[Frabera]

I sincerely do not think CHORD is the right choice for the E3 which is already very very detailed and has plenty of dynamics by itself.

 

[chesebert]

And I still maintain Mojo2 gets you 95%+ of the enjoyment and SQ of TT2, and the difference is not about power.

I don’t think you are wrong. We just have different reference: CFA3 vs TT2.

 

[Nomax]

Greetings from Munich




NOMAX

PS.lol

 

[eimis]

Turns out, those connectors are as shoddy as the headphones sound good. A few weeks in the left one developed a multi-kiloohm impedance.

edit: it's not the connector actually, but something inside has detached, as rotating the cup puts gravity on something and pulls some contact away. Oh well, still much to learn for DCA.

 

[chesebert]

Are we still talking about E3 or Composer?

 

[eimis]

Some shots of the curious bits inside:

 

[Daiyama]

Now I am also a E3 owner and this is one of the few headphones I need no EQ. Not that I am against EQ but you never really know if corrections by Ororatory or others are valid for your own headphone.
Little anecdote: I was at the Munich High End show and listend to a lot of other headphones (also quite expensive ones like RAAL 1995 Immanis or ZMF Caldra Closed) and thought let's see how my new E3 compares directly to these other headphones. So I went to the Astell&Kern booth were all could be demoed using the same song and I was shocked how liveless and without any "oompff" in the bass the E3 was playing and thought "well, bye bye E3, looks like it I need another headphone". But just across the Astell&Kern booth was another both with the E3, Stealth and Expanse in combination with a Zähl HM1, so I went there to compare these three and boom there was the "ooompff" and bass of the E3. Unfortunately I did not remember the the exact DAP from Astell&Kern (maybe a Kann something but totally not sure about this).
And as expected the E3 had the slightly more fun tuning compared to the Stealth and Expanse, so this validated my dicison for the E3.

 

[godmax]

Now I am also a E3 owner and this is one of the few headphones I need no EQ. Not that I am against EQ but you never really know if corrections by Ororatory or others are valid for your own headphone.
Little anecdote: I was at the Munich High End show and listend to a lot of other headphones (also quite expensive ones like RAAL 1995 Immanis or ZMF Caldra Closed) and thought let's see how my new E3 compares directly to these other headphones. So I went to the Astell&Kern booth were all could be demoed using the same song and I was shocked how liveless and without any "oompff" in the bass the E3 was playing and thought "well, bye bye E3, looks like it I need another headphone". But just across the Astell&Kern booth was another both with the E3, Stealth and Expanse in combination with a Zähl HM1, so I went there to compare these three and boom there was the "ooompff" and bass of the E3. Unfortunately I did not remember the the exact DAP from Astell&Kern (maybe a Kann something but totally not sure about this).
And as expected the E3 had the slightly more fun tuning compared to the Stealth and Expanse, so this validated my dicison for the E3.

Yea, also for me I can use the E3 without any EQ to enjoy. Even I had the initial intention to replace my Aeon 2 Closed with the E3, the bass quantity for me is still higher with the A2C and with EQ even more - so 'sadly' need to keep them both
I was also at High End this year and its really hard do make any educated listening since the overall noise level is so high that you tend to increase the volume so much that some headphones tend have advantage over others at this artificial levels, but at home you would probably never listen that loud. But the E3 still did very good in comparison to the rest and was not really surpassed by other headphones like the Immanis or Caldera Closed.
Interesting you mentioned the Zähl HM1, I also listened to the Heddphone Two on it and was really impressed (also in bass quality and quantity) - so the HM1 seems to make some things right in that regard, sadly too expensive

 

[TheFritz]

Yea, also for me I can use the E3 without any EQ to enjoy. Even I had the initial intention to replace my Aeon 2 Closed with the E3, the bass quantity for me is still higher with the A2C and with EQ even more - so 'sadly' need to keep them both
I was also at High End this year and its really hard do make any educated listening since the overall noise level is so high that you tend to increase the volume so much that some headphones tend have advantage over others at this artificial levels, but at home you would probably never listen that loud. But the E3 still did very good in comparison to the rest and was not really surpassed by other headphones like the Immanis or Caldera Closed.
Interesting you mentioned the Zähl HM1, I also listened to the Heddphone Two on it and was really impressed (also in bass quality and quantity) - so the HM1 seems to make some things right in that regard, sadly too expensive

I was also at the High End in Munich the last days and I listened to the DCA E3 on several amps and DAP to come to a conclusion if I really need another headphone... and I ordered it this mornig (no surprise).
However, at the AK area with all their DAPs some less brilliant people plugged the headphone-cables in the dedicated (4.4mm) Line-Out sockets of the AK-DAPs. I had to replug several times headphones over the two days. So the less than stellar performance some might have encountered might have been one of those cases.
And in my opinion almost every available headphone at the audionext booth sounded its best on the Zähl HM1.

 

[Toddy]

And in my opinion almost every available headphone at the audionext booth sounded its best on the Zähl HM1.

Interesting you mentioned the Zähl HM1, I also listened to the Heddphone Two on it and was really impressed (also in bass quality and quantity) - so the HM1 seems to make some things right in that regard, sadly too expensive

Quite interesting, how many of these were there. It felt like half a year's production run.