@taronlissimore - Why does the forum make me follow/track new threads like this automatically? So annoying. I don’t want anything to do with the devourer of headphones L30 explody thing.
Also… if you have $1600 headphones, why are you cheaping out with a $150 amp? Save a few more bucks and get something worth owning.
Sorry, I need coffee. Don’t mind me. Carry on.
I mean, if you believe that the L30 is all you need for Arya, go for it. It’s extremely tough to believe that a $1600 headphone is performing at it’s best with a $130 amp. If that is true, I would recommend the L30 wholeheartedly and don’t believe it makes sense to buy anything else.
Things don’t always need to perform at their best, they just need to perform at a level that we are happy with and don’t leave us longing for more/better.
If things needed to perform at their best, we would all need to be objectivists and in which case, the L30 is objectively a great amplifier (except for melting headphones of course).
If we are to be subjectivists, then we can’t have a subjective opinion about something until we try it (or at least I can’t).
This is not meant to be for or against the L30 with the Arya, as I said, I haven’t heard them.
I think we can all agree that not everyone can be objectivist and not everyone can be subjectivists. All I’m saying is go ahead and use an L30 with your Arya. I think you’re missing out on what the Arya can do with that amp.
In my experience with the cheaper planar Dan Clark AEON Flow Closed, I concur. Planar headphones seem to do well with high current delivery, “excessive” amps, and Class A amps.
The L30 just isn’t that kind of product.
I would agree, L30 doesn’t quite deliver the same experience as some of the current gain based Class A designs. But @SenyorC makes a good point about performing at a certain level, and honestly price does NOT equal performance…
I imagine Ayra may do well with the Magni 3 or another current gain based discrete power amps, and honestly a $1600 headphone on a $130 amp will do better I think than a $130 headphone on a $1600 amp… an in my honest opinion there are a lot of… mediocre amps in and around $400/500 range that are better than stuff like L30 but not nearly as impressive as the more robust designs you see around $1000 or so, stuff like the GSX Mini for example or the Bryston BHA 1 or even the now discontinued Apex Sangaku
Anyways @driftingbunnies have you heard L30 and Ayra? If so what didn’t you like about it
@mshenay I can’t say that I’ve heard the combo together. However, I have heard the Arya and how it sounds on different level amps and based on reviews I’ve read on the L30, I can triangulate how the L30 will sound. Without the proper amplification, dynamics and bass might sound off or just outright bad with the Arya. Now if you haven’t heard it before, you might not notice a difference and that might be where you were going with “good enough”. Ignorance is definitely bliss when it comes to audio.
I believe very strongly in a balanced system. If you spend way too much money on the headphones but barely any on the chain, it can easily give you a terrible experience. If you’re looking to spend a total of $2k, I wouldn’t buy an arya for 1600 and spend 400 on the rest. I’d much rather allocate 1k to the headphones and 1k to a dac/amp. Which headphone and which dac/amp is dependent on the person. Similar to how you would never put prius tires on a porsche, I don’t think it’s good advice to put Arya or any headphone that requires power with a cheap SS amp. There are just too many compromises made in order to hit the L30 price point (i.e. exploding amps).
However, if I’m truly wrong and the L30 is the amp that destroys all amps, I will need to get one in my hands some day. I’d love to hear the amp that will end my audio journey.
Go into your personal settings and you can change it.
Or if you would prefer, I can permanently lock every off-topic post as a perma-notification for you 
( I actually don’t have that kind of power 
)
Ohh, can you ensure those come through as emails please? LOL
I agree about the compromises, I would encourage you tho to present your speculations as well exactly that. A lot of time newer members will take your words assuming you’ve heard it, and while reviews can help us triangulate how something will work it’s no substitute for hearing it.
Still I do appreciate your thoughts on the matter tho, and myself I find the JDS Labs Atom sadly kinda kills the bass tactility of my LCD 2 PreFazor… enough that I don’t enjoy it. I was however surprised that L30 maintains enough of what I enjoy about my PreFazor that I don’t find it lifeless or un-enjoyable as I did with Atom. S
Granted I enjoy most of my headphones the MOST out of my M3H but not every one has $7,500 lying around. Still for $130 I think L30 can maintain a lot of what makes some planars worthwhile. Tho yea the most recent failure has be less than enthusiastic about recommending it any more these days
That’s fair. I just don’t think pointing people to an L30 with their Arya is the best way to go. I’d rather someone rethink how they should allocate their funds. There’s been too many people who believe that power specs are all that matter when it comes to amplification which has lead to an increase in cheaply built SS amps from China. While some might have a preference for the dry sterile transparent sound that is advertised, I’ve found that those who fight the hardest about it just haven’t heard better.
There’s a reason “low powered” Class A amps cost 10-20x more than “high powered” (generally falsely advertised power) class D amps.
I concur.
I grabbed a THX 789 from the leftovers of the first release (around Nov 2018). My review at Drop compared it to a sandblaster. The ultra-clean amp profile strips away the unity and ‘skin’ from audio. So, one focuses on the muscles, bones, and organs at the expense of perceiving the whole. One is required to literally fetishize small details that were never intended to be the focus of the musical production. This is not unlike the difference between medical photography (or niche k i n k y p o r n) versus artistic human images and portraits. “Oh, look at the skeleton on that woman! Look at those blood vessels! Look at her spleen! Look at her intestines!”
With an ultra-technical amp one can hear: Hot mics - check. Room noise - check. Breathing - check. Slight volume fluctuations - check.
What about the lyrics? What about the feel? What about the tone? These are all better communicated in an integrated fashion by a non-fetishized amp.
That’s a great point! An yes I agree on a need for rethinking what constitutes a good value. I think for some L30 and something Like Arya would be enough but I’d still encourage them to take a moment to hear something better! As it’s by no means the be all end all, a good place to start really.
I’m hoping this year to get to hear more of the nicer standalone topologies that are out on the market now aside from the myriad of high feed back chip based designs.
Tho I do think there is a level of transparency that isn’t Dry or Sterile [sadly L30 doesn’t even quite reach that point] If you’d like, we can move over to the Hifiman Arya thread and I’d love to hear what amps you enjoy it with!
Something that hasn’t been mentioned so far is that measurements only look at test tones and not actual music.
So people are praying to the zero-distortion god of sine waves but what they actually use the device for is listening to music which contains really complicated waveforms.
It’s a similar situation to looking at headphone frequency response charts. The chart can tell you if something is seriously messed up but it won’t tell you the full story of how the headphones will be perceived when playing music.
That was the most oddly enjoyable thing I have read on this forum in a while! LOL 
Damn fine intestines, those. Yup.
Yup! Measurements serve as a good peak into how something performs but are never the full story. Hearing something first hand as often as possible is always the best way to gauge how it’ll actually perform!
Excellent points man, thank you for sharing
Thank you for posting this review.I have the L30 and E30 stack and have been very happy with their performance driving my HD6xx and Dt990 headphones.They replaced my Schiit stack and I think they have comparatively helped the sound and the gain switches are on the front which is better.I have the Sundara arriving tomorrow-I’ll see how they work with a planar.
Just make sure that your L30 has a serial number that starts with 2012xxxxxx or higher.
If it starts with a lower number, contact your seller for a replacement.
Thank you for the heads up.
The Topping L30 ampliFIRE sounds good but it’s features are not up to par.
The Monolith Liquid Spark sounded the best of the bunch with most of my dynamic driver headphones. This headphone amplifier was able to reproduce violins and french horns with the most texture and sometimes even outclassed $500 headphone amplifiers in terms of texture phenomena. I was most impressed with this amplifier of the bunch.
The Schiit offerings did not sound as good in low gain. Switching the Schiit amplifiers to high gain turned them into completely different sounding amplifiers altogether. I mostly preferred high gain. With modified Fostex T50RP the requirement for high power went over and beyond the normal requirement as the thick pads that I placed on them made them less efficient than any headphone I have ever used. I was able to max out all of the amplifiers in this comparison to see what they were capable of when driven beyond what they were designed to do. With this demand placed on them, the amplifiers that exceeded all of them were the Schiit amplifiers. The JDS Labs Atom, the SMSL SP200, and my favorite the Monolith Liquid Spark were not able to keep up with the Schiit amps and they would quickly distort and sputter out when turned up trying to drive the Fostex. Although I did have a problem with my Schiit Magni Heresy, they are American made if that matters to you. Schiit did say I could send it in to be repaired but I opted to just write it off as bad luck as it wasn’t worth the shipping I would have to pay. I won’t be buying any more Schiit $100 amplifiers when all of these reliable other great options are available.
The Topping L30 ampliFIRE sounded amazing with my Sony MDR-CD780. I could not believe my ears with the sweet music flowing with this pair. This was a MATCH made in heaven that BLEW AWAY any of the other amplifiers in this comparison. Literally. Because one feature that was not mentioned in the user manual was that randomly when adjusting the volume of the Topping L30, a surge of power is sent to the headphones which heats up the headphone coil in the drivers which cause them to distort, burn, and melt. This produced a sound that is crackily and poppy sounding rendering the drivers of the headphones dead and useless. No other amplifier in this comparison has this feature. The output to my JBL and Emotiva nearfield monitors did not receive this output and were spared from being burned and destroyed. With some of you owning headphones in the $1,000 to $2,000 range, I would recommend that you not use the Topping L30 ampliFIRE which might melt and destroy your drivers as well.
Of this group of amplifiers, I was very happy that I was able to return the Topping L30 ampliFIRE to get my refund. However, it remains that the Topping company has made clear to me that they will not give me a cent to cover my dead headphones that the Topping L30 ampliFIRE destroyed.
The Monolith Liquid Spark was so good that I now own three of them.
The SMSL SP200 sounds compressed, but pairs well with Fostex planars, albeit with slightly reduced soundstage. However, the other amplifiers, except the Topping L30 ampliFIRE, were usually better overall than the SMSL SP200.
The JDS Labs has a very clean preamp output and a second switchable input for a second source. These features make it stand out among the other amplifiers for the price.
Ultimately, the Topping L30 ampliFIRE is evil from the devil himself. I do not wish any Topping product upon my friends nor enemies. I feel in the next weeks to five years all of your Topping devices may start develop problems that I am reading all over the internet regarding improper soldering, assembling the internals wrong, devices failing, and worst of all the Topping ampliFIREs now burning up headphones. I have 20 year old headphone amplifiers that are American made that are flawless and reliable.
To conclude; Do yourself a favor and buy anything else but Topping. Topping can suck donkey d.
