Using a playlist of recent Qobuz buys off my 16/44 subscription, first impressions were up to beautiful Lebanese Julia Boutrous, Prague Philharmonic huddling with her on my Ikea desktop. There a pair of full-metal Swiss Eversound Essence actives include headfi with a Gordon Rankin 3.5mm port preceded by his driverless 24/96 USB DAC and 12dB linestage. It's surprisingly good at headphoning, plenty good enough to drive HE1000. To my ears, these are planar magnetism's answer to electrostats. They're far away the most airy of this usually darkish lot, thus the ortho brother from another mother to the dynamic HD800 on raw resolution and spacious staging.

The trouble in headfi land is that various statement headphones set benchmarks in different disciplines. For bass power and overall density, Audeze are hard to beat. Moving from them to an HD800/HE1000 entails liposuction. But returning after due acclimation*, one wonders. Why can't Audeze do their speed, treble effulgence and overall lucidity? Nearly by definition, anything that splits the difference won't be as good as whatever these designs major in. Lower louder bass invariably seems to steal from transparency. Exceptionally aerated treble and wispy decays get closed in on when density goes up. If you want the most balanced presentation, no single discipline can be better than any other. As long as you don't keep more specialized competitors around to remind you where virtuous balance falls short, all is peachy. Those in accord with this situation often opt to harem it. For different moods or genres, they own various cans which perhaps allow themselves minor excesses. Those celebrate special qualities rather than walk straight down the middle. What did first impressions suggest about the Dharma?


Here we remember that just as normal dome tweeters differ—vintage paper, silk, aluminium, Titanium, Magnesium, ceramic, Beryllium, diamond—so do dynamic headphone drivers. Many are Mylar or metal. The D1000's is specialty Japanese paper traditionally made of bark from the Mitsumata shrub or Mulberry tree but versions with bamboo, hemp, rice or wheat fibre exist, too. Washi paper is usually tougher than ordinary wood-pulp paper and made by hand.

* Acclimation: this word is a perfect reminder. How quickly our ear/brains get used to things. It's not as though we retain separate internal judges who remind us of otherness by holding up an invariable yard stick. However much our aural compass might diverge from true north, as far as we go, it's true. The only way to confuse our needle is to keep clearly different sound makers around. Then we're reminded. How relative all of it is. Adaptability is hardwired to our human genome after all. It's how our species can thrive or at least survive in the Sahara, in Iceland, in the rain forest, in a Kumbh Mela meet or in solitary confinement.


First ear not hand shakes. The Dharma very clearly is a dynamic headphone. If you've compared Wilson to Martin-Logan, you're crystal already. With the HifiMan HE1000, electrostatically reminiscent aspects dominate. With the D1000, the e-stat element is a mere dusting of powdered sugar on top. That's crossed in well above the critical presence region. The general locale of the action is squarely in the tonally robust, dynamically punchy, bass-righteous neighbourhood. Just as is often the case with loudspeakers, this is the sound of quality paper à la ScanSpeak or Audio Technology topped off with an atypical fizzy sparkly champers quality. Even off my active speakers' headfi op-amp outputs, the Dharma sounded richer than the other 1000. This was high promise of not only having lift-off with 'lesser' gear but actually flying in unexpected style.

Next I had to kowtow to personal curiosity off my top source: iMac into Fore Audio's DAISy1 tube DAC via PureMusic v2.0.4. For giggles, I connected that deck balanced out into Simon Lee's 50wpc Toshiba Mosfet Aura Note Vita integrated. Its potent 1/4" socket taps into the push/pull speaker output stage through a simple load resistor. This is the kind of thing that has HifiMan's punishing HE6 pay full attention. Such power, drive and natural warmth really benefit both HD800 and HE1000 which, on one or two Questyle CMA-800R, prioritize snap and spaciousness over weight. What the Vita did for the Dharma—which from the desktop I already knew not to need its tonal assist—was to showcase absolutely massive bass such as on the 4th cut of Smadj's Spleen. This is a true bottom-feeder track. It can devolve into an opaque droning morass if not properly gripped and sorted, especially with the fine electronic shards in the higher registers blitzing through the proceedings like radioactive mites. As though having three eyes, the Dharma kept simultaneous sight of the slam bass, the FX noises in the treble and finally the melodic elements in the midband without letting the LF energies overwhelm and veil the rest whilst drowning out the mites. Even with my Vita tank for backup, neither the Sennheiser nor HifiMan flagships equal the D1000's down-low pressurization and might. That the Dharma didn't feel as spaciously teased out and ephemerally gifted as those two was simple arithmetic. To the fullest extent, one cannot have one with the other.


To move their strongest qualities more into the Dharma's own foreground would mean plugging it into my Bakoon AMP-12R night-stand set. That is how one exploits ancillaries. With them one articulates the joy-stick range a given voicing or grouping of qualities enables. This doesn't turn an apple into an orange or pear but decides whether the apple is a Candy Crisp, Golden Delicious or Park's Pippin. Whilst I still had the Vita-lizer hooked up, I checked out The Khoury Project's rightfully named Revelation album. The occasionally vigorously stressed modal violin didn't get gnarly and screechy as it can over the Sennheisers. The various percussion really cracked with abandon and a workout across the cymbals set off a swarm of buzzing bees to let me hear the oscillating brass molecules. Again, these were prime check boxes for top dynamic speakers like our Sounddeco Sigma 2 with their Satori drivers from SB Acoustics. The little extra whose effect or contribution wasn't that little came by way of the Sopranino element. By staying clear of the presence region and instead working only in the brilliance zone, it didn't thin or whiten out the core treble. It simply maintained a degree of ribbon or electrostatic speed and energy which soft-dome tweeters don't possess. Yet ribbons or electrostats can steal some weight in the lower treble which the dome units often do better. These upper registers had both the heavier copper elements and the Platinum finish. I began to suspect that this plus the splendid tonal saturation were two special Dharma treats/traits.


Time to explain tone.