It’s the exact same headphone, just in the purple Mimic package. Obviously Mimic wanted to be an exclusive vendor for Tungsten.
As far as resale goes, I get the feeling demand for this headphone is gonna be crazy for a long time. I’m not worried about selling it on if necessary
Sounds amazing. Unfortunately out of my budget at the moment. But I can be patient 
I think Feliks audio has some OTC (non-OTL) tube amps in the somewhere around $1k ballpark. They are all single-ended until you get up to very pricey ones, which shouldn’t be a problem for sound quality, but you would have to take a very careful look at whether they have power for driving the Tungsten. Another option I considered is Little Dot, which may be some of the most affordable all-tube designs with output transformers. Woo Audio is pricey, but I can definitely say that the WA22 is an amazing amp - versatile, ton of power, great sound. The only issue is around the availability of the power tubes for it - the most desirable ones have become extremely rare, and nobody is manufacturing them. The also good, but not quite as fancy ones are readily available.
Tube amps can be pretty fiddly, and you will almost assuredly be able to get higher power and lower distortion on solid state at better prices. With that said, once you go down the tube rabbit hole, they can be more addictive than nicotine or high fructose corn syrup 
. One other thing to consider is that if you get started into tube rolling, it’s another potentially spendy habit, so the amp is sometimes just the beginning of the spending for tubes, depending on how obsessive and / or impulsive you get with it.
You could try the Woo Audio Tube Mini for a preview of “tube sound” at lower cost because it really does capture the harmonic effects of tubes, but it does not capture the idiosyncrasies of how a full tube amp handles power delivery to transducers. One other hybrid to consider would be the one from Sparkos labs, it has what appears to be a very competent tube preamp and interesting design for the solid state amplification stage.
One other big thing you might consider while shopping for tube amps is whether it is solid state rectified or tube rectified. It’s another thing to tweak and obsess over, but as I understand it, tube rectification can enhance performance on transients relative to most solid state designs.
GoldenSound did a video on the WA22 that finally sold me on it, but I was very close to getting it anyway, as it reminds me of the amp in my main stereo and is compatible with the same rectifiers and driver stage tubes. I absolutely love the thing. I also swapped out its coupling capacitors - pics in the WA22 thread in these forums…
Well there is the Bottlehead Crack with Speedball. I don’t have one, but I’ve thought about the value of DIY. With all bells and whistles you’re generally around $600 plus whatever you value your time at.
Headphone Amplifier Kits Archives - Bottlehead
Ah this is what I’m talking about, thank you so much! Some great options to mull over.
I’m not even trying to get a tube amp to drive Tungsten, that’s gonna be up to the Mjolnir. I might just try the Little Dot and see what the fuss is about 
That’s an OTL amp, the OP is interested in non-OTL [EDITED FOR CLARITY]. Just noting this should a random reader head down the wrong path. I tried the weird $250 DarkVoice OTL too. It gets within 90% of the Crack on technicalities, but with lots of strangeness too. The DV also has line out so you can use it as a tube buffer stage for hybridization with another amp. I ran it with a speaker amp for a while. I plan to sell it.
IIRC, someone here said that Focal used to demo their headphones with Feliks amps.
Beware – tube rolling can involve lots of dead ends, downgrades, sidegrades, placebo effects, and wasted cash. Similar size/mass tubes tend to sound similar. I hear obvious differences based on the shape and size of the metal mass inside the tube, and I usually prefer Coke bottle shaped power tubes over straight wall power tubes. Worn-out vintage tubes (often mislabeled and sold as “new old stock”) sound terrible. Ask me how I know.
I eventually started to focus on other stuff over tube swaps, as I found that tube swaps couldn’t tame various issues. As above, I’m a convert into DAC upgrades and would direct people to swap DACs before messing with the factory tubes. In my experience transformer and capacitor size/quality seems more important than rolling tubes for overall performance.
I assume the distinction you’re making here vs. “full tube” is that the rectification in the PSU is solid-state not tube?
Sloppy me. Terrible choice of language with “full tube.” It followed from the OTL vs. non-OTL discussion prior. I was thinking hybrid-vs.-non-hybrid.
One, I think, the Echo 2. Per the Feliks website, for headphones from 80 to 600 ohms. That, along with the specified max power of 350 mW, makes me think it’s also OTL and that toroid on the top is for the power supply. I could be wrong, but in any case, not for power-hungry low-impedance stuff.
The Echo 2 is indeed an OTL.
I think most or all of the Feliks ones might technically be OTL now that I think about it, but I think they have some other feature in their circuit design that still lets them get fairly low output impedance without the transformer. The catch is that they just aren’t really any cheaper than ones that use a transformer. I should put a giant caveat here that there’s a lot I don’t know about the electrical engineering aspects of these amps, so I could absolutely be wrong about this / missing something.
Yes absolutely agreed.
I personally hate rolling tubes.
Rolling tubes rarely fixes an amp, for they most part they’ll all be electrically similar, but especially with larger power tubes there are quality related differences.
My advice is always if your buying an amp where the cost of the tubes is low compared to the cost of the amp, pick something with good feedback slanted towards what you like, buy them and forget about it. I think most of the modern Chinese tubes are quite good, the modern production Russian stuff less so. But for things like DHT’s it is worth the rediculous cost of moving to the top tier Chinese tubes or some of the Modern production Euro stuff.
The Viva is a much better amp with the Elrog 845’s than it is with the stock Shugangs, it still sounds like the Viva, but a lot more refined, but that’s an extreme example.
The issue with tube rolling is it becoming an irrational expenditure it’s easy to end up spending the cost of the amp on Tubes even if your doing it incrementally, you’d have been a lot better off just buying a better amp.
It’s all about where the overall investment makes sense, were listening to systems, not components. DAC’s can make a huge difference, but costs escalate really quickly, the first time I spent $1000 on a DAC I was blown a way by how much better than the $100-$300 DAC’s I’d been listening to it was, but it opened the door to even more expensive DAC’s, which resulted in more expensive Amps etc etc. My system is in my profile, and no one rational should be spending what I have on DAC’s.
So much priceless experience in this thread! Thank you all for the guidance 
Lokius just arrived… can’t resist… Holy SCHIIT 
This changes everything. I couldn’t get into Peace Equalizer, but this… No more treble spikes!!! Bass so clean… This just became my most valuable gear, so grateful 
One system, under knobs, indivisible. With clarity and sub-bass for all.
I really like my Lokius. I use it in the office, with … ahem … speakers.
Glad that you’re enjoying your new Lokius! I’ve had mine for the past few years and it is extremely useful for tailoring the sound of my headphones to my preferences. If you own several headphones it makes sense to try a graphic equalizer before you invest in a lot of physical (and oftentimes expensive) modifications. 
Exactly. This thing has enhanced my HE1000, to the point that I enjoy it more than Meze Elite or Empyrean, Diana MR, even the Caldera (and I’m talking about the combination of sound signature & comfort). I even auditioned the Warwick Bravura today, and that was totally limp and unremarkable compared to this $1200 Hifiman with EQ.
Lokius is incredible
New update on this topic! I finally got my Atrium open and after reading some of @Torq’s ideas on SET vs balanced amps and researching, and agonizing, etc., I grabbed a WA2 amp, which is sitting here staring right at the WA22. I am truly blown away by the difference in source gear and the impact on soundstage. Switching to the Denafrips Ares / Iris combo over the E70 Velvet made a big difference here. Then the Atrium has vastly better soundstage than any of my other cans except the HD 800 S, but it also has slam, impactful bass, and a much lower propensity for sticking icicles in my eardrums, and what I would call an overall neutral tuning - in the not overly warm, not at all bright sense. Swapping in the WA2 just takes it over the top. This combo definitely has a sense of soundstage that I can understand and experience.
It also helps to know what I’m looking for. It is not like listening to speakers, and most of the sounds don’t exactly sound like they’re coming from outside the cups, but things are spread out and imaging much better.
I really appreciate the input here that got me thinking about this issue from many more angles. The DAC and amp aren’t saving the HD 800 S from EBay, but they definitely gave me a greater appreciation for the HD 800 S that I will be able to refer to in the future that I think would’ve been unduly negative with the DAC and amp I started this process with. I guess soundstage may be one of those effects that ends up being a casualty of lots of feedback and / or balanced / push-pull topology.
BTW, let me know if anyone is interested in the HD 800 S - they’re in good shape and come with the stock 6.3 mm SE and 4 pin XLR balanced cables as well as a Null Audio Epsilon 4.4 mm balanced cable I got for them to try with more amps. I’m sure my enthusiastic description of them has everyone reading this just dying to buy a pair 
One more random thought on this topic.
I had no idea until last night that there had been a significant firmware update to the Ares 12th. I did not expect this change, but the soundstage shocked me after the change. I think I might have had a version 1.7 of the firmware, which is no longer available (the one provided for rollback is 1.5) and the upgrade is 1.8. I just grabbed it to fix a syncing issue when changing between tracks with different sampling rates (which was fixed), but listening to it, it is insane the change that happened there. I wonder if anyone somehow has an archival copy of the 1.7 firmware that could be compared to 1.8. It would be fascinating to see what changed. They did make reference in the update notes to fixing an issue with phase between L and R channel, so I wonder if that made a difference. Here is the summary of changes from the Denafrips site:
Improved Adaptive FIFO Buffer & Reclocking Architecture
Reduced the effect of Buffer overrun/underrun due to the Source’s Clock and the DAC’s Clock differences
Reduced Audio Latency
Reduced Phase Difference between L/R Channels
Optimised DSP to improve the sonic performance
Well allow me to share my experience from the solid state side 
Bought the Flux Labs Mentor amp and had a very similar experience to yours. Man I had no clue how different class A really is 
I’d only listened to Topping and SMSL before now, and I can never go back.
Regardless of what I’m playing, the tone that this amp delivers is like the sound of laughter, or ocean waves, or birds in nature. It is just pleasing to the ear in a way I’ve never experienced. I’m sure tubes are even sweeter, but I’m so happy with this.
Thank you @pennstac @generic @Torq for explaining the value of the right chain and the right synergy. I have to strike all my headphone evaluations from the record and start over, cause I wasn’t doing them justice until now 
Since my earlier response, I’ve purchased a used Eufonika H7m which seems to be in the better than entry level yet still affordable class. Under $1k, it’s an OTL model so suitable for higher impedance headphones. It seems that there are always compromises. You can buy silly expensive tubes if you wish.
So far, the experience is quite good, and the resale market is strong - this might make an acceptable entry point for you. I agree about class A - my old but restored Sansui has a class A pre-amp section, and AB output. The preamp out is impressive.