retrieval, timbre, etc.
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I have this same question. I have a LP 4-screw HE-6 driven by a Rag 2, wondering if the double sided Tungsten is an upgradeā¦ or sidegrade.
There seems to be some confusion here.
Subtracting from DFHRTF for each rig wonāt make two measurements of the same headphone taken on different rigs look the same. Rather, it will reveal differences in the headphoneās behavior on each head. This was always something we were aware of, even when we began this project.
HpTF variation is also a significant factor when you measure headphones on different real heads.
The reason they are comparable is that this is based on the same sound field (diffuse field) for each head. So we can show the differences for a given headphoneās behavior from head to head - thatās precisely the point.
Regarding the different GRAS fixtures, it was a KEMAR that was used.
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Got it, thank you. Itās fascinating how this particular headphone compares with the two benchmarks! The two measurements are actually quite similar, until around 6k or so. There is a striking difference in the measurements at 8k though (which, perhaps of interest to some, happens to be the frequency at which a middle-aged listener with generally healthy hearing but with a history of noise exposure, and some mild noise-induced hearing loss at 2-4k, will be most sensitive to). Cheers