Yamaha has formally introduced the headphone amplification associate for its YH-5000SE headphones, following worldwide previews of the anticipated element in latest months.
The HA-L7A, which we bought hands-on overview time with on the Excessive Finish Munich and Australian Hello-Fi reveals earlier this 12 months, is Yamaha’s first-ever high-end amplifier and has been designed to associate with its five-star flagship headphones (although any wired headphones can naturally be used with it).
Whereas the L7A may be its debut headphone amp, the corporate actually has a wealthy historical past of amplifier engineering as its basis. Certainly, the Japanese model says it took the patented Floating and Balanced Energy Amplifier applied sciences on the core of its pre, energy and built-in stereo amplifiers, and optimised them for headphone purposes.
Because the high-end value level calls for (we’ll get to that later), Yamaha has seemingly taken distinctive care to restrict noise and distortion within the title of unpolluted, high-quality energy and efficiency. Firstly, the three circuit boards (the primary board that handles minute alerts, the amplifier board, and the ability provide board) are remoted from each other.
All circuitry is supposedly totally impartial of the bottom, cancelling the consequences of exterior ground-related noise, and the post-DAC phases have balanced circuity for totally balanced transmission (balanced conversion can be inbuilt for typical unbalanced inputs for consistency throughout the enter sources).
Then there’s a twin toroidal transformer design, with the ability provide utilizing impartial transformers for the minute-signal circuitry within the entrance stage and the amplifier part within the second stage. These two transformers sit straight above the ability provide board, minimising the ability provide path and creating a particular L-shaped chassis. Talking of which, Yamaha guarantees to have created a extremely inflexible, 5.3kg-heavy chassis right here to minimise the impact of vibrations – the highest panel is made from 8mm-thick aluminium, the toroidal transformers are mounted firmly onto a 2mm-thick metal plate, and there’s additionally a double rear panel, and a novel heavy-duty housing that includes a backside cowl on the finish. 5 conical ft – one at every nook – with dampers between them and the underside panel assist take up vibrations too.
The HL-L7A is unsurprisingly a digital-friendly machine, with USB sort B, coaxial, and optical inputs fed by ESS Expertise’s top-tier ES9038PRO 32-bit, 8-channel DAC chip, which includes a devoted grasp clock utilising a crystal oscillator with ultra-low section noise, and applies four-channel conversion to each the left and proper sides, within the title of correct conversion.
There are additionally XLR and 4.4mm Pentaconn balanced headphone outputs along with a single unbalanced headphone connection, plus XLR and RCA pre-out/line-out outputs to permit the L7A to even be used as a DAC or preamplifier.
Yamaha is shouting from the rooftops about its new Sound Discipline mode, which provides six sound presets for creating the optimum sound subject relying on the music or video supply being performed. Once more, this sees Yamaha bringing the soundfield applied sciences and processing it has developed through the years for its AV receivers, into the headphone world.
So, we get to the value. The Yamaha HA-L7A is priced at £3499 / AU$6999, with UK availability commencing in November and Australian availability kicking off someday in ‘This fall’. (We are going to replace this text with pricing and availability info for the US market shortly.)
Will the HA-L7A show a formidable rival for the class-leading Chord Hugo TT2 at this value stage? Whereas an preliminary listening to the HA-L7A and YH-5000SE throughout the Excessive Finish Munich present gave us each impression that that is certainly a harmonious head-fi pairing, we won’t wait to go twelve rounds with it in our take a look at rooms sooner or later.
MORE:
Learn our hands-on Yamaha HA-L7A overview
Learn our full five-star Yamaha YH-5000SE overview
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