My SR1a are OOC 
, Again, 
The cable came unsoldered at the R-side headphone plug. This is the replacment cable RAAL sent me after the same exact thing happened to the original cable.
Has anyone else seen this?
I’m reluctant to get another cable from RAAL if they’re so fragile. I def haven’t been rough with them. Does anyone know of alternatives?
Hello, I have just bought a nice replacement cable set for my SR1a (headphone and resistor box to amp) from Invictus Cable (Italy). You can contact them here: emiliano.bruschi@live.it.
Very happy about sound, build quality and aesthetics.
Emiliano is a professional cable maker of course, he’s a great guy to deal with, can provide you with custom termination, length etc., and has a sensible pricing policy.
The photo below does not make justice to the cable actual looks, but here it is 
Looks nice. Thanks for the suggestion.
Can you use/borrow a soldering iron to solder the wire back on?
If not, there are decent battery-operated solder guns for like $10 these days. If one is into audio, having a solderer is so useful.
Dave from RAAL called and they’re sending me a new cable.
He also said the ETA for the HSA amp is late July. They’re in the process of getting it CEC certification.
Happy Cake Day @simorag.
Thanks 
Celebrating with some good music for now, next some nice Italian seafood on the beach 
I just wanted to post some initial measurements and impressions here.
Keep in mind that the SR1a has an extremely unique fit to it that makes the tonality change depending both on the angle of the flaps and the forward/backward positioning. With that said, I took all of these measurements with it at the optimal position for how I wear it (what sounds best to me).
Apart from the bass roll-off, I think this measures (and sounds) really quite good. The upper midrange and treble balance in particular is really nice. With the bass, when you move the flaps inward, it is possible to get a bit more energy in the mid and upper bass, but at the same time it also loses a bit of treble presence, which wasn’t to my taste. The midrange forwardness seems to be there on every measurement I take where it’s at an optimal position for the rest of the FR, but I don’t mind that at all. When you adjust them forward/backwards this does change a bit as well.
Okay now onto a few other things. For the most part, I find the detail retrieval and image clarity to be excellent. Treble and upper midrange detail is really quite good. For mids and bass, I feel like that’s the SR1a’s weakest point. For other technicalities, I find it’s not a particularly punchy sounding headphone, so not the greatest for dynamics. And I don’t think this is just due to the bass roll off, because even when adding a low shelf by a few dB it still doesn’t give me much punch. I think that’s okay though because it does sound sufficiently lively throughout the rest of the FR - not unlike the HEDDphone, although I’ll have to spend more time going back and forth to get a proper sense of that.
Soundstage is one of the more strange aspects of the SR1a to my ear, and in a way kind of disappointing. I don’t find it as spacious as I thought it might be. I think this is because when I position it in such a way that’s optimal for tonal balance to my ear (what I like, and as close as possible to what the measurement shows), it loses quite a bit of the space and stage characteristics. So I suppose it’s not to say that it doesn’t have them, like when I move it forward on my head I get the increased sense of space one might expect. And when I open the wings up wide, it does sound more spacious and open, but this also has an impact on the FR that I’m not a huge fan of. So I think if you want the space and stage, it’s there with the SR1a, but that may also be at the cost of a bit of tonal balance.
Where’s the beef, I mean bass?
There appears to be little meat on these bones. 
Yeah I think this kind of roll-off is to be expected with this type of headphone. Folding the flaps in all the way does bump it up a bit, but at the cost of a bit of upper mid and treble balance.
This article @antdroid recently posted would suggest that based on how it measures, that the SR1a isn’t very good.
This is interesting, as quite a few forum members really love the SR1a. 
On the contrary, I think it measures quite well. Apart from the bass roll-off and slight forwardness around 2khz, this matches the target very well. Keep in mind, that target uses the 2018 Harman mids and treble, which is a bit more relaxed than the 2013 one at 2khz. Can I ask, which area do you mean specifically?
I was looking at the overall measurement, but the two areas you pointed towards are the stand-outs.
The steep slope from about 1200k to 2k looks interesting. That peak between 5k-6k is another stand-out.
The bass roll-off doesn’t look good. I understand why people discuss pairing a subwoofer with their SR1a now.
It’s important to remember that these are using very fine grained scaling intervals, so it’s not like deviations on graphs that go by like 5dB or something (each line is 1dB here). Also, when normalized on this compensation, there aren’t any peaks that show up, at least nothing significant. It’s only the gradual elevation at 2khz.
I’ve heard this on the JotR. It’s really very good. It’s odd, both in appearance and gear needed to run it, which is why I didn’t buy one. If i could use it with regular equipment, I’d own one.
Bass is present, but yes, it isn’t loud. Oddly, i think having a subwoofer nearby might work really well with these. They are more like listening to speakers in many ways than they are like listening to headphones.
Crazy the stage isn’t that impressive. You’d think it would go on for days.
It must be an “ear speaker” anomaly with measurement rigs.
That’s what I was thinking, but actually the Arya has a more spacious presentation to me.
Honestly I found this as well when I auditioned it. Opening the flaps definitely does open up the soundstage in front of you in a more speaker-like fashion, but it didn’t sound particularly vast, and the fact that it’s fully open means you don’t feel the physical punch/impact/tension as much as from headphones with a front seal. The lack of that physical element is what I found to be the main culprit. I guess it’s as subjective as anything, but for me it felt like the music just wasn’t able to really come to life mostly due to that.
Very interesting experience, definitely unique and excellent in its own regard. Just not something I’d enjoy much for recreational listening.
I’ve listened to many headphones and the SR1a are the only ones i’ve thought had something equivalent to a speaker-like soundstage.
By that I mean they create the illusion of music coming from a stage in front of you so it sounds as if you’re actually listening to a performance (at least to some extent).
I’m not sure that’s what people mean when they refer to soundstage when listening to headphnes, though. I think they mean seperation between the instruments maybe?
The SR1a also do that well for me but not as much as some headphones I’ve heard. Though I would say the Sr1a are very realistic in that regard.
Just my opinions of course (using them with JotR and TT2). Others will hear differently.
