High End 2015 • Hot Product

ENIGMAcoustics has gotten a lot of press for its Sopranino electostatic super tweeter, but at High End the company showed the Dharma D1000 hybrid electrostatic headphones ($1180) driven by its Athena A1 single-ended-triode tube headphone amplifier ($1480). The headphones combine two drivers -- self-biased electrostatic and dynamic -- to provide a claimed sensitivity of 95dB at 26-ohm impedance, with the object of providing the advantages of electrostatic headphones that can be driven by a standard headphone amplifier. Noisy neighboring exhibitors made it impossible to fully evaluate this claim, unfortunately.