I had the opportunity to listen to HE-1 at my house for about an hour, with my source and music and with no pressure of a show… quite an experience!
This was a couple months ago but I’m pasting this from another forum I shared it on.
Some impressions:
- Tuning is surprisingly consumerish, was warmer than I expected
- Internal DAC is not great, improved significantly with the Wavedream
- Single ended and balanced sounded similar when tested with the same cables, afterwards Danacable was much nicer than Prion4S
- Bass is very fun with plenty detail all over the FR
- Stage isn’t huge but accurate
- Separation wasn’t great or competitive with its competitors (thinking Shang Sr on good energizers)
- HE-1 worked better with modern music or smaller classical ensembles / more intimate jazz
I don’t believe it’s worth the money and probably not even its used pricing considering I would definitely have a DAC feeding it and then we’re comparing full systems. For its cost I see little reason to own it compared to what you can get with other options like Shang Sr, Susvara and X9000 to name a few if we’re thinking about one chain alone, but for the cost I would probably prefer owning a few options anyway and that’s easily achievable at this price.
tl;dr yes it’s great, it’s not $60K great and you can do better for different preferences and genres. The market for a type of system like this exists, it’s not really audiophiles or gear enthusiasts.
