I really enjoy the sound of this amp, especially for the price. Been using it for years with HD6XX and it really brings them to life for such a cheap amp. It does color the sound vs straight to dac and you can experiment with different tubes for slight variation in color. My only cons would be the case or lack thereof. It seems to be picking up some rfi at times and i ended up breaking the plastic by dropping something on it. I would've gladly paid more for a metal enclosure.
Works well as an amp and powers my Sennheiser 6xx's very well. There was a bit of warmth that came with it being a hybrid tube amp, but there is not as much there as other non-hybrid amps have. But hey, its a great price for someone looking into something that can just power headphones well.
I have to say though that because its an open case and I have a pet, I was afraid of hair or fur getting into some of the exposed components since it doesn't come in an enclosed case. And I think that did happen because a few times I heard something like frying in my audio which went away when I blew on the amp enough for whatever hairs to blow off. So, if you got a lot of fur or dust in your house I'd say maybe skip to the v2 or something :/.
I was gifted a pair of the Drop-HiFiMan HE-4XX headphones and was totally stoked. With the plague in full effect, working at home and the kids at school online they were primed for heavy use. While my Fiio X3 works great with them, my laptop didn't drive them very well. It took a couple months to arrive after they were ordered, however, the Bravo V1 is exactly what I needed. Instant sound upgrade. They elevate sound in a way that is worthy of the HE-4XX headphones.
It has a worm open sound, I like it's tube but on high (very high) volume you can hear a little distortion.
Over all - I love using it with my HiFiMan Headphones.
I've been using NuForce UDAC 2 for the last 8 years and so before deciding to try somethingnew. This is my first hybrid/tube amp and what a big improvement from the NuForce. The sound coming out of this amp has more depth, soundstage is wider and the bass is tighter/punchier. For the price that I paid for, this is well worth it.
Having heard this, I can see myself buying the darkvoice tube amp in the future.
I know nothing about audio enginerding but this slick device allows me to hear footsteps from farther away in game, as I was hoping. I would assume music, movies etc would sound better as well but since this is my first day with it I am really not sure. Biggest plus...it has a tube that you can see in all of its glory.
I recently got a set of Fostex Planar headphones with are higher power headsets than what I usually use - I had issues driving these at volume with my mobile devices but my console receiver had no issue with it.
I have not had a headphone amp before and decided to see if this was an upgrade over what I have.
It definitely improves sound from mobile devices, but can take some fiddling on getting the output gain right from devices with no lineout. Did not find any improvement over my receiver's built in headphone amp when connecting this unit to a line out from the amplifier - so same DAC on both amps from my PC. This is a bit more niche of a usecase than I'd expected but not a huge price to risk on something new.