If you’ve spent any time researching the absolute top end of headphones at any point in the last 7 years, you’ve almost certainly come across the HIFIMAN Susvara. Susvara’s $6000 price tag, combined with the fact that you need a headphone amp costing as much as or more than the headphones to fully appreciate them gave it an almost mythical status. Not content to let the myth fade away, HIFIMAN has released an updated version of the Susvara with an all new driver and some bold design decisions. Will Susvara Unveiled become a new HiFi legend?
Build and Design
Susvara Unveiled starts with the basics of the original Susvara, featuring the same headband and chassis along with the the same earcup shape, but adds visual changes with the color of the headband and earpad, and makes an even bigger change by completely removing the grill and cover on the back of the earcup – leaving the back of the planar driver completely open to the air. Susvara was always a reasonably light and very comfortable headphone, and Susvara Unveiled is no different. The pads have changed slightly from the original though, and are a little thinner, putting your ears closer to the drivers.
The package is essentially the same as the most recent revision of the original Susvara package, with the headphones stored in wooden box with a plush interior. In the box, you get two pretty long cables – one 6.3mm and one XLR – a coffee table style book with more information about the creation of Susvara Unveiled, and magnetic protective covers for the ear cups to be used when storing the headphones. The cables are a standard, cloth wrapped design, that’s similar to what has been bundled with other HIFIMAN headphones like the HE1000 or Arya in the past. With the headphone design and package providing a mix of new and familiar, does the sound do the same?
Sound
Susvara Unveiled has a massive soundstage and strong dynamics, which combine with lifelike imaging and a well-balanced tonality to deliver a highly immersive listening experience. The detail and resolution are among the best ever achieved in a conventional headphone, giving Susvara Unveiled a sublime mix of clear, accurate representation of the sound and engaging musicality.
In the bass, Susvara Unveiled gives you a linear presentation, with strong extension into the subbass. The bass is deeply textured and hard hitting, though you need a good amount of power from the amplifier to get the full impact and power that Susvara Unveiled can offer.
The midrange is full and weighty, providing a natural timbre and good balance of instruments and vocals, and there’s a touch of warmth coming up from the bass which aids in that natural presentation. The vocals are slightly more forward than with the original Susvara, offering some intimacy which contrasts nicely with the exceptionally wide soundstage.
The speed and resolution of Susvara Unveiled’s treble rivals that of electrostatic headphones, though there is some roll-off in the highs that takes some of the edge off. While the treble performance is technically impressive and fundamentally solid, some warmer sources might leave you feeling – ironically – that it’s slightly veiled.
Any roll-off in the treble doesn’t impact the sense of air and space that Susvara Unveiled gives off, as the stereo image feels huge and highly three-dimensional. Instruments and voices fill the space with a holographic presentation that gives you both a clean, clear separation between instruments and a lifelike feeling of blending in the space. Susvara Unveiled is one of very few headphones that feels like it can actually reveal all of the imaging information that a recording can provide.
While Susvara Unveiled makes some improvements to the power needs from the original, it’s still quite power hungry, and its soundstage, bass, and dynamics scale up as you provide larger amounts of clean power. Where the original Susvara was only a shadow of itself with most portable or low-power gear, Susvara Unveiled maintains more of its separation and dynamics at lower wattages, making the experience more accessible. As an example, with the original Susvara, most audiophiles would need to turn the KANN Ultra up to 90-95% volume to get their desired listening level, and at that volume, you get noticeable clipping in the bass. Susvara Unveiled achieves a similar SPL at closer to 80% volume and without significant clipping.
While you can coax a little extra black magic out of Susvara Unveiled with ultra-powerful amps, probably our favorite combination was the dCS Lina Stack. While I always felt that the original Susvara was ever so slightly underpowered the Lina Amp, Unveiled is a perfect match, and when you put the whole thing together, the detail and resolution are absolutely exquisite. HIFIMAN’s own Goldenwave Serenade DAC and Prelude Amp proved to be another formidable option for a fraction of the price of the Lina system. While it couldn’t match the detail and imaging of Lina, the dynamics and soundstage remained surprisingly good.
Tracks like “Beginnings are Such Delicate Times” from Hans Zimmer’s Dune 2 soundtrack let you really soak in every last detail of the recording. Early in the song, deep tones rumble through the full extension of Susvara Unveiled’s subbass and percussion demonstrates the fast dynamic attack. But things quiet down after as Susvara Unveiled lays out the sparse arrangement of quiet synths to lay out a vast open soundstage, with the haunting melody played through warm, breathy pipes placed in front of the listener.
The complexity of the production in modern pop music is often much richer than the artist gets credit for. Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto album is an example of this, with each song dripping layers of synth, modified vocals, and spacey guitars. Listening to “Paradise” with Susvara Unveiled, you can bask in the textures of synths for a moment before you’re bombarded with a bass drop and dynamic shift that might rock your brain. The vocal are crystal clear and just a bit forward, and Susvara Unveiled presents every subtlety of the vocal dynamics that the studio mic could capture. Every instrument and synth feels precisely placed and expertly balanced in a stadium sized wall of sound.
“Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac takes things the other way, with Susvara Unveiled delivering a more intimate performance that, rather than setting you up in a stadium, puts you in a room, within arms reach of the band. The acoustic guitars naturally blend with each other as their melody and countermelody weave across the stereo image. Stevie Nicks’ legendary vocal performance is the real highlight here, and Susvara Unveiled gives you every single detail of it.
Comparison: HIFMAN Susvara, Audeze LCD-5
For comparison, the obvious choice is the original Susvara, but we also wanted to include one of the best planar magnetic headphones to challenge the original Susvara for its HiFi crown: Audeze LCD-5. The differences between the three seem subtle at first, but they quickly add up to some notable distinctions.
In terms of the build of the headphones, LCD-5 has a higher material quality and simply looks and feels higher quality on close examination, but it’s heavier than the Susvara or Unveiled, and has a higher level of clamp, which some listeners might find uncomfortable. Having a foot in both the audiophile and pro audio worlds is part of Audeze’s DNA, and LCD-5 has that sense of being a professional tool in its build and in the package, while Susvara and Unveiled are more clearly aimed at being luxury HiFi products.
In terms of sound, it almost seems as if Susvara Unveiled took some small aspects of LCD-5 and integrated them into the core Susvara sound to capture a little more of LCD-5’s incredible clarity and resolution, while maintaining Susvara’s soundstage and bass extension. Susvara Unveiled brings the upper treble down, and upper mids and lower treble up slightly from the original Susvara – which is a step closer to LCD-5 in terms of tonality. LCD-5 has weightier feeling imaging than either Susvara, but can’t offer the same sense of overall space. LCD-5 is also the easiest to drive. While Susvara Unveiled is easier to drive than the original Susvara, it still struggles on low power sources, while LCD-5 can get sufficient volume just plugged right into a laptop or headphone dongle.
Susvara Unveiled really takes the overall cake, with the largest soundstage of the three, and a sense of clarity and resolution that exceeds the original Susvara and matches up more strongly against LCD-5. Where Susvara Unveiled really pulls ahead of LCD-5 is in the bass, where its more dynamic extended presentation puts the cherry on top of its all around incredible performance.
The Bottom Line
Compared to its predecessor, Susvara Unveiled offers a bigger soundstage along with more clarity and resolution, all while being easier to drive and more efficient for a broader range of headphone amps. With speed and resolution that competes with electrostatic headphones, and some of the best imaging and dynamics ever seen in a headphone, Susvara Unveiled’s sound and performance is legendary in its own right.
