Still not that slammy, but Sus can certainly accomplish some head rattling when called upon with the CHA-1.
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Exclusively talking about impact, I personally feel 13R, forge, and V281 (and now pretty sure hsa-1b too but need more time) all drive susvara to similar bass levels. Obviously differences in how sus runs elsewhere on those amps but raw impact was pretty similar across them imo
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So Ill do a propper comparo once I get more time but I am liking HSA-1B significantly more than 13R for sus right now. I am currious if this will change if I step up dac wise but not sure how long it will be until I can make any significant moves there unfortunately
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Susvara in the house on extremely kind loan.
Norah Jones is playing digitally via ROON and she sounds lovely.
Zenith Mk3 > ROON > Line Magnetic 32 (old tubes installed) > SOTM reclocker > Vinnie Rossi L2iSE > fancy cables > Susvara.
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That must be sounding pretty good?
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Susvara is something else to be sure and to have it working from your setup it must be truly outstanding. Enjoy!!
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oh yeah, I bet the susvara sings with that Vinnie Rossi, beautiful setup 
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This particular amplifier (VR L2iSE) I find pleasing and what i like to call a performance and value champion. Itās basically a nice pair of class A/B monoblocks mated to a good pre-amp (the DHT tubes do add just enough special sauce to make the combo worth its asking price) all squished in one chassis so I donāt have to deal w/ 3 power chords 
Vinnie was kind enough to entertain my endless silly questions before he built it and was kind enough to throw a removable attenuation switch inside so the amp could accommodate HPās of moderate sensitivity and speakers in excess of 100db sensitivity per my request. The amp has been attenuated by 6db off the top which allows for plenty of travel on the volume knob on the low end, NO hiss, no noise and in combination with my other equipment a very nice sense of blackness.
If ever i decide to really downsize, i would keep 1 or 2 HPās and use them on this amp, no reason for me to keep anything else around, just not needed other than for my own hoarding desires. This amp simply does all i require and i enjoy the SQ. Having said this Iāve been browsing amps and speakers all afternoon. 
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You can buy a Honda Accord for that kind of $. Better be money well spent! LOL Who did the speaker tap box again for you? Looks nice and clean and I like the fact that it comes into the room. HP cables in the high end are crazy expensive and that box allows you to just have your std 5 or 6 foot cable and not have to plunk down crazy cash for 10ā of high end can cable.
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Itās the Amps&Sound box. No idea why Justin argues and fights over it with people. Itās made for SS amps not tube amps. No resistors in line, gives me both XLR and 1/4ā plugs. Saves me the effort of having to make really long and expensive HP to amp cable for solid state amp use. Well built box, very solid platform with what seem like premium components. No idea if it colors the sound at all but it provides me the versatility i require once in a while. Purchased mine second hand, price was very fair, actually cheap compared to the next best box i could have had made from elsewhere.
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For what itās worth from me, the Susvara is a very nice piece. I honestly canāt give a better compliment because at this point all HPās are pretty much wasted money for me. They all sound the same in that all they do is put music between my ears when the house is too noisy. I have developed a weird ability to āseeā my music with closed eyes in my 2 channel systems and HPās just canāt recreate the same impression for me in my minds eye, thus they basically bore me and make my ears hot and uncomfortable after about 20mins or so.
My own eccentricities, biases and preferences out of the way, i would absolutely add one of these to my collection for no other reason that they do nothing unpleasant to any genre i put through them. Cost aside, they make for a perfect general purpose HP if you can drive them, and would be a cost appropriate addition to a signal chain you have invested heavily into.
I have spent hours reading all the reviews of these along with your personal comments across various platforms, more power to you if HPās impact you in a fashion that genuinely gives you joy. I swear, all they do for me is put a bubble of sound between my ears and behind my eyes, no matter what combo of gear i use. I just canāt appreciate the fine nuances of the HP world, speakers do so much more for me, HPās really have been relegated to a status of simply fun cool gear and pretty wood in my life.
Someday, their status may change, especially if I retire in an apartment building somewhere a decade or so from now and have to be conscientious of sound volume. The Susvara is absolutely a pair i would like to own, especially at vintage pricing, years from now.
There you go, top compliments while providing nothing of value or substance. 
Edit to add; I do find these comfortable, and very relaxing to listen to. The pressure they apply is just enough for me to lay my head back on a chair and not have any slippage while i close my eyes.
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Your first paragraph hit home for me personally and would have been the voice of reason when Iāve been tempted by this pair multiple times
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Ok, Iām back one last time w/ comments on the Susvara. After making my ālazyā posts I remembered I actually spent good money $ to borrow and listen to this HP so I cleared my schedule for the rest of the day and put on my āamateur audiophile earsā, walked around the house gathering a selection of favorite HPās I wanted to compare against and settled in for a grueling session w/ Tom Waits track Kommienezuspadt off his Alice album played using Quboz > ROON.
Here is my nickelās worth of opinion. Itās written at a kindergarten level and contains ZERO level of professionalism, and even less worthwhile experience that I would base any sort of expenditure of finances on. This is solely my opinion and wild ramblings, based on one tiny sampling using ONE single track on very eclectic equipment, based on my 50 year old, well abused eardrums and auditory limitations. 1 amp, 1 DAC, 2 settings on the DAC, tubes in line and tubes out. 1 song, 3:10 mins. Played 2x per HP, breaks in between sessions, volume leveled by ear only, two separate sessions, one with tubes in-line on DAC and one without, song played twice for each session. I can say w/ pure honesty in my heart I have no desire to listen to this song again anytime soon.
Background on why I picked this song, Waits has a tendency to record music for fanatic audiophiles, he uses high quality recording/mixing/mastering and throws little āextraāsā into his music so that audiophiles can spend hours comparing equipment, listening for very fine details, and tuning their gear to do strange shit. This track is a cacophony of sounds and at the 2:25 mark seemingly when Tom stops singing, if you pay attention and your gear is capable, you can actually hear that he has NOT stopped singing and goes on for another 25-30 seconds. Itās thereā¦ There is also much depth and texture in this song amongst the mish-mosh of music going on. Honestly it sounds particularly bad on many systems and can be fatiguing in the worst way, along with the fact that Waits voice grinds on many peopleās nerves, he alters his vocal tempo on this track about midway, and lastly the song is in German, I thinkā¦
Is this a good way to compare HPās? Hell if I knowā¦I donāt like them enough to EVER do this again, it was boring and tiresome and I had to actually take notes and fight my desire to change songs. I simply did it because i wanted to know for MYSELF if ever I would spend $6k on a HP based solely on a direct comparison to a battery of my favorite HPās, to be used on my main 2 channel system, in a way I almost never spend any time listening or relaxing to. Basically, I am using this post to remind myself later on when the memory of what the Susvara sounded like to me is LONG GONE from my memory how much $$$ someone could squeeze out of me for these. 
HPās used in my comparison:
HiFiman Susvara
HiFiman HE6se w/ 2021 vs drivers
Sennheiser HD800s
Audeze LCD-3 NON-fazor model
Grado PS2000e w/ custom earpads
ZMF Autuer Stock earpads as shipped.
Iām not sure how to make sense of my opinions in writing, they are based on one tiny sample but the time was well spent for me.
I repeat, this entire piece is MY OPINION based on 1 single song, nothing else, and Iām writing down all this more for myself than anything else.
Speaker amplifiers tend to have some noise when played w/ headphones mine is no different. Even with attenuation it is only dead silent with some HPās, that will be part of my criteria. I will include my findings on power and what it took to drive each HP in reference to the volume, I will give a visual descriptor based on NOTHING TO DO WITH AUDIO for each HP and then then I may babble a bit on tangents that may or may not have anythjing to do with the sampling I did.
HiFiman Susvara, Took top honors in being the most difficult HP to drive in my limited experience. My Volume knob goes from 0 to 64. In order to maximize my listening sessions I drove each HP w/ more volume than I would ever normally listen to for an extended period of time. In other words I played these all fairly loud. The Susvara took my volume knob all the way to 40 for me to find a loud solid volume to listen to the song on. It had ZERO noise, hiss, etc. nothing but a deep blackness with no volume or 100% volume and NO music, nice 
The Susvara showed exemplary detail retrieval, along with exemplary performance of every aspect that proper reviewers who know what they are talking about give it credit for. Itās a damned fine HP, I fed it 170 wpc of solid state power and it gobbled it up voraciously reproducing music for me. The song played beautifully, every nuance and detail was as lovely as I have ever heard it. I had no preference between DAC tube in and tube out sessions. This would be an excellent HP for me to use w/ my 2 channel set-up, it mated so damned well with my amplifier and I have multiple DACās available to mess around with.
Next direct comparison was the HiFiman He6se w/ 2021 vs drivers i own. I specify the drivers because they have been replaced 4 times total. These current drivers have lasted the longest w/ no issues. I had to push the volume to 36 which was LESS than the Susvara needed which in my uneducated opinion makes me think the Susvara MAY require more of whatever special sauce HiFiman drivers need to play at their best.
Now lets use our āNick Imaginationā to understand what I felt were the differences between Susvara and 2021 HE6se, if you have ever watched any Hollywood movies, letās say made in the past 10-20 years, the Susvara would be a big ticket, marvel level, Hollywood magic āNINJAā, the HE6se, would be a āBerserker level Vikingā. If you donāt get this analogy, stop wasting your time and move on to another post, it only gets worse from here! Use your imagination and come up with the coolest Ninja, you have ever watched on the big screen and then imagine an old school Conan the Barbarian updated with Marvel level comic book magic. Yep, both awesome but way different. Done, gotta keep the HE6se because who doesnāt love some Berserker Norse barbarian warrior level playback capabilities once in a while.
Next, we have Senn HD800s, these picked up some noise off the amp, lets say 5%, nothing bad or too irritating, I have had much worse off other amps. Not enough to interfere with anything past volume level 5 listening. The big surprise to me was that the HD800s required volume of level 28, thatās allot, and if i wasnāt trying to keep things equal I could have gone up to 32-34 and kept bopping my head to some better beats than I was actually listening to. (which BTW I did because these sounded so damned good). Iām gonna sneak this comment in here, āTo me these were 95% as good as the Susvara,ā if it werenāt for the noise, a tiny bit of voicing and the fact that they slip off my head I would put them as fair equals. There I said it, feel free to call me lame and stupid, move on nothing else to see here. The HD800s using Nickās imagination is a āHero Level Samuraiā, yep thatās what they sound like next to the Ninja and the Berserker.
Audeze LCD-3 pre-fazor, noise level roughly the same as the Senn at 5%, volume similar at 28. Nick Imagination says this is a big dollar Hollywood, Roman Legionary hero level warrior in its sound compared to the others. Do with that what you will its a great descriptor, (Think Gladiator movie level Russel Crow).
Autuer and Grado PS2000 had too much noise, about 25% and that annoyed me, could they be used, yes, the synergy was NOT there, the equipment combo did NOT work for them, I have used them extensively on other combos and they sound glorious, not here though, nope. No further info needed there, stick to HP amps and combos that have been well documented for these.
Thatās it, day spent doing this, way too long, was not particularly fun, but damned if Iām not gonna try and get my $80 worth of listening out of these. No idea if āNick Imaginationā comparisons are useful to anyone, but since i seriously doubt anyone else will ever use the same chain of equipment I used to do this thatās about as valuable as all this long winded babbling really is ever going to be to anyone but me. Would I ever purchase a Susvara? yep sure I would! what would I pay for one? Nowhere near what anyone would sell one for in the next several years or until it is well dethroned and aged. Happy listening to all, Iām very happy to have the opportunity to listen to these for an extended period of time, they are nice but they share their throne w/ others.
Edit to add:
Thank you @sa11297 very much for the loaner and opportunity to purchase with an in-house demo on my own gear. Itās not often we have folks as generous as you at our availability.
Group photo, bad photo skillz:
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Didnāt know u have Senheiser 800s 
also yeah that seems like alot of work, but word get your moneyās worth out of the loan at least lol.
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Not everyone should review things and folks should really take their time when spending hard earned money in making decisions to purchase high ticket items. If you read carefully I made some bold statements, in my little kindergarten grade impression piece. 
. I am definitely one of the people that cannot review items but I do know my ears and my equipment. I sit on my stuff a long time which means I get to spend many hours with it. I know how my stuff sounds and what it is capable of. I am also well aware of what I find pleasurable and not. 
. Problem with anything audio related is that just about everything factors into the end sound. I decided to make today worthwhile for myself and I had some fun with the end product.
Thereās lots of good stuff available for folks to buy, the combinations are practically endless.
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Tbh I think everyone here should āreviewā every piece of gear they get in. Not all reviews should be given credence obviously but I think if more audiophiles were forced to put stuff into words we would have a lot better discussion in the hobby in general. Again, not all opinions should be given the same attention but more opinions in an already filtered forum such as this is rarely bad imo (assuming the written gives them some time for form, but given the filtered nature i think thatās already more likely here). Plus, the more we read from each member hete the better we can learn their tastes and understand what they think.
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@Draaly i enjoy how we talk about and give our opinions around here very much. I am also a very firm believer in memorializing moments of clarity, good ideas and opinions here and elsewhere so that others who come across our ramblings years from now can enjoy, research and take away an idea of our experiences. Iāve become a bit jaded on proper reviews for various reasons but scroll through tons of posts looking for little gems of experience. Iām much more careful though in what I write nowadays because I fully appreciate how much money we spend on this hobby and how personal an experience music is for each individual.
One last shout out for the Susvara today to keep this post in line with the topic, itās one hell of a HP if you can power it up well. I look forward to hearing what it sounds like using ālesserā gear the next few days.
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I think this a better way to put it. You are right. Maybe not everyone should be a āreviewerā but rambling and impressions are whats important. Tbh one of my favorite things when researching random obscure gear is finding a like 2012 HF thread with 1 person comparing two random pieces of gear you wouldnāt expect matched up.
Aināt that the truth. Comparisons are so few and far between from the hyper experienced group i actialy want the input of. Tbh at this point i treat almost all reviews at the exact same level of importance as a random headfi postā¦
Thats fair. I personally donāt see an issue with any subjective impressions. Its where you start like targeting a setup/shamming people (which i have never seen in this forum even when I post shit that very well goes against the grain here 
). I think this is just one of those things that comes down to āits not what you say but how you say itā. I think the lack of offense when opinions donāt line up is my favorite part of this forum.
Yup, back on topic! I look forward to seeing your continued journey!
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Can someone take a stab at explaining why some of the Hifiman variants like the Sus and the HS6 are such primadonas to drive? I know theyāre not very efficient but what does an amp NEED to have to handle these? Is it wattage is is a certain impedance? Is it a certain amount of current?
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I just took a quick listen to thisā¦ god bless you child.
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