RAAL requisite audio SR1a Review: HOLY MOLY! Buy this now!

Yes, leading edge correlating with ... something we can hear?

 

I don’t have experience with these burst diagrams. But, as a physicist, I can say something about the general nature of oscillators. I’d say that gap you highlighted is just a matter of formatting the graph. The perceptual “speed” of a headphone would seem to be characterized by acceleration and damping. Amplitude of the first full sine wave is a decent measure of acceleration. The shape of the tail after the sine wave turns off indicates under, over, or critically damped behavior. LCD3 shows the best acceleration. They all show underdamped behavior, but ELEX is the closest to being critically damped.

 

Kinda flogging a dead horse, but just wanted to explain better what I was asking (as someone with a physics degree, but who's forgotten most of what I've learned).

I was wondering if the zero point of your x-axis was synced with the leading edge of the burst signal. So then those gaps would indicate a measurable delay in the sound wave created by the diaphragm in response to the leading edge of the burst. And if it was, then the SR1a appeared to have a shorter delay than LCD3 than Elex.

Apologies for digression into irrelevant minutiae ... this is what I do.

 

Even if it did, it would just be a Galilean transformation - the signal lengths are the same.

 

Does signal length matter, though? Think Hilbert would just sample the amplitude envelope over the burst, presumably telling you something similar to the oscillator ringdown post signal termination. The amplitudes do vary by eye, as you mentioned.

 

Yes it matters. In the limit that the burst goes to a very short length (a delta function) the “frequency” al la Fourier transform goes to a uniform distribution. The Hilbert transform is the same deal, just using the Cauchy kernel in the integral. But you guys are making this WAY too complicated. You don’t need to do anything other than look at them to get a ranking.

 

Understand this; just didn't see this issue with the signals being the same duration if there's enough cycles to estimate the envelope of the impulse-response function. Maybe there aren't (don't do a lot of signal processing), but again, agree about eyeballing.

Hell, sent it to me, guys. My Mathematica licence is bored

 

Agreed 100% with @Hands I’ve heard that “resolving of errors” for years about metal, ribbon, ring, and Amt tweeters yet none of them ever sound right with a ton of material. They just will get nasty on material that’s fine on even dry soft domes.

Metal isn’t even the worst offender most of the time because more popular genres have more focus on drums. Those heavily modified cymbals and snare samples are where the big pain hits. clap and gunshot snare samples will destroy ears on metal drivers. the big mastering guys will add subtle distortion too so that the additional harmonics can be heard on gear and in environments where the fundamentals won’t be heard like cars and ear buds that usually makes pop a wash but sometimes means brings the pain even more so on harsh setups.

Even a well miced up clean electric guitar amp is a harmonically distorted, resonant mess that colored as hell gear, even some “monitor” speakers that cost thousands, will struggle to replay and the published specs of it won’t tell you anything as some nos dac or CD player from 1995 might come way closer than a Topping. Punk and metal bands who shell out for studio time (the guys with slightly more money than the direct input guitar and samples pack drum guys now) can’t afford people who need them to get to cover that 2000 dollar outboard distortion boxes and 200 dollar plugins. These guys can’t even afford 400 dollar Ibanez, an interface, and the software to diy a lot of the time. They are short on money and time. You wait for weeks to get a hundred bucks outta them because they need pay rent or need to replace a couple mic cables. If your setup can’t painlessly play back cheap and quick productions that sound like summed together, cleanish rough tracks because the band doesn’t have the time, knowledge, money, or will to truly mess them up then you got a problem. Sorry B&W, HD-700/800, and Audeze fazer razors.

 

The compression artifacts are in your face because the transducer or amp can’t replay small transients and is shitting the bed. The HD 800 and most speakers and power amps without an always active limiter on them (hello extremely shitty PA electronics and Yamaha HS Line) CAN! Loudness war heavily limited and maximized masters and mixes jsut will either sound small or wall of sound depending on how loud you crank it on truly good gear. It takes something like Californication or Death Magnetic to sound truly bad. Even Iggy’s raw power remaster is mostly a wash despite the clipping.

Recordings are made mushy with saturating compressors or distortion to provide more perceived vocal and string definition because the midrange is what survives the processing! The my sphere has god awful volume issues and totally shits the bed when pushed to real volumes. Because it can’t even play at anything close to reference levels, it is a distorted piece of crap not worthy of comparison to anything that can. An HD 25 is less distorted.

Since you’re obviously not listening at anything within the general ballpark of reference levels, your opinion about tolerance is god damn irrelevant. Even the DT 990 middle finger of death is listenable at 50 dB.

 

Show impressions from canjam

Pretty comfy, weird fi
Hedd produces more realistic notes due to the timbre and dynamics, they decay faster than the hedd giving it a plastic timbre.
The tone is a tad dark, less airy sensation than hedd.
Lower treble is dipped (?)
The stage is more fleshed out, but the overall presentation is less realistic.
I can see why estat fans will love this.
This has a similar presentation, but offers a more normal tone, with a more realistic timbre and greater lower level detail. There is low level detail.
Less ethereal than estats, and a lot more dynamic heft than those.
Bass guitars sound a bit anaemic, but the headphones have bass, sort of the midbass bump with subbass roll of trick
Push back the drums in epitaph, despite staging the different locations well, making a vocal heavy presentation.
Vocal timbre is quite good on these, just something sounds off(?)

This was off of vidar with Jotunheim as a pre.

 

Even more interested now to hear Jason's direct drive prototype with the SR1a's now. @purr1n - Any plans to get such a Schiit prototype and compare it?

Also wonder how something like Nelson Pass's Adcom GFA5800 would do with these.

 

@purr1n .. Have you tried your old Pioneer M22? I’m not sure, but might be a touch better: I think the gain on that is 23 dB vs. the 20dB of XA25. M22 lacks intense slam but it’s so beautiful in its finesse; better than Pass XA30.8, IMHO. I’d also be curious how you feel about it vs the XA25 in more general terms.

 

Thanks Marv. Super useful. I have an XA25 coming and will also post my impressions in a week or so. Your criticism of the bass seems consistent with this decent review. I’ll be comparing it to M22 for driving HifiMan planars. There are few other options: Noise floor of the other XA-series amps is too high, and I’m not in the Krell market.

 

Did you end up using an active preamp with the XA25 on your speakers, or just the nano patch?

 

Do you think an active preamp would bring out an improvement to the bottom end?