Country of Origin
Reviewer: Srajan Ebaen
Financial interests: click here
Main system: Sources: Retina 5K 27" iMac (i5, 256GB SSD, 40GB RAM, Sonoma 14), 4TB external SSD with Thunderbolt 3, Audirvana Studio, Qobuz Sublime, Singxer SU-6 USB bridge, LHY Audio SW-8 & SW-6 switch, Laiv Audio Harmony; Active filter: Lifesaver Audio Gradient Box 2; Power amplifiers: Kinki Studio EX-B7 monos & Gold Note monos on subwoofer; Headamp: Enleum AMP-23R; Phones: Raal 1995 Immanis, HifiMan Susvara; Loudspeakers: Qualio IQ [on loan] Cables: Kinki Studio Earth, Furutech; Power delivery: Vibex Granada/Alhambra on all source components, Vibex One 11R on amps, Furutech DPS-4.1 between wall and conditioners; Equipment rack: Artesanía Audio Exoteryc double-wide 3-tier with optional glass shelves, Exoteryc amp stands; Sundry accessories: Acoustic System resonators, LessLoss Firewall for loudspeakers, Furutech NCF Signal Boosters; Room: 6 x 8m with open door behind listening seat; Room treatment: 2 x PSI Audio AVAA C214 active bass traps
2nd system: Source: FiiO R7 into Soundaware D300Ref SD transport to Cen.Grand DSDAC 1.0 Deluxe; Preamp/filter: Lifesaver Audio Gradient Box 2; Amplifier: Kinki Studio EX-M7; Headamp: Cen.Grand Silver Fox; Loudspeakers: MonAcoustic SuperMon Mini + Dynaudio S18 sub; Power delivery: Furutech GTO 2D NCF, Akiko Audio Corelli; Equipment rack: Hifistay Mythology Transform X-Frame [on extended loan]; Sundry accessories: Audioquest Fog Lifters; Furutech NFC Clear Lines; Room: ~3.5 x 8m
Desktop system: Source: HP Z230 work station Win10/64; USB bridge: Singxer SU-2; DAC: Sonnet Pasithea; Headamp: Kinki Studio THR-1; Speaker amp: Crayon CFA-1.2; Speakers: Acelec Model One Headphones: Final D-8000 & Sonorous X, Audeze LCD-XC, Raal-Requisite SR1a on Schiit Jotunheim R
Upstairs headfi system: FiiO R7, COS Engineering D1, Cen.Grand Silver Fox; Headphones: Raal 1995 Magna, Meze 109 Pro, Fiio FT3
2-channel video system: Source: Oppo BDP-105; All-in-One: Gold Note IS-1000 Deluxe; Loudspeakers: Zu Soul VI; Subwoofer: Zu Submission; Power delivery: Furutech eTP-8, Room: ~6x4m
By an uncommon margin when after 22 years of mooning you expect crass 'been there, done that, tossed the cigar' cynicism to rule, one product this year led my parade on what can be achieved; at the bleeding edge no less. Granted, it's not where I typically play. Amplifiers or speakers with flagship ambitions quickly get too unruly on price, size and weight, my room volumes too blue collar for purpose. Truth told, cynicism factors too. I have heard an awful lot to nurse a keen nose for what's possible and matters under ordinary domestic conditions. Arab oil sheiks, Russian gas oligarchs, Indian steel magnates and a certain Irish cage fighter on his Ferrari yacht live far larger. Now entirely different product leagues open up. Financial limits move the decimal point by a few digits. The allure of luxury and exclusivity throws off all shackles of common reason and restraint. None of it is my reality, head space or aspiration.
However, there's one product category where even normies with closets for listening rooms may go all the way if their wallets can stretch up to €10K: headphones. Like wrist watches, cans can only get so big and heavy before they become unusable. With dynamic, planarmagnetic and electrostatic headfi very mature to make meaningful advances unlikely or at best marginal, ribbon headphones still represent a new frontier. That's because only one man in Eastern Serbia even works the sector. With this year's release of his Raal 1995 Immanis triple-ribbon and Magna twin-ribbon statement headphones with external transformer-based Ω-converter barrel, Aleksandar Radisavljevic has really moved the goal posts; even over his radical SR1a winged open-baffle effort from a few years back. Whilst assessing a €639 pair of excellent aune SR7000 headphones a few days ago then switching to his Magna ribbons for the big picture, the gap's magnitude particularly on dynamic range, differentiation and expressiveness really felt like x 10 so on par with the price ratio.
As even newbie cynics in the hifi racket learn quickly, beyond a base level of competence, twice the price rarely nets twice the performance. As price keeps doubling, gains tend to narrow ever more. Even more, to reap them soon requires an 'all hands on deck' approach. Everything must be dialled to the max to let a small improvement make a still meaningful difference that's not swallowed up by elsewhere bottlenecks. In the usual scheme of things, going from a very well-engineered Chinese headphone with ultra cost-effective manufacturing behind it to that of a small Serbian boutique at roughly ten times the cost shouldn't track performance that multiples by the same number. Except that here it did. For the full lowdown on the ribbons, refer to my review by clicking on the linked thumbnail. It explains why and how they can build such a lead over existing dynamic driver tech. This feature won't re-tread it all. It's just a pointer at a legitimate standout that you may have missed in the glut of reviews which populate the global hifi review space every month. To appreciate the real-world ramifications of personal Immanis exposure onto loudspeaker listening in a 
normal flat, watch Simone's unfolding journey in our pages. Already frolicking at headfi's bleeding edge with a LampizatOr Horizon 360 DAC, Riviera Audio Labs hybrid amp and Immanis, he's now exploring how best to transpose the same performance standards to the free-space loudspeaker experience. Can you spell—cough—tall task? These ribbon cans can really mess up our notions on what's actually possible to then cruelly disqualify our current speaker pride. It's precisely why these two Raal 1995 models occupy the top spot of this page. They keep one honest about what to really get excited about; and 'delete' the buzz of mere pretenders.
The next teacher's pet from my class of 2024 lives at the opposite end of the coin toss. Hello Singxer SA-90, a €1'500 set of discrete 90/180W into 8/4Ω class AB monos of +23-bit resolution from a shockingly low noise floor executed with 300VA linear power. If you admired the crystalline resolution of good class D but still complained about its overdamped gestalt in the upper-mid and treble frequencies, these Sino monos could ring your bell. I've been a fan of Singxer's USB-reclocker bridges in my main and desktop systems. When news of their first-ever speaker amp dropped, my ears pricked up. As the review chronicles, I could very happily live with these in my main rig. In terms of micro resolution, I'd actually reap rewards over my long-term resident monos. In terms of reviewer credibility I'd take a hit with people who conflate hardware cost with quality. Friends of this site simply know that I'm made of sterner stuff. If you can forgive their plain shoebox aesthetics and black-only dress code, these SingXer monos could really mark your spot. Bad dogs? No, good boys indeed. Spray on.
In the compact widebander sector, this year I crossed paths with the Voxativ Hagen2, Audience Clairaudient 1+1 v5 and Lindemann Move. As the most affordable but best balanced of this small bunch of exotics, the Move is my pick for this page. It runs its rear-ported 5" Mark Audio Alpair driver wide open so without filter, then adds a high-passed lens-loaded small AMT tweeter above 10kHz. The Alpair's claim to justified fame is eliminating the energy-storing inner suspension of virtually all other dynamic drivers called a spider. If you come from ribbon headfi and want a similarly direct immediate sound just outside your head, the Move is an excellent pursuit. For those with bandwidth and room/SPL needs in excess of its ~45Hz and size, the Groove is a magnetically docking companion subwoofer. For smaller rooms and nearfield applications, doing the solo Move is perfectly sufficient however and precisely why I'm listing this two-tone monitor with its copper-anodized driver here. Appearing deceptively simple, there's more careful clever engineering going on behind this façade than meets the eye. I did that Zoom chat with the designer and got the memo. Whilst it lacks the lacquered piano-gloss snazz of the competition, for me it tops them on value and performance Jazz. €3'200/pr bags it.
Enter a new category just for this page: good geek grabs. Tongue in cheek, G³ is about accessories or 'lesser' bits which typically only geeks obsess over. Normies
and cynics lump them away as 'all the same' or 'matter at best marginally if that'. Often they're right and justified in such dismissal. Yet there are exceptions which, given the acknowledged lower returns on accessories and lesser bits in general, push the envelope after all the main bobs have been sorted. My first geeky find this year was Mateusz Przychodzien's inspired outreach to Lithuania's LessLoss for a custom-modded spool of their raw C-MARC cable. His first kilometre of noise-cancelling wire has turned into the Forza Medicine cable built to order for your headphones, be those Meze or Sennheiser, AKG or Final, HifiMan or Sivga. Specify the connectors and length, team Forza will wrangle you a braided snake ending in 3.5mm, 4.4mm, 6.3mm, XLR4 or dual XLR3. Go ahead, deny the audibility of superior headfi wiring once your electronics and cans are spit-polished. This G³ find is for people of broader minds, pointier ears and altogether more enthusiasm. Expect more tone density and black in the colour palette for greater saturation and outline fill. Add more general suavity and a small shift away from the leading toward the trailing edge. Et voilà, a noticeable step-up from Forza's previous best which for years already played pigtails to most my headphone harem. And no, this isn't for beginners with €189 headphones. This is for triple Gs. Forget only Raal ribbons. Those need electrical cable values which require a very different build and geometry. All other illustrious and wannabe illustrious full-size cans are fair game. I'm updating my Susvara and Final D8000 once Matt bags his wooden splitters and plug barrels from a new supplier. The first one proved to be a time waster of empty promises. But, these cables are good meds. I'm fully onboard taking mine. Hence my order is in already for once the embargo on the trim bits lifts.
My second come-to-Geezus find of the year was the sound|kaos Vibra 30. It's a honey-I-shrunk proposition of a wire-suspended isolation footer. It takes the general Audite, Boenicke and Wellfloat concept down to a single 1mm steel wire but still supports 25kg per footer. What's more, the very compact Vibra 30 works right-side up or inverted, comes with thread adapters for either end to bolt to various components, speakers or subwoofers, adds up to 8mm of height adjustment for crooked floors or uneven gear bottoms and is available in anodized bronze or silver. Whatever we support on it doesn't contact our floor or shelf directly. Instead our thing hangs above it like a hippy macramé plant from a ceiling hook. The mechanism conceals smartly inside the design and has been shrunk to play visually nice even with half-width kit à la Enleum, iFi and Laiv. I find it particularly effective under subwoofers and speakers whose mechanical jackhammer action on our floor creates structural resonances behind the beat to smear the time domain and create lumps in the amplitude response. Getting our mechanical energy generators off the floor so their vibrations can't invade other gear or migrate into adjacent rooms is a real difference maker particularly with suspended floors and transducers that play loud and low. A quad of Vibra 30 will float up to 100kg or 220lbs. For anything heavier, the Vibra 68 stablemate with triple wires does 60kg, each. Digital too seems very responsive to vibration isolation as is anything with tubes. Then there's spinning vinyl and polycarbonate. In short, plenty of job opportunities to get these geeky gizmos earning their Swiss keep.
Whilst on Swiss keeping, I just had to keep the PSI Audio AVAA C214 active bass traps post review. They complete my 'invisible' room treatment begun with the sound|kaos Gravitas 15's cardioid coverage below 100Hz and continued with the Qualio IQ's cancellation of most sidewall reflections via dipole radiation. Just how effective these ~1-foot Ø 'plant-stand' columns are drove home when I reviewed more traditional speakers in full-range mode so sans super-dipole radiation pattern across the lower 2+ octaves. The active bass traps—just plug them into an AC outlet and set their gain—virtually removed my 35Hz and 70Hz room modes. And no, they're not really invisible. But compared to the volumetric presence of passive traps required to equal their potency, they are pygmies. The experience of other reviewers has framed more mildly. This had me initially hesitate to put the C214 on this page. Then its header reminded me. These are my favourites of the year. Just as I can't ever speak to or for anyone else's experience, so do my reviews and this annual overview only speak to my own. On that score, these Swiss mini towers belong, absolutely. Add the fact that they became available in white after my review hit to disappear even more into a domestic environment. Set them up in your front corners where playback's highest acoustic pressures build up. Flick their power switches. Open a virtual 1x1m window in each room corner to deflate its pressure zone. It's a serious bit of engineering that involved the research labs of two Swiss universities. It does exactly what it says on its tin. I find its looks far more agreeable than a forest of passive bass traps which would never make it past our home's front door. Problem. Solved.
With another ~50 days to go before the year closes out, this page leaves potential open space to hedge my bets. It could fill out; or not. I have a good idea on what's still inbound. Playing hard to get for that crusty old-man vibe in action, showing up on this list will take some hustle. I made this live by already mid October when Year's End habits could want a few hand-picked prospects for sp(l)endiferous consideration ahead of time. Cheers from your friendly neighbourhood drug pusher of hifi. Pass it around.
