Welcome @Bertel.
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Good luck with your new purchase. I am looking forward to your impressions as are a lot of folks. I could never afford such a stunning setup but it’s great to hear from guys like yourself and others in the community who are able to bite the bullet so to speak.
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I want to take a step back here and re-iterate a couple of points that, while I pointed out early on in the thread, may have gotten lost/forgotten (or simply not see) by more recent thread-entrants:
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Compared to most listener’s typical expectations, and the tuning of a great many headphones, the studio-neutral presentation of the SR1a is going to come off as a bit bass-light and a little bright. They take EQ well, and it’s easy to dial that bottom end to Abyss-like bass levels - but you’ll need proper power on tap to do that, and without EQ they’re going to have a bottom end more like the Utopia with slightly earlier roll-off. Even without EQ, however, they exhibit the best bass-quality and texture I’ve heard from a headphone.
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Power with these is not just about volume … have too little of it and things like dynamics start to suffer as well.
Remember those two things and you should be fine … but don’t come into these expecting to run them without EQ while expecting planar-levels of bass, nor run them off a flea-power speaker amp and be surprised if they lack dynamics and impact.
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Now Miriam has her answer to where that naughty little flea went!
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I spent a little time at a friend’s place with the SR1a last night. This did two things … let him hear them in his rig, and let me resolutely eliminate at least one of the amplifier pairings I had been considering to match with them (at least for my use).
The amp in question is the McIntosh MA252, which is a tube/hybrid, and in theory is rated suitably for power at 100 into 8Ω and 160w in 4Ω, and even has proper phono inputs. I think it’s a lovely looking piece - though I do wish they’d incorporated VU meters into it), and have, on more than one occasion, looked for a suitable use case for it in my setup such that I could justify buying one.
To be sure, this is a more “musical” and “laid back” amplifier than I would usually consider for my own listening, something I’ve found to be generally the case with McIntosh stuff, but its still a nice piece. I liked it better than the MHA100, for example.
Now, with the SR1a …
Even without any bass-EQ, it was a push to get to satisfying playback levels. With EDM or anything with much low-frequency content, we were pushing the MA252 into clipping before the SR1a got loud enough to be enjoyable. But even modern pop/rock was not something we could get to satisfying levels here. And even at the levels we did attain, dynamics were lacking (easily beaten by any of the Focal cans, for example).
This was easy to tell as the MA252 has a feature that’ll flash the illumination of the tubes their natural amber/orange color (usually it lights them up in “McIntosh Green”) when it begins to clip. That feature may be a little over-protective, as just causing it to occur had not, yet, resulted in nasty audible clipping but going a little further did result in audible artifacts.
Enabling my bass-EQ boost, which is just a gently sloping profile that compensates for the bass-roll off below 30 Hz, and brings the level up just a bit from 100 Hz down (as I am finding I listen with the wings not fully closed-down), caused the MA252 major pain. Overall levels had to be reduced further, taking them even further from “acceptable”.
A bit of a shame, since the tone of the MA252 with the SR1a was quite lovely.
If you consume a diet of mostly small-ensemble Jazz, classical quartets, solo guitar or piano or other less bass-emphatic music then you’ll probably fair better, but my broader tastes, and some focus on stuff that will be more of a challenge to juice properly, I cannot see this being a good pairing with the SR1a.
I will be testing it again … mostly because I need to borrow his amplifier to do proper pictures when I write up it’s comparison formally, and I want to measure them to see what levels we really where hitting with a bit more precision … but for now it’s off the list of amping possibilities for me.
I should say that, sitting here with the dual Vidar’s again this morning I am finding absolutely NOTHING to complain about. Even with the single Vidar, the combination had already put a number of my dynamic headphones on the “endangered species” list. But it will be interesting to see what other changes, if any, really come about as the “supposed quality” of the amplifiers I have in mind to try is a) audible vs. the Vidar and b) results in an obvious improvement (just “different” I would expect, but that’s not always for the better).
Of note, the ridiculously clean numbers posted by the Benchmark AB2H make me particularly interested to try that combination. Using it with speakers I’ve found it to be rather lean and a bit dry, and any purported benefit to it’s ultra-low-distortion numbers weren’t really evident - likely because the speakers it was driving have three or four orders of magnitude more distortion themselves (as they typically will). But maybe with the SR1a it’s theoretical performance advantage can actually be meaningfully leveraged.
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Of note, the ridiculously clean numbers posted by the Benchmark AB2H make me particularly interested to try that combination. Using it with speakers I’ve found it to be rather lean and a bit dry, and any purported benefit to it’s ultra-low-distortion numbers weren’t really evident - likely because the speakers it was driving have three or four orders of magnitude more distortion themselves (as they typically will). But maybe with the SR1a it’s theoretical performance advantage can actually be meaningfully leveraged.
That’s exactly along my line of thinking. Yes, please do try the AHB2 if you find the time and can get your hands on them, there might be a good reason why they were used for the SR1a‘s development, and your opinion towards that, especially in comparison to the amps you already have tested, would be very helpful!
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My impression regarding AHB2 auditions with a couple of different speakers were similar with @Torq. It’s a bit flatter than what I usually like or enjoy. To less extent, I felt somewhat similar with HPA4 with familiar headphones. So, maybe what I seek departs from Benchmark. Rather curious about how SR1a sound from SPL Performer as I liked Phonitor 2 over HPA4.
And for this reason, I also think that AHB2 could (or should) be used to voice transducers or produce musics – believing such creations tend to reflect “inverse” characters of upstream.
I am also wary of Alex (Raal)'s preference on DAC3, which I never choose for my uses any day. Not sure whether it’s a matter of preference or intentional choice.
But ultimately this is a hobby where one guy’s boring becomes other guy’s accurate. I see the wide spectrum of human sonic preference. 
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I just see that Srajan (6moons) has published an add-on to his review in which he now favours the Kinki Studio EX-M1 and calls it “the ideal SR1a driver”, stating that “sonically it’s a clear step up from the Job 225”. This path of matching can and amp is getting a bit strange and obscure for me, hard to understand what‘s actually going on and what the determining factors (apart from power >120W, that‘s understood) might be…
EDIT: I personally will want to have a look at Krell and Pass, both up-to-date and vintage, for me ever since they are almost synonymous with current, lots of it and always more than you need in any situation, which probably is kind of the point here.
And I‘ll get back in touch with Soo In from Bakoon - over at Super Best Audio Friends the discussion on whether to get rid of the Interface box and directly hook up a high-quality Current amp like some of Bakoon’s pedigree sounds very appealing to me.
(And yes, I am well aware that I don‘t even have the SR1a yet… 
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I came to the same conclusion with the Phonitor X vs. the HPA4. Not withstanding that the THX AAA 789 is extremely hard to tell apart from the HPA4 …
I actively didn’t like the DAC1. I can’t tell the difference between the DAC2 and the DAC3, even with practice in sighted tests beforehand. I didn’t much care for them either, though. If I was after an ESS-based DAC in that price range I’d start with the Matrix X-Sabre Pro.
But it does depend on whether we’re talking about “listening to music for pleasure” vs. “attaining some specific measurement reference”. The latter is great for engineering and design, the former how I prefer to buy gear for my own use!
On the Performer s800 front, that was the first amplifier I wanted to try the SR1a with, originally. But none are available in the US in black for a month, so comparisons there will be delayed (and will require an audition unit, as I’m not special-ordering that far out).
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I’ve heard lots of good things about the EX-M1. I know Alvin Chee is one of the represtantives for it, and he’s chosen some interesting products as part of his “Vinshine Audio” brand in the past, and is known to be a stand-up guy and offers good customer service.
People I know, who have the EX-M1, say good things about it … thought they characterize it more towards the technical presentation than the organic or involving.
My experience with some of the other brands I’ve seen Alvin pick up has been that they’re usually massively well built, with excellent choice of parts, but have been a bit underwhelming (to me), in terms of delivered sonic performance and value.
A much bigger concern is that there is no trial/audition or return possible - which is not the way I want to deal with expensive audio components from brands I’ve not heard of. Sometimes dealers take care of that side of things, but as far as I know there’s no KinkiStudio dealer in the US - let alone one offering auditions of the nature I would require.
I have other concerns looking at the internals of the EX-M1. For one, it’s designer clearly wants to have lots of thermal capacity to avoid big power shifts in the active devices from breaking them, but also wants to keep them running hotter than most designs would attempt. I say this on the basis of the massive, solid, barely-perforated heatsinks, which have great thermal capacity but clearly are not intended to dissipate that heat particularly rapidly.
In theory, a smaller thermal mass, with greater surface area, would achieve the same thing, at lower cost and weight, so I start (perhaps unfairly) wondering if the extra mass isn’t to drive a sense of “physical purpose” or “impressive weight”. Same thing happened with the DENAFRIPS DACs … massive casing that really just served to make them heavy.
Then I’m looking the components in various parts of the build. There is comparatively little supply capacitance at work here. The dual, symmetrical, mono design is nice, but I’d be worried about big dynamic swings, in to low-ish impedances, exhausting what looks (I could be missing something) to be just 4,000 µF of reserve capacitance per channel. A single VIDAR has 5x that.
As ever, I’d reserve any actual impressions until I’ve heard one … though absent a dealer springing up that can make one available for audition/review or one of my more local friends buying one, that’s not going to happen any time soon.
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I am hoping to get Alex, from RAAL, to join in the discussion here. He’s active on Head-Fi, so that’s one place to converse with him.
In advance of that, one metric I consider important with amplifiers is their slew rate (how fast they can ramp up voltage) … and few of those recommended power-plants I’ve looked at the spec have been a bit slower than I consider “reasonable” for a modern solid-state amplifiers. Op-amp/monolithic based designs sometimes have this measures in tens-of-volts-per-µs … where as discrete may slip in ms territory. This is important for transient response (and would be quite visible as differences in square-wave response).
Though in the case of the SR1a, which is fundamentally current-drive, instantaneous current-delivery would seem to be more important.
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I am hoping to get Alex, from RAAL, to join in the discussion here.
Oh yes, that would be extremely beneficial! For both sides I‘d reckon
Though in the case of the SR1a, which is fundamentally current-drive, instantaneous current-delivery would seem to be more important.
Sure, absolutely. But how is this best measured in a conventional speaker amplifier? Is there a parameter that is being communicated in specs / measurements to evaluate and compare exactly this?
And well, in addition, I must say that (for me) it still feels kind of wrong that there is an Interface box sitting between amp and ribbons that does the passive V/I conversion and by that removes the amp from being able to directly control the drivers. As said, using Current Amplifiers (not that I would know of any apart from Bakoon) would seem the right thing to do. But probably that‘s something to better take care of with a next version of the SR1x then
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A lot of the better more expensive ones actually quote their peak current delivery in their specs. Which varies a lot. 20A peak current seemed like a decent baseline. I’ve seen this quoted into “welding territory” with amps I didn’t expect it, and in the single digits for former aspirational gear.
I imagine a few changes if there is a “next version” of the SR1a, at least with the interface box. Switchable levels of treble-de-emphasis being one. Pass-through/switching for those wanting to use them in an existing speaker setup (better amps do not tend to have switchable A/B speaker outputs) as another.
I am considering swapping the XLR socket on the interface I have to switch its gender, mostly so I can use a “better” (or at least “audiophile”, for what it’s worth), 4-pin XLR on the headphone connection. It might not meaningfully improve the nature of the interface’s connection, but it’d at least provide more options on the headphone side.
Don’t see this in a production offering, as plugging in the wrong can to the interface, or the wrong can to another amp, would result in something breaking. But if I like the results I may offer it as a modification to owners (with suitable disclaimers).
Waiting on parts now for a new cable build … already got the ultra-precise sub-ohm impedance metering taken care of.
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Thinking about it more …
I may just do an all-new interface box, that does what the current one does, adds switchable treble-deemphasis, moves to a dual-3 pin XLR connection (more “audiophile” connector options still as well as helping mitigating melt-down scenarios from improper connections/can-connections), and adding an optional active cable bias and an active shield to the cable.
I’ve experimented with active shielding and dielectric biasing in headphone cables before and not had results that were worth the cost-increment (or weren’t discernible at all), but the SR1a might be resolving enough to make it worthwhile.
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I know I’m chain posting a bit today … so be it … 
Dual mono-Vidars … I now have them up to 120℉ (measured at the heatsinks, calibrated, lab-grade, infrared thermometer) on a pure-afternoon-diet-of-EDM-and-other-electronica (going back to late 80’s Electro) and an 85 dB average listening level.
Hottest point on the interface box is at 85℉.
And I think I finally found a good reason to buy a decent FLIR unit …
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am very much enjoying your chain posting!
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t FLIR factory-calibrate their phone attachments for field use? Might be a way to minimize the space you need to store equipment and make it easier to post your thermal images
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Just a quick side note on the Kinki EM-X1 as potential alternative for a well-pairing amp:
I have contacted Kinki yesterday in this regard, and have received a reply already. I live in Germany, and they do have a dealer here, interestingly not too far away from where I live, will work something out with him in terms of audition and return. So just saying that Kinki does not sell direct exclusively (as I had assumed) but may be able to offer alternatives locally (assuming that this is not common knowledge yet, otherwise please ignore and forgive my newbie ignorance )
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Yep, they have dealers/distributors in various countries who can (if they wish) provide demo gear. A friend in Canada got one via Charisma Audio for audition. But in the US there are no dealers that I know of, and generally dealers in other territories aren’t allowed to operate outside them.
Definitely interested in hearing your impressions with the EX-M1.
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They do.
I was just hemming about whether to go with one of the phone-attached variants, or their standalone units. In the end I pulled the trigger on the iPhone version of the FLIR One Pro.
Should be here today.
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