RAAL-requisite’s co-owner Danny McKinney

As audiophiles, we strive almost obsessively for a low noise floor and no distractions, only to be spectacularly thwarted when we evaluate equipment in a retail or show environment. Around us, people are entering and exiting, and often talking up a storm. The air conditioner is set to a low drone. Bass notes leak in from the next room over. AXPONA’s cavernous Ear Gear space, where more than two dozen manufacturers of headphones and related equipment were demonstrating their wares, was awash with buzzing, excited people—the best kind of noise, really, even if you have to turn the demo cans way up to block it.

I had come to pay RAAL-requisite a visit, hoping to audition a first for me: a recently-launched ribbon headphone called the CA-1a. The Serbian-American company previously made waves with another ribbon headset, the SR-1a. SR stands for studio reference, suggesting an elevated standard, and reviewers have tended to agree. Stereophile‘s Herb Reichert wrote about the SR-1a in Gramophone Dreams #32, calling it “both revelatory and revolutionary” and assigning it class-A+ status. At $3499, the product is up there in price, and given an ultra-low impedance of 0.2 ohms, the SR-1a requires an amplifier of at least 100Wpc to make it sound its best.

The CA-1a is much the same beast, but fundamentally different at the same time. The SR-1a, in Herb’s words, “sits lightly on your head and neither covers your ears nor puts pressure on your pinna . . . [It] images outside and away from your skull—similar to floorspeakers!” The CA-1a uses essentially the same ribbons; slender strips of foil, attached only at their short ends and energized by an array of small magnets alongside their flanks. But the newer ‘phones retail for a much more affordable $2000, have traditional circumaural cups (made from polycarbonate) with interchangeable foam pads, and can be driven by an amplifier as humble as the Schiit Jotunheim ($299). In fact, that’s how I listened to the CA-1a: via a $1299 German-made RME ADI-2 DAC, plugged into a Jotunheim.

On “The Incredibles” by Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, a complicated, spy-themed, large-ensemble jazz piece, it was remarkably easy to follow each instrument to the exclusion of all the others. I delighted in the same quality on Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” and even heard it on a favorite 1960s mono recording by Johnny Barfield and the Men of S.O.U.L called “Mr. Starlight”—a spooky, Lynchian doowop song with Barfield’s pained, piercing falsetto at its core. The RAAL-requisite CA-1a kept leading me deep into the music, thanks to a presentation that was agile, fast, superclean, and revealing to a T.

When it comes to headphones, I’m partial to the purity of planar magnetics. The HifiMAN HE1000se and the Audeze LCD-4 are my favorite cans for serious home listening. Considering what I heard in the RAAL-requisite booth, I’m guessing that in a side-by-side shootout, the CA-1a could rival and perhaps surpass them.

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