HiFiman high end thread, HE6 / Arya / HE1000 / Susvara / Shangri La

Just wrote up a bit of a susvara chain recommendation guide for someone with a 20k budget and figured I would post it here as well


That is a metric shit ton, so you have a ton of options! Just TBH, I think there are even too many options for me to give you a real solid recommendation, but hopefully I can give you some places to start.

First off, I don’t recommend buying a whole chain in one go. Start one piece at a time and move up. As the place with the least options for sus is the amp, that is where I would start. With a 20k budget you can comfortably spend around half of it here and still build a well balanced chain. Here is a stellar writeup on some amp options for susvara in that range.

Next is the digital side. In this range, your digital front end will play a solid role. I would try and stream if you can, but if you cant, there are some good DDCs here to clean up the usb out of your computer as well. Streaming dacs like meitner, weiss, or totaldac are also solid ways to maximize your money. The important thing here though is to get the amp and figure out what exactly you want to balance out the sound from there. Do you want to tilt the chain warmer? More spacious? More dynamic? This will also be largely achieved through the dac and is why I recommend you live with the amp for a bit before getting a dac. You can find some awesome writeups and comparisons of dac’s across several price ranges in this thread.

Last is the ancillaries. While I wouldnt budget a ton for them, stuff like cables and isolation footers for tube amps/dacs will play a role here. I am partial to Fern and Robby feet (roughly 350 for a set of 4) for tube gear, and 1k should be plenty to get you decent cables across the board (that will get you cerious graphene extreme power cables, interconnects, and digital if you go used as an example).

Here are some examples of chains that should fit in your budget even new (make sure to talk to dealers, advertised price is basically never the real one they will sell for):

Weiss 501 (streamer dac) → WA33 (Takatsuki upgrade, but standard 2a3) → Susvara

This is a chain that will focus realism above all else. Its honestly not my personal preference but I understand why people adore it. Smaller stage than some other options here, but incredible image clarity and placement with really stand out timbre performance. Texture can be slightly lacking compared to other options in the price range, but the chain avoids being brittle or too thin IMO and keeps a good neutral balance. This is my personal reference for “neutral”. Bass is well controlled and articulate, but its not an utter bass cannon chain.

Meitner MA3 (streamer dac) → AIC-10 (G73R)-> Susvara

Absolutely incredible liquidity and flow. I know that’s a bit of a blow hard description, but its kind of the best way I have to describe the sound. To this day its still one of the best susvara experiences I’ve had. Leaning on the rich side, tonal density is actualy fairly neutral but texture is truly incredible. Certainly a micro focus, but dynamics are still great and bass is extremely full and hard hitting but maybe not the absolute most tactile and articulate. The one main downfall of this chain is the image separation, but honestly, even as someone who highly values separation, I just didnt care.

Holo Red/Innous → Dave → Egoista 845 (not sure about tubes here) → Susvara

Spacious, incisive, dynamic, and energetic. If you prefer more synthetic music even at the expense of doing organic music a bit worse this is an easy pick. Largest stage and best dynamics every chain listed and truly incredible with more ambient neuwave as well as tactility focused EDM. Unfortunately it can lean a bit thin and brittle over all, so music focused around tonal density and vocal texture will fall a bit behind other chains (this can be balanced out with a different dac btw). This may be pushing the budget new due to the dave’s high new pricing, but used it will be super doable. For more reasonable new pricing you should be able to trade off some incision and ultimate space for a bit more tonal density and image clarity by getting a wavedream edition (though I havent heard the 845 with WD, so that is a little speculative based on what I know about the amp/dacs).

Ultimately these three are just examples of chains I have heard and loved to give you a basic idea of what may be possible. I would highly recommend reading through that first thread I linked to try and narrow it down to what amp you want and go from there. Ultimately there are more viable amps and dacs in this range that I haven’t heard than combos I have, so you have plenty of options to chase whatever kind of sound you want.

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