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Big bone. Only the 'er' lacks from the elegantly engraved pow beneath the standby button. For all his badness, our man clearly has humor. 'Pow' fits with a vengeance. It won't take prolonged listening to feel in the presence of greatness. The CHA-1 links two usually separate schools of thought on what's important in hifi whilst elevating the mastery of each to a very high degree. Their two conflicting ideals are detail density and humanity. Let's start with the former. Perceiving each receding layer of the sonic panorama at exactly the same perfect focus approaches hyper realism. Our eye sight is more used to a softening with distance. The Crayon has cyborg vision. The only softening occurs on amplitude when background performers or secondary sounds were recorded at a lower level. But sharpness of focus remains all-inclusive no matter how deeply embedded in or surrounded by louder events. Such aural omniscience or heightened simultaneity of image lock is intense. The better the recording, the more this veers into hyper realism.
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This conjures up quick attention wear and inevitable listener fatigue. Enter humanity. Like musicality the term is fuzzy. In this context it's the most fitting though. It's what prevents the hyper in realism to get annoying or trying. Writing that was easy. Achieving it is very far from. The €1'495 current-mode Questyle CMA800R from China with 600kHz bandwidth approaches the CHA-1 on detail density but trails it in on humanity. Hearing that is easy. Describing it without fuzzy logic isn't. Have you ever heard a poorly integrated Heil-based pleated tweeter or midrange driven from bright edgy transistors played too loud like a Burmester show demo? It's super-incisive detail galore but also relentlessly needling. A demo of vintage Quads plus warm valve gear will be the polar opposite. It'll have humanity but no bandwidth, speed or true dynamics. The CHA-1 bridges the two. Its ability to distinguish between sources and transducers is extreme. I finally heard that the 'X-rated' sealed Audeze model with 'Fazor tech' is actually superior to the open-backed LCD-3. That I'd not perceived before. I also heard clear differences between two zero-sampling converters (Metrum Hex and Aqua Hifi La Voce S2) which with the usual speaker system were far smaller. Here 'when only the best will do' really applies itself to ancillaries. The Crayon has tweaked timing precision and noise floor to such a degree that otherwise insignificant or marginal differences magnify to really matter.

If the CHA-1 were a tubed preamp, it'd combine—somehow—the lucid crisp snappy lit-up sound of a 6H30 and the sweet toneful elasticity of a 6SN7 in a 3:1 mix. The 6H30 represents detail density, the 6SN7 humanity. With a solid-state preamp it'd be a 70:30 mix of BJT and Jfet. Overall it's a definite sonic tie to Akira Nagai's aesthetic at Bakoon. The extra twist or seasoning here is that subtle sweetness. It coats the mix's predominant spicy accelerated flavors just enough to add elegance. To approach this from another angle, think caffeine. It dehydrates. Its buzz isn't true but stolen energy. That's particularly blatant in the evening. Your bio rhythm slows down, the espresso fights it. It's pushy and against the flow. It's an unnatural overlay below which lurks hollow exhaustion. And some ultra-resolution gear has that effect. It dehydrates. Its apparent energy is really faux. Underneath it all hides a lack of true substance. In the long run that gets exhausting. It's a very easy mistake to make. It gets more and more common the greedier we get for detail. Except that the CHA-1 flatly doesn't make this mistake.


Its extreme handling of nuance and space is the benign 'ceramicness' of Albedo's 1st-order physically time-aligned Aptica speaker. It's however not a ceramic speaker from the usual MDF-box suspects. This tipping point is well greased. It takes little to trigger it. That Crayon stays clear is testament to Roland Krammer's listening chops. What facilitates such performance? As listeners we can only guess which specification does what. Having heard a sufficient number of ultra-wide bandwidth amplifiers, I believe that lucid mode links to avoiding phase shift in the treble in particular but also in general. Packed density of coincident detail is almost certainly a function of exceptionally low self noise. We know it from digital sources. To this extent we're simply far less familiar with it from amplifiers. Various Hypex Ncore 1200 amps are one obvious exception. It's probably not too far off then to think of the Crayon CHA-1 as quasi headfi Ncore with a spritz of something else.

Now that we mapped out the CHA-1's foundation virtues, we need to qualify them by contrast. For that I'd use my Bakoon AMP-12R—a €5'995 15wpc speaker amp with passive pot and ¼" jack—and the Chinese CMA800R headfi amp.