RAAL SR1a Headphone + RAAL HSA-1b Headphone amp


I will keep this short and sweet.

The SR1a and the HSA-1b is a revolutionary product for me. A headphone that is almost as good as my amazing floor stander. I needed to apply DSP on ROON to make the floor stander fit my room. I also needed to tame the high frequency with some DSP on the SR1a headphones but I am currently using a low end Matrix Mini-i 3 Pro Delta Sigma DAC ($899) . The SR1a is revealing the short comings of this DAC. A better DAC is in the cards for 2021.

So if I were to rank my 3 setups it would be like this:

#1: Thiel CS3.7 optimized perfectly for my acoustically treated room with ROON Convolution [100/100]

#2: RAAL SR1a headphone with the RAAL HSA-1b headphone amp (with some DSP to fix the DAC) [95/100]

#3: Meze Empyrean headphone with Benchmark HPA4 headphone amp (with no DSP) [50/100]*
* I love the Meze. It is just that the other 2 are in another stratosphere.
yyzsantabarbara
Interesting, i dont give a dam for my 7 headphones(2Stax) but this Raal is very different indeed...

i am curious thanks for the thread...

Happy new Year..
Rush fans, listen to them on this combo. Wow, like seeing them live.

In some other A'gon posts I was debating whether to get a Halo May KTE DAC and/or the AudioByte VOX | ZAP | HUB. The Halo mainly to tame harshness. After the DSP adjustment with the Matrix DAC I think I will go with the AudioByte stack. I do not need to tame anything anymore with hardware. DSP is the way to go to do that.