Yeah that’s a great idea. That’ll come soon I think. And IEMs.
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LCD-5 is shouty to me, MM-500 is also shouty but not quite as much, as the balance between upper mids and treble is a bit better.
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You are on the correct path. “You get what you pay for” adage within the headphone realm applies rigidly with solid state headphone amplifiers. Many have demonstrated this after spending many dollars on amplifiers and countless combinations of headphone paired with amplifier. The further that one spends above the $1,000 price point, synergy between solid state amp and headphone becomes a diminishing issue and concern.
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With your use of a highly respected and tried and true brand such as Violectric, and selecting a $3,600 amplifier, issues of synergy becomes negligible.
I’d argue significantly below that haha. But for me versatility is key at the moment.
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Agreed! The RebelAmp is a prime example of that, punching well above its price range in the sound quality department. If a rev 2 ever comes out with more power…boom!
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I have had the exact opposite experience tbh. I find synergy to become a larger and larger factor the higher you go. For example, sub 1k I have a favorite solid state amp for basically all cans and dacs. Once you get up to 1k-1500 used I find you start getting more flavors at similar technical levels that can help some cans and hurt others (for example GSX-mini works well with new utopia but is often lack luster with arya unless you have great dac synergy mean while the v281 goes the dead oposite direction). Once you start getting up to CFA3, AHB2, Mass Kobo, V550, 13R, etc, your dac and can choice will very very largely determine what is good and what is bad. A great example here is that Spring 3 → 13R → Susvara is an utter travesty of thickness, goo, hyper smoothed textures, and completely uninvolving sound, but you swap 13R for CFA3 and you get energy back within the texture, a much more metered weight, and a serious step up in timbre as well. If instead of swapping out the 13r you swap the spring 3 for a m1se you get a very similar output. Same if you swap sus for d8kp.
TBH I think maybe a better way to put this isnt that synergy detriments are larger at the higher end, but instead that there are simply more options to get the most out of gear for a given chain price once you step up high enough that the swings become more apparent even if gear is at a similar technical level.
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The tuning on MM500 is truly fantastic tbh. I think its my favorite current production audeze (outside of CRBN but I cant use those cause my head makes them fart like crazy)
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I’m curious to hear where the Warwick Bravura falls in this list. Hearing a lot of hype for it lately and it has piqued my interest. 
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forgot to add that. Tier 1 for sure.
Edit:
Added Warwick Acoustics Bravura and move a couple of others around.
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No doubt about that. I recommend the inexpensive RebelAmp more than any amp paired with the HiFiMan HE6se V2.
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However, with headphone evaluations and a tier list, the RebelAmp would make many dynamic driver headphones pale in performance compared to how they might perform with a more expensive amplifier such as the Questyle CMA Twelve. This might skew ratings down for many headphones that don’t pair well when using the RebelAmp. The Twelve constitanly shines with most all of my headphones whereas the RebelAmp mostly shines comparatively just with many planar dynamic headphones.
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everyone told me utopia doing bad for classicals, only works for vocals, something like that can be in tier 1? where’s the $9000 stax x9000?
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Have you heard it for yourself?
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Anyone who told you Utopia is “bad” for anything was lying to you.
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Black metal… I would not choose it for black metal. 
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Ok, Utopia may be “bad” for poorly recorded music. But to be fair, so is literally everything else.
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Rather listen to poor recordings on Utopia or a Beats Solo?
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Neither. I am firmly of the opinion that poorly recorded music isn’t good music; likewise, well produced & recorded music played back on awful equipment isn’t good music. Music’s only job is to sound good. If it doesn’t sound good, it’s not good music. I know I am in the minority on that topic, but I stand by my conviction. I demand well recorded music played back on high fidelity equipment. Don’t settle for less.
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I somewhat subscribe to this as well. If only the recording industry had a true standard to ensure high(er) quality releases every time; probably a pipe dream, though.
Edit: I don’t let so-so recordings prevent me from listening to artists that I love, though; I also won’t stop listening to music in the car, which has lousy sound quality, so…
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I genuinely mourn that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, there will be this whole period of 10 or 20 (more?) years where all music is lazily produced and poorly mastered (re: the “loudness war”). It is doing a disservice to music history in the long run. But I digress.
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- Utopia works amazing for classical IMO
- X9000 is $6200 not $9000
- X9k (assuming you have a good enegizer like a Z10E) is at a fundamentally higher tier than utopia from a technical stand point but sounds extremely different.
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