Going green. It could mean off-grid so battery-powered DAP. If its leatherette cover were green, the cans too and the music's cover art – we'd have us the below Greenpeace party. For many prospective shoppers, such a combo is far more likely than jacking up their electronics to Grand Theft Auto calibre. And whilst its true that the SR7000 is perfectly mobile friendly, it's sadly also true that at least with my DAP, you won't tap its dynamic rectitude, its low-down graft, overall scale or gravitas. Not even close. Devolving from discerning discrete power off big linear supplies to op-amp power took a clear toll on this aune's true potential. An Astell&Kern über DAP might recast the movie, even flip my script but not my trusty C-list €469 Shanling. Put differently, the SR7000 is far better than my player could show off. For my final sessions, back it thus was to gilding the lily, this time in the headfi bay of my big rig.

With a few amplifier options, I decided to really live it up with ~12wpc of pure class A into the SR7000's impedance compliments of another Chinese contender, the Soundaware P1x. This saw signal off an iFi iDSD Pro Signature DAC's XLR outputs which got an S/PDIF feed from a Singxer SU-6 bridge which taps my music iMac via USB. An external 4TB SSD stores my local music while cloud files hustle in over the worldwide web through a pair of cascaded LHY network distributors. Audirvana Studio handles signal routing, upsampling and accesses my Qobuz Sublime account. I'd like to tell you that for our €639 headphone, this still constituted egregious overkill versus the FiiO R7 and perhaps I could have underkilled it a bit more without noticing. But it wasn't and I didn't. Which segues rather neatly into the final straight.

Whilst my resident headfi ceiling is the below Raal 1995 Immanis followed by the upstairs Magna then HifiMan Susvara, aune's SR7000 juiced by their familiars belongs just one rung down. What's more, it does so as a sealed load whereas this upscale crowd is Club Open-Backed exclusively. That's not how I saw this assignment pan out; particularly from a brand I had no prior experience with. Given my exposure to Cen.Grand, Denafrips, FiiO, Jay's, HifiMan, Kinki, Laiv, Singxer, Shanling and Soundaware—Cayin and Matrix gigs are presently in the works—it's impossible not to be impressed by the breadth and depth of quality hifi from the Middle Kingdom that needn't cost a kidney. I suppose that today's review constitutes proper personal penitence for not having tackled aune sooner? Of the many headphones I divested myself of over the year including Sennheiser HD800 and Beyerdynamic T1 and T5p, I've not missed any. My Audeze LCD2 and XC remain on hand as decorative book ends and the occasional review contrast agents but otherwise have been thoroughly displaced by the ribbons then Susvara. On the desktop my regular is Final's D8000. A sealed cheap single-entry audio-technica serves podcast duties with John Darko. The FiiO FT3 is my outdoor partner. The Meze 109 Pro hogs my nightstand for occasional horizontal listening. To my ears, the aune eclipses them and belongs right next to the desktop's D8000. Again, Sino manufacturing expertise and labour advantages plus perfectly mature dynamic driver tech add up to more for less. Throw in the dragon scales and the SR7000 gives one lots to talk about.

Hopefully the lot I talked about painted a solid picture on what to expect should you feel tempted to follow my own curiosity on these. Though I still don't know how to pronounce 'aune' or what the name means, my inner wordsmith shall think of them now as all u need. And to press the point, 'u' for you would actually be 'I' if that letter were present. So is the SR7000 really all I need from a sealed dynamic headphone? You bet; in balanced drive with my XLR4 3-metre custom Forza Audioworks Noir leash and 'lesser' electronics shown, I could easily call it a day despite knowing that there's still a tier beyond for which I own three different thin-film options if those are allowed to cost ten times more. That's how balanced and comfortable these aune are; and how generously they scale up with better electronics.

The very happy end!