HIFIMAN Susvara Headphone Review

[_thelaughingman]

Here we go again. People who can afford luxury goods like these Susvara don't really care to hear the objectivist tilt on whether this product is good or not. I may be generalizing this but I honestly don't think that individuals that want to buy these at the cost they're selling are looking for anything but having these as a luxury product to show off. Quit making a hash of this as a poor product and not meeting objective targets, this product is sold for the price of satisfying a niche in the high-end market.

 

[virtua]

One of the hardest things for me as an objectivist is reconciling and trying to make sense why a lot of headphones I love measure like s#!t. Though it was never a problem for me to accept it as is. I'm more than happy enough to have saved bucket-loads of money already from getting out of the dac/amp/source gear stuff. I don't really have a horse in this race, and I'd love to just have a HE400SE and 7hz x Crinacle Zero:2 and be done with it all myself, but I keep listening to some of my more expensive, often poorly measuring sets and I can't bring myself to let them go...

 

[ROOSKIE]

The poll isn't rating value or taking into account if people voting have heard these headphones - that's my main complaint.

And what do new members take away? Buy $21 IEM - it's better the Susvara? A bit extreme.
Of course just because something costs XXXX doesn't mean it's good - that is the other extreme.

Who said value can't drive a vote? I do vote that way.

I don't need to use a $5000 Rolex or Brently to know it doesn't keep time as well as any contemporary cellular phone, even a $30 burner, or any Timex watch if you really need a wrist watch.

Do I need to carry that $11,000 Gucci handbag around to understand it is a 'luxury' item and not a high performance bag.

Do we really need to listen to those $3k speaker wires to know they are overpriced? A $15 power cord works as well as just about any $2,000 one.

In 2023 I find it hard to believe people won't accept that luxury items rarely exist for performance & often a reason very far away from high performance.

IMI, $6000 headphones should be obviously mind-blowing in every conceivable way in order to receive a positive vote. If they deviate from the established frequency curve or other params, that is fine if when placed upon the head they are clearly superior.

In audio we are lucky that a few luxury hifi items do still perform well like McIntosh solid state amps and KEF blade speakers.

@_thelaughingman Really IMHO there are no headphones worth $6000, just like no power chord is worth $1000. Only there are people who need to do things like buy such items and companies are filling holes, both in the people and the 'market'.

I do understand a flagship product is often produced for overall brand success & is not often intended to be a value driven product. As well a lot of money needs to be spent to keep the world spinning, (though that can be done a variety of ways). I find it hard to ignore the bummer that this headphone is a marketing tool & cash grab for status just like some 95+% of high level price point products.

Plus just do the math @Chagall . This is a gross oversimplification of variables but imagine you sell 1000 of X vs 250,000 of Y, yet need to make meaningful profit on both. It is conceivable to make the same $, one item could cost a handful of bucks and one $1000 and yet be essentially identical products.

 

[heraldo_jones]

$6000 headphones bested by $22 IEMs. Classic. This is what ASR is all about. Thank you, @amirm!

Although I guess Hifimans does not worth their price by any means, I haven't experienced their listening experience. In the other hand while 7hz Zeros almost nail the Harman curve, having them I can say their sound is very mediocre with poor imaging and soundstage. Truthear's Zero Red for example have more or less the same response but have a much higher detail retrieval and a much better imaging and soundstage.

 

[_thelaughingman]

@_thelaughingman Really IMHO there are no headphones worth $6000, just like no power chord is worth $1000. Only there are people who need to do things like buy such items and companies are filling holes, both in the people and the 'market'.

I do understand a flagship product is often produced for overall brand success & is not often intended to be a value driven product. As well a lot of money needs to be spent to keep the world spinning, (though that can be done a variety of ways). I find it hard to ignore the bummer that this headphone is a marketing tool & cash grab for status just like some 95+% of high level price point products.

Plus just do the math @Chagall . This is a gross oversimplification of variables but imagine you sell 1000 of X vs 250,000 of Y, yet need to make meaningful profit on both. It is conceivable to make the same $, one item could cost a handful of bucks and one $1000 and yet be essentially identical products.

I understand your opinion but let's agree to disagree that at the end of the day, overpriced items are priced as such to stoke the egos of few that can afford it. We live in a world where individuals with excess money can throw their money around on overpriced items and not bat an eye at the cost. Yes they could be better but even a $11k Gucci bag has shortcomings that most individuals that own them would not consider to gripe about. Well there's a lot of marketing in high end that's simply unjustified and moronic but who's to stop it from happening.

 

[ROOSKIE]

I don't really have a horse in this race, and I'd love to just have a HE400SE and 7hz x Crinacle Zero:2 and be done with it all myself, but I keep listening to some of my more expensive, often poorly measuring sets and I can't bring myself to let them go...

Well, just food for thought.
Material attachment is a real challenging thing, stuff IS cool and fun.
It can be real hard to let go of something one loves/loved even after it is truly useful to the individual.
Maybe get rid of them and replace them with a good feeling so it isn't just empty for you.
Like selling the stuff on eBay an use the $ to buy gifts for struggling families. Or as a high fi lover use the money received to buy an extra couple dozen excellent budget headphones to regularly give to people, sharing your love of great sound?
Kickstarters and the like are fun for some as well & many are audio related
Just ideas. I'm kind of in the same boat with to much gear.

 

[nyxnyxnyx]

Sure, go on apologizing for a $6000 kit made clearly for charity with the very original "you never heard it" argument in an industry trying to drown us in every bit of nonsensical drivel for a profit.

What did I ever apologize or advertise for? You wanna talk proof? Then for starter, how about the numerous times Amir measured a product that has poor specs YET his impression is still positive, or at the very least not as bad as what the measurement shown?
Besides if we're talking performance here, why should we emphasis that it's $6 or $6000? If this measured flawlessly but at that price you'd still give it the a similar remark for being too expensive, which again, is NOT related to the performance.

 

[IAtaman]

One of the hardest things for me as an objectivist is reconciling and trying to make sense why a lot of headphones I love measure like s#!t. Though it was never a problem for me to accept it as is. I'm more than happy enough to have saved bucket-loads of money already from getting out of the dac/amp/source gear stuff. I don't really have a horse in this race, and I'd love to just have a HE400SE and 7hz x Crinacle Zero:2 and be done with it all myself, but I keep listening to some of my more expensive, often poorly measuring sets and I can't bring myself to let them go...

Except Susvara does not measure like s#!t.. Actually it measures OK, acceptable, pass on the pass / fail scale. It does not sound good is Amir's opinion. There is no measurement to suggest that.

 

[Coverpage]

I have written about this before. And I can repeat it for this thread.

I own the Susvara. And I'm okay with the idea that what I purchase is a bad purchase; in fact, I find my recent purchase, the E70 Velvet, to be terrible.

That said, anyone who owns a Susvara knows that it easily beats most IEMs and headphones, putting aside the $6,000 price point.
However, what the measurement suggests is that it loses to iems costing perhaps 10s of dollars (I haven't checked the measurement, but I'm sure something may outperform Susvara in terms of THD). Does that make sense?

The core issue is the lack of a clear objective in what we're trying to measure. My personal goal in purchasing headphones is to achieve lifelike reproductions of high-quality recordings. Although this isn't a scientifically precise goal, it better aligns with what we seek in music listening. It's more meaningful to aim for a target that is challenging to measure, rather than to measure what is easily quantifiable and claim it as our goal.

The tests required to determine what makes a sound lifelike extend beyond just frequency domain measurements. This is primarily because the system, which includes the input from the DAC to the output through the headphones and our ears, is non-linear. The driver itself is non-linear, with diaphragms of complex shapes and magnetic flux densities in planar headphones that are not perfectly sinusoidal, resulting in a non-linear force constant. Additionally, the acoustics of the sound traveling from the driver in the earcup through our earlobes add to this complexity.

This non-linearity implies that the system is not Linear Time-Invariant (LTI). Therefore, headphones with identical frequency response curves will not sound the same. Nor can one set of headphones be equalized to sound like another, which would be possible if headphones were LTI.
I believe that more tests should be conducted in the time domain, such as measuring the step response and modeling the sound stage. The visceral, or lifelike, quality of sound seems to be linked to the speed of the headphones. Furthermore, while soundstage may seem abstract, it could potentially be modeled.

However, to claim that frequency response and the other measurement shown alone suffice to declare one set of headphones superior to another is misleading.

That being said, I appreciate the work of ASR. I think there is a lot of snake oil out there in the audio world, and you guys are helping to debunk them.

 

[TurtlePaul]

The "fine grass" is showing very abrupt seesawing of the frequency response ranging in the region of 2-3dB, I can imagine this changing the sound perception of things like instruments and voices that sit across that frequency range - you'd think it could almost be like putting them through a fine-grained filter where parts are regularly omitted (a bit like the audio equivalent of looking at the world through a screen mesh).

While I haven’t heard any of these planar headphones, my mental model of the phase and frequency grass should sound similar to a guitar ‘phazer’ pedal.

Phazer (wikipedia)

While this effect can sound pleasant, you can’t turn it off with the headphones.

edit: maybe the sound would be closer to a flanger (wikipedia).

Those sharp frequency response deviations won’t be heard in the frequency domain per se, but our brain will try to interpret extra ‘fullness’ and ‘complexity’ from the grass.

 

[fin]

I honestly don't think that individuals that want to buy these at the cost they're selling are looking for anything but having these as a luxury product to show off.

Audio gears aren't real luxury though. They don't preserve their value, and the less-then-20-year-old-Chinese-brand Hifiman is certainly not for any upper class to show off. Audiophiles still believe that expensive audio gear "sounds better," so they consider it worth the price, even with the seriously diminishing returns striking hard. This is still in the performance realm much like all other electronics. Luxury rarely emphasize functionality as a selling point; they focus more on the brands themselves, lifestyle marketing, materials, craftsmanship, preservation of value, etc. while the lifeline of audio gears are still, like audiophiles emphasized, their sounds.

That's why many myths need to be debunked. No one will ever debunk luxury brands as they don't belong in the realm of performance. However deception of electronic products about actual specifications and performance can be anti-consumer and thus worth being treated seriously. Many of them are simply pure music lovers, after all. They believe their hobby should be worth the money but might not be as wealthy as you think. They deserve the right to know the truth before making their decision, rather than being deceived to spend their life long saving so unwisely in the hobby.

 

[Aperiodic]

Why would anybody buy this over a Dan Clark offering, the least expensive of which crushes this? Hell, some of their own cheaper models outperform it. I hope the buyer can still get his money back. If the performance sucks, who cares about the aesthetics?!?

 

[cheapmessiah]

And the very first post blames it on the AMP/DAC.

Who would've guess

 

[Soria Moria]

However, what the measurement suggests is that it loses to iems costing perhaps 10s of dollars (I haven't checked the measurement, but I'm sure something may outperform Susvara in terms of THD). Does that make sense?

Yes. Why not? Although not liking the presentation IEMs have (no pinna interaction, 'no' soundstage etc.) Is understandable.

 

[Aperiodic]

Here we go again. People who can afford luxury goods like these Susvara don't really care to hear the objectivist tilt on whether this product is good or not. I may be generalizing this but I honestly don't think that individuals that want to buy these at the cost they're selling are looking for anything but having these as a luxury product to show off. Quit making a hash of this as a poor product and not meeting objective targets, this product is sold for the price of satisfying a niche in the high-end market.

All true, but somewhere there are people who are considering it (400i owner maybe?) expecting top-level sound to match the top-level price and getting trash instead; people should have a shot at getting what they're paying for,

 

[trollbearpig_what]

Who would've guess

To be fair he did mention static and clipping which is odd, as I've read countless reviews of Susvara and never heard that before. But reading it and having also listened to Susvara and never encountered this, I just assumed he was listening or testing at higher than normal listening volumes. So it's reasonable for someone not comprehending his listening volume and hearing about static/clipping issues to point to some kind of gear issue.

 

[Coverpage]

Yes. Why not? Although not liking the presentation IEMs have (no pinna interaction, 'no' soundstage etc.) Is understandable.

Read the entire thing. What I'm suggesting is that what is measured is not enough for someone to make a decision on buying headphones. Partly due to a lack of clarity on the goal of the measurements.

If I show you ten FR curves of 10 different headphones and their THDs and ask you to spend $5,000 on one, would you be able to make a decision without listening to them? I'm sure you can't. The reason is that two headphones with identical FR curves through a sine sweep will not sound the same.

 

[Chagall]

Who said value can't drive a vote? I do vote that way.

I don't need to use a $5000 Rolex or Brently to know it doesn't keep time as well as any contemporary cellular phone, even a $30 burner, or any Timex watch if you really need a wrist watch.

Do I need to carry that $11,000 Gucci handbag around to understand it is a 'luxury' item and not a high performance bag.

Do we really need to listen to those $3k speaker wires to know they are overpriced? A $15 power cord works as well as just about any $2,000 one.

In 2023 I find it hard to believe people won't accept that luxury items rarely exist for performance & often a reason very far away from high performance.

IMI, $6000 headphones should be obviously mind-blowing in every conceivable way in order to receive a positive vote. If they deviate from the established frequency curve or other params, that is fine if when placed upon the head they are clearly superior.

In audio we are lucky that a few luxury hifi items do still perform well like McIntosh solid state amps and KEF blade speakers.

@_thelaughingman Really IMHO there are no headphones worth $6000, just like no power chord is worth $1000. Only there are people who need to do things like buy such items and companies are filling holes, both in the people and the 'market'.

I do understand a flagship product is often produced for overall brand success & is not often intended to be a value driven product. As well a lot of money needs to be spent to keep the world spinning, (though that can be done a variety of ways). I find it hard to ignore the bummer that this headphone is a marketing tool & cash grab for status just like some 95+% of high level price point products.

Plus just do the math @Chagall . This is a gross oversimplification of variables but imagine you sell 1000 of X vs 250,000 of Y, yet need to make meaningful profit on both. It is conceivable to make the same $, one item could cost a handful of bucks and one $1000 and yet be essentially identical products.

Is Susvara overpriced? Yeah.
Is it a poor headphone? No.
That is all I'm saying.

HE-1 should then by default be a poor headphone, no matter how it sounds or measures.

Gucci bags and speakers wires..not sure what was the point.

 

[cheapmessiah]

To be fair he did mention static and clipping which is odd, as I've read countless reviews of Susvara and never heard that before. But reading it and having also listened to Susvara and never encountered this, I just assumed he was listening or testing at higher than normal listening volumes. So it's reasonable for someone not comprehending his listening volume and hearing about static/clipping issues to point to some kind of gear issue.

Fair point, but regardless of that, the misticism of pairing the susvara with an amp that's expensive enough, regardless of it's power, it's a meme at this point.

 

[TurtlePaul]

The reason is that two headphones with identical FR curves through a sine sweep will not sound the same.

Have you done any double blind testing?

Given the vast differences in frequency response and distortion graphs between nearly all headphones, this is a pretty wild claim.