Gear change are motivated by synergy before anything else...
It takes me few minutes to decide to return back a TOP tube amplifier costing way more than my Old Sansui alpha a S.S. design. And the TOP tube amplifier i returned back is not a trash design but one of the best there is at this price universally recognized as such. This is why i decided to upgrade my AKG K340 dedicated headphone amplification with this TOP tube headphone amplifier ( Berning ZOTL) .
But price tags or even improved design as the well done ZOTL does not replace synergy between pieces... Especially for the most picky and hard to drive headphone ever made..
More than that i tried for fun to drive my k340 since from a low cost but very well designed chinese S.S. headphone amplifier with a tube preamplifier (150 bucks for the two) and they worked better to drive the K340 than the ZOTL because of synergy not because they are better than the ZOTL, they were not better but the vsynergy was way better ...( this chinese system is used normally only for the K240 sextett (movies) and cannot beat my Sansui alpha with the K340 i used for music)
Is the TOP tube ZOTL amplifier one of the best for headphone i tried as upgrade faulty ?
Not at all , SYNERGY decide...Not price tag not even the design quality by itself but the quality of the coupling ...
By the way the K340 is the only working hybrid ever made with a dual acoustic chamber and when optimized cannot be beaten but it takes me 6 months to learn how to optimize it ...😊
Forget price tags, open your ears and pay attention to synergy...