HPA4 Review - Dan-Alexandru Gheorghe, HeadMania
HPA4 - "It's Been a While Since I Have Been this Excited ..."
"It’s been a while since I have been this excited about an audio product."
"I do have a good queue of products that deserve a review here, especially in the headphone department: Audeze LCD-2C, Quad Era-1, Brainwavz Alara."
"It’s the first time when I have heard the headphones mentioned above to their full potential. In the first minute my jaw dropped ..."
"This is the fastest and the most controlled bass I have ever heard. It goes deep, it’s organic when it needs to be, but it doesn’t linger at all. It’s controlled by an iron fist. The punch is really really fun and strong."
"The midrange is really pure and lively. The instruments and voices have vibrating, lively and pure textures."
"The treble is really extended, very detailed and sparkly. It doesn’t have any touch of brightness, but it does brighten up the place in a good way if you know what I mean."
"The level of detail is amazing on HPA4. I seem to discover other sounds in some songs that I did not notice before."
"The voices are incredibly pure and textured. Depending on the artist and the song, the voice can sound incredibly pure, stammeringly clean and extended, but also guttural/throaty in other cases."
"When you talk about natural sound, about emotion in this domain it usually means that the audio component adds some coloration that give a more natural tonality, more weight to the sound, more present voices, less harshness, etc. In this case the emotion comes from the purity of the sound from the fact that HPA4 completely removes itself from the system."
"From my perspective this is the best headphone amplifier I have ever heard. It’s no competition really."
HPA4 - "An End Game Amplifier"
"It’s not cheap, I can give you that. Is it worth it? That is up to each and every one of you, but if you really want the best amplifier out there, an end game amplifier…this is it."
- Dan-Alexandru Gheorghe, HeadMania.org
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The Bricasti M3 is a great example of that performance in a $6,000 DAC."
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"What Makes the Benchmark LA4 Preamp So Special?"
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"Very few preamps at any price reach the LA4’s level of objective performance."
"On the subjective end of things, the Benchmark LA4 preamp puts the lie to the old audiophile myth that neutrality means clinical, cold, or sterile sound. Instead, here neutrality means musical, involving sound, with precise, stable imaging, a sense of space (if one is on the recording), and exceptionally truthful timbres."
- Mike Prager, FutureAudiophile.com
AHB2 Review - Mike Prager, Future Audiophile
"For years, the audio world acknowledged one main contender (at least at sub-five-figure pricing) for the quietest, cleanest, most neutral power amplifier around. That was the Benchmark AHB2, whose specifications are still, for all practical purposes, unsurpassed, even by today’s excellent Class-D amps."
"10 years after its release, the Benchmark Media Systems AHB2 stereo power amp is still a standard-bearer in clean, neutral sound in the audiophile world."
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"I especially appreciated the AHB2’s smooth, well-integrated treble, free of splashiness or grain, and its natural reproduction of the human voice."
- Mike Prager, Future Audiophile