I have the Bliss for three days now. I had a Burson GT Soloist for a while recently, and while it was strong and clear, it felt aggressive, brash, with a bit of assertive sameness among several distinct recordings. I make no claim that you will hear it the same way. It must be popular for good reasons. I don’t have a history of turning up my nose at hi-fi gear - That amp was one of the few obviously high-quality pieces of gear I’ve ever just given back, ultimately, saying, no thanks. And then the long-rumored, possibly-an-urban-messianic-legend Bliss arrived.
I’m using Roon on an M1 iMac, with Qobuz streaming and hard-drive-sourced files, cd through highest res DXD and DSD, Holo May KTE connected to the Bliss KTE by Audioquest Fire ICs, AQ Niagara power conditioners, AQ NRG and Cullen power cables. The Susvara, 3.5mm connector, is being fed by a beautiful new Double Helix Chimera cable. Although the Bliss, I’m told, is electrically optimized and musically voiced for the Susvara, I’m comparing its performance through the latter with its handling of Dan Clark Expanse with their own Vivo cable and a Prion4 borrowed gratefully from Peter B. at Double Helix Cables; The Utopia 2022 with stock and Arctic Ingens cables,; Grado GS3000x with Grado cable; and Abyss 1266TC with the upgraded and dedicated JPS cables. I’m only using balanced 4-pin XLR connections.
The Susvara is clearly in its natural habitat here, optimized and idyllic. The Abyss responds to Bliss-juice as though it has found fulfillment. Something not quite frequency-range dependent is happening here, in that, on recording after recording, the characteristic deep bass control, holy mother of slam factor, and electron microscope level of clarity is evident… but now the midrange and the whole harmonic envelope of acoustic instruments and voices is more fleshed out, almost devoid of the hardness these industrial-cyberpunk Uber-cans can bring. Whereas the Woo WA5-LE, a refined and powerful 300B SET tube amp well matched to the Abyss and good for the Susvara, can bring its 2nd-harmonic rich but still transparent virtues to the Big Abyss, it can still feel a little brash in the upper-mids/lower treble. The Bliss produced nothing but nourishment through the 1266TC. preternaturally detailed, yet with just enough subcutaneous fat to be healthy. There is no sense at all of euphony or tube bloat; to the contrary, the music is highly objective in the information it consists of, and yet the amp seems to offer ideal support for the unique needs of each headphone, across their dynamic and frequency ranges. Zhu states, in the manual, that the way he uses multiple paired transistors brings all the advantages of both solid state and tubes. Without any so-called tubey characteristics, there is also nothing characteristic of solid-state, except with respect to sheer clarity. Such simplistic binaries are far transcended at this level, with this design. It is providing the diet each headphone thrives on. Two hours of jazz, hard and progressive rock, and chamber music, and I have no listening fatigue through the Abyss.
The Expanse retains its deeply detailed, spatially expansive and harmonically refined qualities. The Utopia '22 is the least minutely revealing headphone in my current roster, though this is not a deficit; it is relative to three other cans known for end-game resolution and one, the Grado, which at 28 - 50% the cost of the others, may lack the surreal spatial verisimilitudes and end-game timbal and dynamic refinement of the others, but is both stunningly good in absolute terms, and actually conveys small details at near-Susvara levels. The Utopia has a fully-fleshed, communicative and impactful qualitymmediately impressive as being intricately transparent, offering a fleshed-out sense of space way beyond my head and the limits of the Susvara. I’ve never heard that so consistently or clearly. Lyrics are more intelligible, complex arrangements have a great sense of wholeness with all the clarity to allow the attention to drift along with and away from individual voices. It’s beautifully voiced, if it’s OK to say that, in that along with the Susvara-ready power, the amp has remarkable timbral clarity and glow, depth and dimension, with textured and fast transients. And I’m just getting the feel for it. It is a special amp, just warming up.
Jeff Zhu at Holo not only has a clear sense of what reproduced music should sound like, but his innovative designs manage to channel that aesthetic sense into extremely authentic/organic-sounding, impactful and nuanced, user-friendly electronic devices which somehow look cool (2001-monolith-black with copper sides and accents and a Kitsune fox emblem) and also measure extraordinarily well… and I am firmly in the my-multi-million-year-ear/brain/gut knows far more than your puny 21-st century measurements will ever measure. But this stuff is accurate as can be, and tastes great. And Bliss is clearly a consistent, masterful engineering expression of the same musical vision as is the May DAC. If it serves a wide range of headphones this well, with such ergonomic ease, while bringing out the very best in the Susvara (folks like to assign percentage-of-potential an amp achieves with the Susvara - I’ll call this 98.6%, to indicate a sign of optimal health, with room for diminishing returns from some gizmo advances by future humans.
I know there’s more expensive and possibly “better” gear out there for a system like this. But while I know what the far end of hi-fi consists of, what it can cost, and the refinement and caché which contribute to the listening experience. But, beyond some optimizing of the source setup - using, say, a Roon Nucleus for SS-data control, some improvements in streaming - I’ll say that there’s not much further to meaningfully go in the headphone-audio quest. “Better” than this? A dedicated digital data and control source and electrical system… that’d be nice. There’s always new flavors and hues to be found in high-end gear, and there’s stuff I still like to stare at. Bacon. Mola Mola. These would be fun to have around. They’re fun to say. Beyond that, spend all the plutocratic audio bucks you wish. Your diminishing returns are yours to enjoy as you wish. I just don’t think “better” means anything at this point. The Bliss has been worth the wait. It is phenomenally good (this after a few days), it is at home, in ideal company with its sister DAC. And while it ain’t cheap, the Holo gear are “are you sh-tt-n’me?” reasonable for endgame gear which seems to inspire data streams and head-speakers to be be their best selves.
