Sorry, not following the logic here. Why would that universally be "better"?
Edition XS if you want to have good bass and an estat for an exceptional sound quality. Both subjectivists and objectivists who have tried Stax stuff have come out feeling like they've tasted audiophile nirvana. HD800S and the DCA are good headphones but none of em actually recreate speakers in terms of soundstage, they just reproduce sound well. Whereas there's some other non-measurable thing about Stax estats like the SR-009S that everyone drools over. Even Amir loved the special sauce that estats have.
Due to the massive discounts of Hifiman headphones, one can just get an Arya Stealth as a "do it all" pair and then get a Stax estat and pair it with a Topping EHA5.
I agree that anything past 1k usd is bad value but if it has a special sauce, would it not actually be somewhat worth it?
Where I live the DCA E3 is 2400 USD and the Stax SR-007S is 2870 USD. If I had that much money I'd have gotten an estat instead of just another planar. DCA's Noire X gives 90% of the sound quality at have the price if someone needs a closed back, Hifiman's Arya Stealth/Organic can do all that the DCA headphones can just in an open back manner and significantly cheaper due to Hifiman's focus on sound over build quality. The HD800S where I live is 2000 USD. So how is spending ~4000 USD on two good headphones better than just getting one exceptional one?
Different people have different tastes, I understand that. But since the guy is here and looking for more, I'd say he has an issue with his headphones, so what even was the point of spending that much on all those cans? lol
I have owned multiple pairs of old and new Stax Lambdas, some other Estats and have extensively demoed pretty much all current high end electrostatic headphones. So I would like to share my 2 cents on this topic here but it will be a long one.
So is indeed a pretty large group of people that claims that electrostatic headphones (especially Stax ones) are God's gift sent from heaven and that you won't be able to distinguish between them and reality. After my pretty lengthy experience with Estats and my ability to still hear 20khz which probably helps in some ways, i can confidently conclude that they are all full of shit.
HOWEVER! I do also think that electrostatic drivers is objectively the best headphone driver technology and yes, it does matter.
So let's think logically about this for a minute. What makes a headphone good? It needs to have a pleasant sound, and it needs to be comfortable to wear, preferably for a long period of time. Now if you then go through all headphones there are today, you will notice that they pretty much always fall short in at least one nuance.
Dynamic drivers are tiny, and as such usually paired with tiny earcups, making them uncomfortable. They also suck at bass, meaning they roll off and their distortion shoots through the roof so EQing them won't be an option either. HD600 is the classic example. Very light, decently big so comfort is OK. Tuned very well, but is terrible at low end and it's spatial presentations are so poor that I genuinenly cannot use them for gaming as I always hear that the enemy is breathing down my neck even if they are 20 meters away from me. And for music it also removes any excitement or sense of awe it may be trying to portray.
Planars next. Much bigger driver, usually also very low distortion due to.. well, physics. But the magnets used to make Planar drivers are heavy... and so you get brands like Audeze making 700 gram headphones. Planar drivers fix all the shortcomings of dynamic drivers but it comes at the cost of weight. So also not ideal.
Now we get to Electrostatic drivers. The concept is similar to Planars but we don't need magnets anymore, and we can make them even thinner on top of that. And that means we are creating a driver that has no weaknesses.
Now of course, the first thing you will hear about electrostats is that they cannot do bass. That's a lie. Think about it, you have a giant vibrating wall that is larger than your ears, why would it not be able to do bass? So the reason for their bass light reputation is that Stax, being the face of electrostatic headphones, tuned their headphones on the brighter side with a linear bass response that ever so slightly tilts downwards. So in a direct comparison to a Hifiman planar for example, the Stax will indeed sound thinner. And that is asuming you get a perfect seal which is mandatory, because if you don't then you can indeed kiss all your bass goodbye. See example below:
Then there are also headphones that are just incompetently built, such as some Stax round headphones which are generally less bright than Lambdas but have inner seal leaks, causing a drop off in bass.
So how do we fix this?
EQ of course. Second benefit of electrostatic drivers is that due to their mass and using electrostatic force instead of magnetic, they have no reason to distort. And that is exactly what Amir measured in his SR-009s review and why he still gave it a good score despite it's frequency response being a total disaster. You can add a 30db bass shelf to it and it wouldn't care, as long as your energizer is up for the task of course.
And now for the bad news. Despite electrostatic headphones clearly being the best option for any usecase outside of being portable, the few manufacturers that do make them, continuesly shoot themselves in the foot with every new headphone they produce. Let's look at some examples:
Stax are still producing Lambda (rectangle) and Omega (round) headphones. Both with severe design flaws. Lambdas are now much better built than the old ones from the 80s and 90s and have replacable pads. The pads still suck tho, and getting aftermarket ones will mean ordering custom ones from Vesper Audio and then praying that they won't destroy the sound in the process. The driver is very tall but also very narrow, so no matter how you spin it, your ears will touch the pads, the hole is just too thin.
Omega-style Staxes in turn sacrifice the weight aspect of it. They all weigh around 400 gram range which is effectively how much planar headphones weigh. And considering how much they cost too, you can just get a planar headphone at 1/10th of the price and get the same experience with enough EQ skills.
Audeze being audeze also makes their 2 Estats as heavy as possible, approaching 500 grams. Dan Clark did the same with Corina. Koss makes a small and light Estat but it uses propriatary connector that only works on it's criminally underpowered energizer, also not ideal. And Sennheiser made 2 recolutionary Estat headphones back in 1990s and then never again. So good luck hunting them down.
So what do we do now?
Well, an unexpected friend appears. May I present you:
Hifiman returns with an electrostatic headphone using the same formfactor as their planar egg phones. This time however instead of them weighing 450+ grams, it now weighs 320. And yes, you can feel it, a lot.
So let's look at the reviews of Mini Shangri-la, what do we get?
No bass, pretty heavy upper midrange bump, hollow, the dreaded Edition XS headband. Well that doesn't sound good.
Yes it indeed does not sound good because Hifiman shot themselves in the foot just like the other brands. However this time we can fix it ourselves.
You see, Mini Shangri-la comes with both Edition XS headband (yuck) and Edition XS pads
facepalm
. And those pads are thin and hard, breaking the seal. And what did I tell you about seal on Estats? So let's take a look at the Jade 2 headphone (which really is the same thing as the Mini Shangri-la) with different pads:
Oh look! Our bass is back! And the 3-5khz peak is gone too! It's almost as if thick and plushy pads are the way to go. Sure, we still need some more to match the planar, let alone the harman target, but hey, that's what EQ is for. And remember, we have no distortion, so crank it up as far as you want.
Now to wrap things up, get the Capra Audio strap for the headband or mod an HE1000 headband onto the Mini Shangri-la and you are good to go. We have created the best headphone currently available on the market. With good out of the box FR, room for EQ, ultra comfortable due to gigantic pads with gigantic holes for ears and very low weight for such big headphones.
Of course in the end this is my take on the matter, and your preference may vary. I also do not have distortion measurements on any of Hifiman Estats because nobody measured them unfortunately. But at least by ear I could not hear any anomalies.
So this was my ultimate endgame until I got hit by Hifiman's QC and my pair broke in 2 days. I got it refunded and decided to go back to my Edition X headphone and spend that money on an OLED TV instead. My energizer also started acting up at the time so I decided to put this whole thing on hold until I save up enough money for a good energizer to make sure I am not missing a single db of performance so I can then close the book on headphones for good.
Anyway to get back to your question on whether you should get another headphone or just stick to those that you already have. Well before I thought that there was indeed no 1 headphone to rule them all. And that having multiple for different usecases was the way to go. That is until I started getting into Estats and came to the conclusion that Mini Shangri-la and a few similar headphones are indeed the ones to rule them all.
All the headphones on your list have a weakness. HD650 can't do bass and spatials. HD800S excels at sounding wide but is pretty bad at everything else. Edition XS has the best balance but suffers from Hifiman sibilance and is heavy. Dan Clark E3 I can't really comment on since I don't like that headphone whatsoever.
Mini Shangri-la, when used with better pads and EQ, has no weakness.
So to answer your question, yes you should get the Mini Shangri-la as the last headphone you will ever need.
But.. if the weight doesn't bother you, get Edition XV instead. You will get the same sonic experience at... 400$ instead of 900+. And you won't need to buy a dedicated amp for it either.
