HiFiMan Arya Organic Review

@purr1n sorry for the bother but did you do burst response and attack/decay for this one yet? Kinda curious how that'd track with your impressions of them in the grand scheme of pretty-samey-sounding HFM headphones.

 

I need one of those with 15yr Whistle Pig.

 

Having both Arya Stealth and HE5XX, I can honestly understand that reccomendation completely lol. The Arya Stealth are still bright-slanted, even if the treble timbre is better.

The Arya Stealth fit my use case as something to switch from my usual dark stuff. I'd argue they got all of these headphones up to a more pleasing flavor of bright when they brought in the stealth magnets and nano-coated diaphragms. They don't play nice with everything though - picky with power even though they're more efficient, and unforgiving on anything with poor treble or just sudden bursts of treble energy. I personally EQ them to tame it out and then they become pretty amazing - they take EQ well and respond a lot to smaller adjustments, though to be fair I already own EQ hardware that I can just use. I also run a Modibit through a Liquid Platinum, good synergy helps but by then it's still an investment even with them going for ~$600. I bought them for that, having good shit to run to them.

The HE5XX may not have that particulate detail or spaciousness, or that lightning zip, but they're similarly airy with a much more widely-agreeable tonal balance. That slight dark slant with maybe a little toastiness on the top, with a flat-but-slightly-recessed midrange kinda just works for everything. Those are a nice-sounding pair of headphones, if you can live with the zero-clamp, weightlessly cheap build. Maybe a little plasticky and ethereal sounding at times, but mostly a warm and organic sound with a little breathing room and a shimmer of detail overhead. I still throw those on from time to time myself, usually lounging on the porch at night. I think one of the drivers has spun a bit over the years, but TBH I haven't noticed a difference in sound lol

Come to think of it, is it fair of me to say the HE5XX still has more natural mids than any of these egg-shapped models? I feel like that might actually be the case. They sound the closest to "normal" to my ears. The Arya Stealth offer more of an "artificial" or "enhanced" experience by comparison. FWIW I think they do that well, but there is a distinct character they impart to the mids that isn't as exaggerated on the HE5XX.

 

I own these, the arya organic, and have been living with them for many months now, so I thought I would try to give a couple of brief thoughts.

My pair doesn't seem to exhibit a headstage issue or imaging issue at all. Head stage isn't as wide as an hd800, but it is plenty out from the head, and has plenty of depth. Imaging is on another level, vocals are dead center etc. I'm wondering if the channel imbalance on your pair is killing the soundstage.

 

I kinda wonder that too. Having tried both those and the Stealth I wound up taking instead, both are pretty great in that regard. It's a different presentation, but I think it's at least as precise as HD800-series, though I agree it's more reigned in on width/depth. I mean, I'm not the guy to ask about soundstage and would happily use Grados if I found a pair with tone I liked. But in my travels I've tried a lot of headphones where it's a major selling point, heard it, and am pretty confident saying these eggy Hifimans are in the upper percentile of 'staging' headphones. Like, among stagers, there are still better/different options... and then there are the majority of headphones, with significantly less soundstage all around.

One thing I do notice about their staging... and for me this is the differentiator from a lot of other staging cans like these... they draw out forward and lateral elements in a mix, render "more" of that information about different elements, but they don't give you space where there isn't. Things mixed to sound intimate still do. Maybe that makes it more subdued to some. HD800 series puts everything up on that big stage, where as this run of Hifimans seems more content to let things that are mixed close be close, alongside trailing transients and spacial cues. So you can have elements that are off in the ether, alongside things that are basically enveloping you.

One thing I will note about the precision - it trails off the further 'away' things are. Everything increasingly exists in general probability zones. Not everybody will like that, but I like to think of it as laid-back imaging. Very opposite to how my LCD2C's render things, where everything emerges clean and quick from clear points that are perfectly-packed like tetris bricks. Details and spacial cues fly off unpredictably like lightning bolts, but the decay spreads across the stage quickly, which I think is sort of the rub point for a lot of people with "ethereal" sounding headphones. They image well, but without that full-bodied "macrodynamic finality."

I like that I can have everything from front-center, to out in the backdrop, to whispering directly into each ear, or even sneaking behind me. It's on a level where I wonder if the cup shape isn't activating head-transfer zones - I hear hard panned doubled vocals as having pseudo crosstalk, the same as if someone was singing into each ear and some of the sound was continuing around the back of my head to the back of the other ear, like it would if it was traveling through space normally. I can't think of any other headphone that sounded so distinctly like it had natural crosstalk. I really do wonder if the combination of openness, angle, and cup shape lends to a lot more of this for some than others. Or maybe it's just picking up more good mid/side work in the masters, definitely not nothin to it though!

That may even be a downside. I still get the center image in those instances. I just also get the shorter transients and 'breath' localized to their left and right sources, I can distinctly pick out two voices to my left and my right. With layered harmonies, they reach out by loudest to quietest. It's kind of fascinating to me.

If anything, I give the imaging edge to the organics over the Stealths. But honestly, it's one of my favorite things about them. To me, they're very spacious without overdoing it.

 

Dude, that's a whole fustercluck. You have Hifiman QC, and then you have different heads with ears that hear differently. And then the SAME headphones make a different sound on a different head!

But I wouldn't be surprised to find out we were all listening to different headphones unknowingly, cuz Hifiman. Also, majority of people seem to fall into a fairly tight normative range when it comes to what they hear from a given pair of headphones, and then there are a few outlier people who really do get a drastically different experience from the same headphone. Most of us probably do hear them about the same.