solo intro with ath-a900??

Hi oldson and welcome to our little community

Easily driven?

What with? A Jensen Interceptor or a Tank maybe?

Opinions, opinions, opinions...

The Internet: More litter than a dump-it site after a storm!

Yes, they are easily driven in the sense they don't need a big voltage, but being low impedance they need the current.

It is very doubtful that any old CD player or preamp out can do that.

If they were that easy to drive we would never have landed a recent contract to supply 23 Solo's for an overseas government install, but the supplier tried every which way he could, but then gave up and realised he had to spend the cash. At the time he was trying all sorts of headphones on rather good sound card outputs. Because the application wasn't exactly hi-fi the A900's predecessor, the A700 was used - same impedance. The people listening with them needed to turn up the volume high on occasion without distorting the signal. I can't say much about the actual use (because I'm not exactly sure, it being a government thing), but these guys have to don their headphones for a full 8 hour shift, so listening fatigue was also an issue. The Solo was duly tested and it got the job. In fact, Audio Technica UK had initially recommended him the Solo at a trade fair.

The early Solo's found favour driving high impedance cans such as the Sennheiser HD600 (and now the HD650) simply because they were the must-haves, and it did help in that Sennheiser UK chose the Solo for show demos - in fact they still use it at the shows. Even so, low impedance headphone users rated the Solo highly enough for it to have a market driving the Grados at 32 Ohms, right up to their flagship RS1.

The A900, although available for a few years, is a new kid on the block in the popularity stakes. AT's Ryan Thomas visited me a couple of years ago before this boom and told me they were good if only people would give them a chance. I did.

In fact I like them so much that during the development of the SM-PS compatible version of the Solo (the "green" Solo) I put in quite a bit of effort to make it deliver the last ounce of performance into the A900.

We're now in a position to merge the "green" and original Solo into one unit that's compatible with both SM-PS (the energy saving switched mode power supply), Intro, and PSU1 power supplies, and if you did decide to buy a Solo to drive your A900's my advice would be to check with us to make sure you get a post-merged unit.

I'm sure there are members here who've used the A900 with the Solo (both the "green" pilot scheme testers and the original) and I'm hoping they'll fill you in on their findings so you get a balanced picture.

cheers for that guys!

By the way, Solo is capable of driving Grado RS1s very very well.