Power rating by itself is partly useless. You can make a watt with 0.5 volts and 2 amps. Or 2 volts and 0.5 amps. Depending on the load being driven, one of those will be perfect the other will suck.
So basically, you need to understand what type of load your headphone is, what it requires out of the power, how an amp makes its power. Then you can make a decent guess about if an amp will work with your cans.
But, since very few (if any) amp manufacturers give you voltage ratings, you canāt figure out the voltage/amperage ratio. And also, since no headphone manufacturers give you their FEA and other driver data, itās impossible to figure out the sweet spot for a particular headphone. So itās trial and error until you luck into a good combo power-wise.
Thatās why some 2 watt amps seem to have more balls than some 5 watt amps. They just happen to hit the optimum for a given headphone.
Oh and of course thereās the question of how a manufacturer actually arrived at their power rating. Plenty of ways to inflate numbers without lying.
The problem with the Susvara generally is that the what seems to be required to drive one makes no sense given the load and sensitivity.
A 1W amp will get them definingly loud, but the amps where they start to sound the best are all pushing obscenely more power than that, there are a lot of handwavy arguments around current delivery, but those make no sense since the impedance curve is just a straight line.
So the narrative that gets pushed is they need a lot of power, but itās purely anecdotal.
As @M0N mentioned there are some less extreme powered amplifiers that do well with them, but they are the exception rather than the rule.
All of this is greatly compounded by the fact they honestly donāt sound bad on anything that will drive them, you just lose a lot of what makes them special, so you have people claiming all sorts of things drive them well, simply because they havenāt heard a better amp.
The load being driven will determine which of the two it is. You can figure out voltage, current, power, and load with any of the 2. Here is a good chart to reference for that.
Honestly man, you still really just cant. The problem is that a power rating realy doesnt tell you much. One of the hardest things to do with susvara is have enough power while having proper slew rates. This is why the 5W @ 50hm (keep in mind sus is 60 ohm) GSX-mini doesnt work great while the also 5W @ 50ohm 13R works fantastically.
This is the more important one IMO. manufacturers almost never tell you what their power rating represents. In the lower end its almost always peak output @ the stated ohm load @ 1khz @ 1% TDH but in the higher end its really all over the place. Mass Kobo (and a number of japanese companies) use sustained @ the stated ohm load @ 1khz @ 0.01% THD. This is why some japanese amps seemingly have more power on tap than they do.
For example, the difference between these measurement criteria is the difference bewteen the AudioGD Master 9 having 9 W of power at 32 ohm (1% THD) and 0.1 W of power at 32 ohms (0.01% THD) and thats not even bringing up peak vs sustained power
I wonder if something with a huge dampening factor would be key. There is a headphone out on my hegel, which may keep the dampening factory of the speaker outs.
Apparently the LTA Integrated amps are supposed to be able to drive Susvaras out of their HP jack very nicely, at least according to Steve Guttenberg. So some vendors are doing something that others arenāt. I donāt necessarily believe itās a measurement thing, but more of a design thing.
Yah. It all comes down to design. Only reason i brought up how power is measured was to show thats not even standardized even if we did wantbto tey and go off of it
Itās hard to say, given the topology of the WA33, I canāt imagine itās output impedance is much lower than 1 Ohm, and it works well there. Almost anything SS with feedback is going to have damping factors in the 100ās or 1000ās, and that doesnāt seem to help.
Slew rates might be a part of it, but itās considered a āsolvedā part of amplifier design, there was a big push in the 80ās and 90ās when slew rates were considered important stats for amplifiers.
I put it in the bucket of I donāt know, and Iāll just make sure I either hear it myself or hear it from someone I trust.
I will say that IME the 1266 which Abyss predominantly cares about, is much less dependent on the Amp than the Susvara is, neither sound particularly stellar out of a 3W DNA Stratus, but the 1266 takes a lot less of a hit.
I do wonder what the decision was with the 5. I heard from many that the 24 was supposed to be the indicator of the direction Audeze wanted. And I havent heard a 5 but it seems like it wasnt.
I get suspicious whenever a company says theyre tuning with xx recording artist, and its made for artists etc etc. But maybe these will let me hear āwhat the engineer intendedā.
I do think, from those limited photos, it looks like a good combo of the lcd-5 smaller, more sleek and modern build with the magnesium chassis they did for the 24 and 4z.
