Amos Barnett of Currawong has a party trick with a HIFIMAN Arya. He holds his hands a foot in front of the cups while music plays and hears the sound change, because the sound bouncing off his palms comes back onto a diaphragm sensitive enough to pick it up. That diaphragm is the brand's big idea. Most headphones push a small cone from its center. A planar magnetic headphone, HIFIMAN's specialty, uses a large, very thin sheet with fine wiring on it, hung between rows of magnets, so the whole sheet moves at once. HIFIMAN makes its sheets so thin it measures them in nanometers. Barnett says HIFIMAN comes closer than any other planar maker to the light, airy sound of electrostatic headphones while still delivering slam. HIFIMAN suits listeners who want that air and detail from a headphone that plays through an ordinary amplifier.

Start with the Sundara. Todd of askdrtk found it easy to drive even from mobile devices and recommends it as a first planar, and if your budget is tighter, TotallydubbedHD gave the HE400se its best buy award. The Arya Stealth is the step up. Barnett thinks a good desktop amplifier in the Schiit Jotunheim or Topping A90D class gets most of what it can do, and he would not spend more on the amp and DAC than on the headphones. He also liked it with an R2R ladder DAC that skips oversampling, the kind founder Fang Bian says he prefers. Keep in mind that as much sound leaves the back of the Arya as reaches your ears, so it's a headphone for home. The flagship Susvara is a different matter. It was the most power-hungry headphone The Headphone Show had tested, and Tom Martin of The Absolute Sound says you will not run it from a phone.

Fang Bian grew up in China, the son of doctors at a coal plant hospital, and learned from his first Walkman that earbuds all sounded different and the expensive ones were not always better. He studied chemistry, left for a US PhD fellowship in 2003, and in late 2005 started Head-Direct in New York City, a web store selling in-ear phones. The HiFiMAN name came in 2007, and its first product was the RE2 earphone. His partner Binwu He, a hifi DIYer with an aircraft design degree, brought the planar idea and led the HE5 of 2009 and its successors. Bian went back to China in 2011 to set up a research lab, and two years without a new planar produced the HE560 and the HE1000. In 2015 Tyll Hertsens wrote that the HE400S had taken the Sennheiser HD 600's place as his price and performance benchmark. Martin says many listeners put the Susvara in the top handful. Bian still tests with "Sultans of Swing" and Wagner, and says HIFIMAN aims to reproduce "the best seat in a top music hall."